6 Tips For Better Website Optimisation

As a business owner, website optimisation is likely not something you give much thought to.

You're far more concerned with making sure your products are selling and that the company is generating revenue.

I get it. I really do. But you have to be doing everything you can to make sure that people are finding your site and your company or organisation, so that they too can buy from you, even if it doesn't seem like much of a priority for you right now.

Optimising your website can be difficult. There are many ways to do it and no two websites or apps are the same. It's a vital part of any business that relies on its online presence to grow.

What works for one site may not work for another, but here are 6 things you should definitely be doing if you want to improve your website's performance.

1. Check your site for broken links - search engines don't like broken links. Use a checker like ahrefs free broken link checker or any one of the reliable ones out there.
   If you find broken links in the report, get your web developer to either fix them or disavow them or think about using redirects. Google will thank you for it.
   
2. Identify the slowest webpages and prioritise the redesign of these slower pages
   There are several reasons why web pages may be big. Run a quick analysis using Pingdom's Speed Test tool. This will give you some insights as to why the page is slow and then discuss the options with your developer. Other useful and free tools: GTMetrix and LightHouse which is incorporated into Chrome Dev Tools. Both can provide really useful insights.
   
3. Make sure all code is optimised to reduce load times
   Making sure the code that sits behind your website is optimised. Discuss the options with your developer. Are they minifying CSS, Javascript and any other scripts or code that runs your site.
   
4. Review Google Analytics on a regular basis focusing on customer behavior rather than page views
   For example, which pages have the highest bounce rates? Is that a problem? If so how do you fix it?
   
5. Does your site use a CDN for delivering static content like images and some code elements?
   Using a CDN can give a poorly performing site a real boost. For the most part, here at Rubber Duck Towers we rely heavily on Cloudflare to optimise and accelerate our customers' sites and apps. We also tend to use their service for our Domain Name Servers for a bit of additional oomph.
   
6. Consider hiring an agency for search engine optimisation; many have services that include consulting and content writing — this will help you to gain traffic from quality sources like Google, Bing, Yahoo!

This article has given you just a few the basics on how to get started with optimising your site or app. It's a vast and weighty subject, and we love it.

To learn more about how we can help your business drop us a line at [email protected].