Tag: website optimization

website-speed-optimization

9 Ways to Make Your Website Super Fast

Posted on | by Agency Partner
Expert Tips For 9 Ways to Make Your Website Super Fast

If you’ve used the internet at all, ever, then you have at one time, or another found yourself on the end of a slow-loading website. It’s a frustrating process for the end-user, and you’ll have either found your user experience to be dramatically compromised, or you’ll have surfed off somewhere else instead. And if the slow-loading website is your site, please bear in mind that not only will users have done exactly as you would in the situation, but it will have negatively impacted the effectiveness of your SEO. So whatever end of the process you are on, poor website speed will make your life harder.

If you want to avoid this negative impact, you, therefore, need to find a way of having a responsive website and ensuring it stays at the optimum speed for as long as it is in existence. This means knowing the right tricks to prevent lagging, and the following nine pieces of advice are an ideal place to begin.

Don’t use shared hosting

Affordability is a significant advantage of shared hosting. However, that advantage comes with a trade-off, and this is seen most clearly in speed. It is cheaper and faster when you first build a website to host it on shared servers, so that’s what many people do. As your website grows, the available bandwidth stops being enough, and website optimization suffers. If you want things to grow and work cleanly, pay more upfront for VPS or managed to host – potentially through a dedicated WordPress plan – and you’ll see the benefits.

Manage your images

It’s probably not a shock to you to learn that the most data-heavy sections of your website tend to be the images. Do you remember accessing websites over dial-up internet, and how any site with many images would take forever to load? Well, just because we’ve got faster internet, that doesn’t make it any smarter to have many big images. Ask yourself three questions about each image on your website:

  • Does that image need to be on the site? 
  • If so, does it need to be as big as it is? 
  • If so, does it need to be as high-res as it is?

The fastest thing would be to have no images on the site, but it’s understandable if you don’t feel that can work. So make the images you do have as efficient as possible – cut out extraneous space in the images, and compress them if they don’t need to be high-resolution.

Audit your plugins

For WordPress users, plugins can make life much more convenient, but they come at a price for site performance. To make a long story short, they use many files, and therefore a lot of information, to do the jobs they do. And when you carry out a website audit to see what’s holding things up, you’d be surprised how often a plugin is an answer. You can’t avoid them altogether, but you can manage the number you use. If there is a workaround to using a plugin, use the workaround. And if you haven’t seen the benefit of a plugin in the last three months, get rid of it. It isn’t essential.

Study HTTP requests

A primary reason why sites load slowly is that they make too many HTTP requests and/or that the requests they make are too large. Using a speed test tool, you can check each page on your website to see how many requests they are making and how much each of those requests are slowing down your website. Ask yourself if these requests are doing anything essential and whether they could be streamlined to demand less information.

Use minification to optimize CSS and JS files.

Not just minification, but Gzipping, too. These are handy processes that ensure the most efficient operation of CSS and JS on your site. Using the right tools, you can use minification and Gzipping to eliminate unnecessary code and commands on your website and gain an immediate advantage in terms of loading speed and efficiency of the site. There are plenty of tools for your use out there, and the best digital marketing agency will be able to help you with choosing and using the right ones.

Use caching to help repeat visitors

This tip necessitates that you attract repeat visitors to your site because caching isn’t that useful for first-time visitors. But it is worth enabling caching, either in your code or using a plugin (this is one case where a plugin is certainly worth it). If your site enables caching, things like images and other data-heavy elements will only need to load once. On repeat visits, they will be stored and readily appear again to ensure a fast website.

Fewer external scripts

External scripts make HTTP requests, and – you’ve guessed it – this slows down your website. However, some external scripts are generally indispensable. You need to consider which ones are most important to you. Do you need the “Tweet this page” icon? Is the visible visitor count something you can’t live without? No one’s going to tell you to use no external scripts at all, but be critical about their use – if it’s non-essential, is it worth slowing your site down for?

Look at content delivery networks

This is a more advanced tip than others but is worth adopting if you intend for your website to grow and be viewed worldwide. Essentially, a CDN allows requests to your site to be handled by one of a worldwide network of servers – and the nearest server will handle each request. This means that a viewer in Denmark doesn’t need to wait for a server in Texas to be pinged – so things like images, CSS, and other files can be accessed quickly and make a website faster.

Strip out unnecessary or outdated elements regularly

We’ve already talked about critically viewing your images and auditing your plugins. Still, each site merits a full-out Website audit 2-3 times a year to eliminate accumulated residues in the works. Loose pieces of code used for a specific purpose and now are no longer needed, revisions that have been saved for reference, spam comments that Akismet has caught: there’s no need to keep this stuff around. It takes up space and memory, so get rid of it to avoid a slow web page.

