Maintaining high operating speed
The loading speed of a website is a fundamental factor that affects whether a website is successful. Probably many times you yourself have encountered a situation when the loading time prolonged indefinitely. Such situations frustrate everyone and discourage further browsing, and the opinion of the visited company is automatically lowered. It’s no use having a great design and substantive content if someone doesn’t even get a chance to read it.
What affects the speed of a website?
Every website slows down after time. Many factors are responsible for this. A few of them are presented below.
Too many elements
Every additional element on the site is an additional piece that must be loaded by the browser. When expanding your site with new elements or functionality, ask yourself: are you sure this is crucial for your users. Often we add too many sections that are ultimately irrelevant anyway.
In such situations, we recommend the simplest solution – asking users. For larger, more advanced websites, special AB tests can be carried out to display two groups of users with different versions and compare user interest. We provide this type of service as part of our WordPress Websites specialty.
Cache build-up
Old cache build-up is a process in which the browser saves copies of web pages, files and images to speed up their reloading in the future. This is a useful solution, but over time it proves problematic. The browser can accumulate many out-of-date copies, resulting in slower performance. Clearing the cache in the browser allows you to remove unnecessary copies and restore the speed of your website.
To make your site automatically delete the cache, you can add the appropriate HTTP headers to your code. These tell the browser how long to keep the page’s temporary data and when to delete it.
Outdated plugins, skins and other headers
When developing a website, be sure to remove elements that are no longer used. This will not only keep the structure of the site in order, but also protect us from reduced website performance and security vulnerabilities. Over time, developers of particular tools stop supporting and updating them, making them a threat to our site.
Prevent rather than fix
Optimizing a neglected site can be time-consuming and costly. The best solution for it is to prevent problems by taking regular action. Most users don’t know that dedicating one or two hours a month can bring real benefits. Fixing minor bugs, an update, a change that translates into increased user interest – these are just some of the gains.
Once in a while, test your website’s performance, for example, through Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool, and see how much you can gain with small, regular steps.
We also provide website care service. Every month we help clients improve their online marketing. It’s a cost that pays for itself.
Taking care of SEO
SEO is the process of optimizing a website in search engine results. With SEO, we can appear higher in Google results organically (free). This will automatically create a new source of traffic generation. How to ensure a good position in Google? Make sure you meet all of the following points.
File sitemap.xml
Sitemap is otherwise known as a site map that collects links to all subpages and entries. Based on this file, Google locates the sub-pages and then indexes (collects) them and displays them in search results. Taking care of the correctness of this file is the basis for our site to grow.
In the case of WordPress-based sites, we can make the task easier by installing a plugin that will take care of the timeliness of the said file – we use the following Yoast SEO.
Ensuring that the robots.txt file is correct
The robots.txt file is a text file that allows you to communicate to browsers which subpages or folders on your website should be indexed by search engine robots, and which indexing is prohibited. Based on this file, we exclude from the search results sub-pages that should not be there, such as sub-pages that require a login. Such a procedure reduces the number of erroneous pages that a search engine tries to index. Therefore, increases the credibility of the domain in its eyes.
Sometimes it happens that due to a developer’s error, sub-pages that we would like to promote end up in the robots.txt file, and due to their presence in the file they will not be displayed to anyone. You may find yourself wasting time and money on SEO in a situation where nothing will happen anyway because the page in question is blocked by misconfiguration.
Ensuring that the Google Rich Snippets mechanism is correct
Google Rich Snippets allows you to show Google more than just the title of a specific sub-page. It gives the opportunity to indicate additional data such as: product parameters, customer reviews, more links. The use of this mechanism will make our site more attractive among others. It will also help the user enter our site more efficiently in search of a specific piece of information.
Analyzing the correctness in terms of SEO
SEO is a series of activities that affect the final result in the form of a higher search engine position. In taking care of most of these aspects, tools like Yoast SEO, which we have written about before, are helpful. It’s a WordPress plugin that allows our site and its elements to be properly displayed in Google. In its basic version, it allows you to customize keywords and additional subpage descriptions for search engines, known as metadata.
This is absolutely basic, so it’s worth ensuring that your site doesn’t get left behind due to the lack of such improvements.
Content creation
Every website is first and foremost its content. Another key indicator of a site is the quality of published materials. Google pays very close attention to the value of the content presented. By showing that the text on our site is readable, written according to the rules of correct spelling, we increase our chances of breaking through among the competition.
It is worthwhile to regularly add new sub-pages. Descriptions of services, products, tips for customers are just a few of the options. Increasing the amount of text rich in keywords makes the user more likely to find such sub-page. From it, he can go further to the product or contact sub-page.
Updating WordPress
Using templates and plugins with active developer support is an essential practice for maintaining a properly functioning WordPress system. This increases the security of our site, as plugin updates often include vulnerability fixes. In addition, with plugin updates, our site will run quickly and efficiently. We will always be up-to-date with new versions of the PHP language on which WordPress is built, which will also translate into the speed of loading content.
Have a backup for every circumstance!
To ensure the stability of our website, regular backups are essential. Sometimes we may make changes that can damage the site or cause a virus infection. Having a backup allows us to solve the problem quickly and efficiently. Nowadays, we can fully automate the backup and only check once in a while that it is done correctly. Let’s not leave this important issue to chance and verify every process related to data security.
Ask your hosting provider today about the backup schedule and restoration procedure. Any good web host has such a service included as standard.
Behind the analytics
When working to increase the visibility of our website, it is important to have a tool to determine the effectiveness of our efforts. It’s also a good idea to find out what actions visitors take on the site. You can analyze their behavior and see if the site is sure to work correctly in different browsers.
For this purpose, you should implement analytical tools on the site, i.e. Google Analytics or HotJar. The former provides information about site traffic. Thanks to the tool, we know who visits our site, how much time they spend on it and what actions they perform. The second tool, records the behavior of the audience on the screen, so we can analyze live how our site is used. This will help us discover weaknesses and plan an effective fix package.
Iterative adjustments
Website development is an ongoing process. Companies whose websites are effective spend up to a dozen hours a week researching and planning improvements to better suit the needs and expectations of their audience.
If you want to improve your site in terms of reception, we recommend that you implement the two aforementioned tools – Google Analytics and HotJar – and analyze the collected data at least once a month. Then you may find that simple changes can reduce or completely eliminate audience abandonment of our site too early. For example, increasing the font or changing the font format, simplifying a form or changing the color of a button.
Support in the development of the site
If you want to take care of the quality of your website and ensure that it can reach its full potential, contact us. Together we will analyze your company’s site and then suggest further steps to make improvements for current market standards.
Take care of your website
Taking care of regular updates and optimizations both technically and in terms of content is key. Think of it as a process in which you and your team analyze, implement and monitor the changes made. This will ensure that you have a fast and stable website, which will translate into business results. It’s work on your business that pays off.