Using some combination of the tricks above – and any others that you can think of – it is possible to take a slow-loading website and make it move much faster. You’ll see the benefits in terms of traffic and SEO in no time.

speeding-up-website

Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Website

Posted on | by devops
Expert Tips For Speeding Up Your Website

People are impatient. We expect rides across town to arrive within minutes, if not seconds, of pressing a button. Groceries now can be selected, bought, and delivered all without having to leave the couch, let alone wait in a checkout line.

With nearly instantaneous satisfaction being the standard, it’s no surprise that people these days wouldn’t dare wait for a website to load while browsing the Internet to kill time or in search of items to purchase.

Our need for instant gratification means that website speed is more crucial now than ever before. In this article, we will discuss some best practices for speeding up your website.

Manage your total file size

One significant indicator of a slowed or bogged down a website is a massive number of all the files, scripts, and images needed for your website to display correctly. The fewer files, scripts, and photos your site requires, the faster it will be.

Simply put, less clutter means a smoother, faster, and more responsive website.

To help reduce the total file size number, try shrinking your images. It’s a safe bet that you probably display images that need adequate sizing if your site runs slowly.

Use a content distribution network (CDN)

A content distribution network or CDN is a geographically distributed network of servers to reduce the stress put on just a single server to deliver content.

It’s applying the old saying “the more, the merrier,” meaning the more servers there are to help lighten the load, the faster things go.

Reduce redirects

Each time one-page loads to another page, visitors have to wait for that page to load. Suppose you have an endless number of redirects on your website. In that case, your design probably isn’t optimal, and the number of pages in the chain needing to load continues to increase while simultaneously slowing everything down.

Reduce Cookie Size

Cookies are used for a variety of reasons, such as authentication and personalization. Information about cookies is exchanged in the HTTP headers between web servers and browsers. It’s essential to keep the cookies’ size as low as possible to minimize the user’s response time.

Be mindful of setting cookies at the appropriate domain level, so other sub-domains are not affected.

Remove unnecessary plug-ins

It’s easy to go a little too plug-in happy and install far too many. Especially if you’re using a platform like WordPress, plug-ins might be free, but they take a toll on your database.

Use compression

The smaller your files, the faster your pages will load. Compressing files is one of the quickest ways to reduce load times. Enabling compression with Gzip is considered standard practice.

Gzip is a file format and software application that locates strings of similar code in your text files, then temporarily replaces them to make the files smaller – thus increasing your website speed.

Make use of Caching

If you want a fast, responsive website caching is a great place to start. Caching can get pretty technical. But the basics are relatively straightforward. In simple, plain English, caching allows your webserver to send a web page at a much faster pace to a browser after it has already been delivered once.

Speedy transmission of information from your server to the user’s browser ensures your web pages load up smoothly.

Choose a good host

The web hosting provider you choose, as well as the type of plan you sign up for, can have a massive impact on your site’s performance. Many small business owners opt to go with a shared hosting plan for its affordability and ease of use.

But if you have a thriving business that attracts a large amount of traffic or your website requires a lot of data for things like streaming videos or custom apps, a shared host isn’t going to get the job done. The stressed bandwidth and RAM will cause your site’s performance to suffer and users to have a poor experience.

If this is you, a dedicated hosting plan may be a better fit.

Before choosing a website hosting plan, evaluate your business by looking at where you are currently and from a growth mindset.

Regardless of the plan, you choose your provider to provide you with a certain baseline performance level. If they can’t, you might want to look into getting a new host.

Is speed optimization necessary?

The short answer is yes.

In business, time is money, so everything, including how fast your website loads content, needs to be optimized to achieve peak performance.

If you’re not getting the traffic you believe you should, or maybe visitors aren’t spending as much time on your side as you would like, all of these are reasons to ensure your website performs optimally.

As with everything in life, there can be multiple reasons for an issue. Don’t obsess and try to solve every single problem. Instead, you can only start running a speed test to identify the most severe issues and start with those first.

Your website speed can affect your business’s crucial aspects, from page traffic to bounce rate, customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, conversions, and repeat purchase rate.

Is your bottom line important to you?

If your bottom line is essential to you, don’t fall into the trap of ignoring your website performance. While this article is filled with plenty of things you can do to stay aware of and increase your website speed, the easiest and least time-consuming thing you can do is hire professionals like us at Agency Partner.

Our full-service digital marketing agency is tailor-made with you in mind. From web and app development to brand strategy, social media marketing, and everything in between, we have you covered.

If your website is not delivering the results, you expect our web development experts can not only sit down with you and brainstorm, diagnose, and solve the issue, but we can identify areas for increased marketing opportunities and so much more.

Contact us now, and let’s get your website working the way you envision it.

Not big on reading? That’s okay. Watch “Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Website” instead. Using the power of Artificial Intelligence, we turned this blog into a video for you. Check it out below!

bounce_rate_blog

How to Reduce Your Website Bounce Rate

Posted on | by devops
Expert Tips For How to Reduce Your Website Bounce Rate

If you look at Google Analytics, you can see the number of pages your website visitors have viewed after visiting a specific page on your website. The percentage of website visitors who viewed only a single page then left your website for good, make up your bounce rate. 

On the Internet, we should expect some percentage of our website visitors to bounce. After all, sometimes people click on a link thinking it’s one thing, but it’s actually not what they wanted. But if you have a high bounce rate, such as a bounce rate over 70%, you really need to think about the digital marketing efforts you’ve deployed to drive viewers to your website, and the content you create for them to find.

High bounce rates are one of the reasons our agency works with so many clients on website optimization and refocusing digital marketing efforts. Companies like yours want to drive quality leads to their websites and increase their conversion rates. However, for one reason or another, they’re driving traffic to their website that bounces. 
If you have a high bounce rate, here are some website optimization tips to reduce your bounce rate and boost your conversion rate.

Reduce Your Bounce Rate By Keeping Your Digital Marketing Campaigns Targeted

Digital marketing campaigns can drive a lot of leads. But sometimes, overzealous digital marketing means you drive too many low-quality leads.

Think about this example. Let’s say you make work boots to be used on construction sites, in factories, and in other rugged, outdoor job sites. You have a product line that has extra lining and is perfect for outdoor workers who live where temperatures drop dramatically in the fall and winter. As you’re creating your Google Ads campaign for this shoe line, you may think about including the keyword “Boots for Fall.” But doing so would be too broad of a term, especially considering that boots are very fashionable in the fall season and you could inadvertently drive people to your website looking for boots to complement their outfits, not outfit them for their cold field environment. Instead, you need to include targeted terms like “rugged,” “outdoor,” “job site,” and “construction” to better drive high-quality leads to your website who are less likely to bounce and more likely to boost your conversion rate.

SEO Web Content Can Help You Reduce Your Bounce Rate

SEO – which stands for search engine optimization – is extremely important in driving organic traffic to your website. If you aren’t incorporating relevant keywords tied to your company, products, and brand in your web content – including your websites and blog posts – you aren’t going to get discovered by the people who are really interested in what you have to offer.

Reduce Your Bounce Rate
One of the most important things you can do during website optimization is to update your web content for SEO purposes. To do so, you can:

  • Rely on your most popular Google Ad keywords and incorporate them into your web copy.
  • Use Google’s Keyword Planner to find new relevant keywords to incorporate into your content.
  • Leverage a third-party paid solution for keywords discovering and planning in your website content.

Does this sound like too much work for you to handle in-house? Don’t worry! As a digital marketing agency, we perform SEO website optimization and both find the best keywords for your websites and blogs and create that content, too.

A/B Test Your Web Content to Reduce Your Bounce Rate

As a digital marketing agency, we can’t stress enough just how important it is to A/B test your website. This sort of testing helps you identify the best combination of text and images that work for your website’s design. No matter how creative or on-target you think a new update might be, you don’t know how it’ll perform until it’s up and live.

But if you wipe the slate clean by pushing out new content and abandoning your old content, you run the risk that your new content won’t resonate, and will cause your bounce rate to jump even higher!

Instead, we always recommend you make incremental website changes and A/B test them to see whether the old, or new, performs the best. When it comes to website optimization to reduce your bounce rate, performance isn’t necessarily a conversion but is actually a decreased bounce rate when a viewer lands on that page.

Improve Your Websites Speed to Reduce Your Bounce Rate

Today’s Internet users are impatient. Did you know that 53% of mobile website users will bounce if it takes more than three seconds for your website to load? Google knows this too (it’s their statistic) which is why website loading speed is factored into their search algorithm that ranks search results. So, by increasing your website’s load rate, you’re killing two birds with one stone – you’re appeasing impatient mobile searchers and improving your search engine rankings. 

The Google Page Speed tool helps you optimize all your landing pages for high-speed loading. Following best practices for image optimization and caching can help shed time off your website’s loading speed, too.

Use Social Proof to Reduce Your Bounce Rate

If a new website visitor has never heard of you before, they may be skeptical about your product or brand. Sure, you say it’s great, but what do other people have to say about it?

This is why social proof – such as testimonials and badges from organizations you’re a member of or awards you’ve won – is so important. In fact, research shows that 84% of today’s savvy Internet users trust the recommendation of an online stranger just as much as they trust a recommendation from a friend or family member. That’s how important it is to include social proof on your landing pages.

We Can Help You With Website Optimization

Whether you’ve tried optimizing your website to reduce your bounce rate and increase your conversion rate and are spinning your wheels, or you don’t have the internal resources to take on this project yourself, we’re here to help. As a digital marketing agency, we know how to create compelling web content that will keep visitors on your website and trigger them to convert. To start a conversation with us about your company’s needs, call us today at (214) 295-5845.

Not big on reading? That’s okay. Watch “How to Reduce Your Website Bounce Rate” instead.

Using the power of Artificial Intelligence, we turned this blog into a video for you. Check it out below!