Do you want to optimize the speed of your website? Unify Wizards, a digital marketing expert, has put together a blog that talks about website speed optimization, why it is important, and actionable steps on how to make your website function faster.
In this era, consumers are very picky and preferential about the information they want to consume. As such, when search engines are ranking results, they want to ensure that they are only ranking the best of the best information to their users. This is why your website speed Optimization and performance matter so much.
There is also a difference between your website showing up on the first page of Google Search Engine and showing up on the tenth page.
A website is like your business salesperson but, without optimization, can be found at the bottom of the Google search results page. This stops potential clients from engaging in your services or buying a product you offer. However, with effective website optimization, search engines will place your website at the top and bring visitors to navigate your website.
What is Website Speed Optimization?
Website speed Optimization is the process of creating strategies and implementing methods that make a website as fast as possible. It is a way to increase website visibility when people search for products or services that are related to the business in search engine pages.
Optimizing your website speed gives you some benefits such as a higher conversion rate, and lower bounce rate, while improving user experience.
According to many studies, website speed is connected with other key metrics for example, a business-to-business website that loads in 1 second has a conversion rate that is three times higher than a website that loads in 5 seconds.
The Importance of Website Optimization?
Web page speed Optimization is the process of making changes to your website so that it can load and display faster when clicked. When this happens, users will have a better experience, which can lead to better engagement and higher conversion rates.
The website speed is optimized in this digital era to make it Search Engine Optimization-friendly and accessible to users on search engine pages prompting users to click and convert.
Here are some of the main aims of optimizing a website's speed.
- To increase the website traffic
- To improve the user experience when they visit the website
- To boost the website conversion rates
- To build more brand visibility and awareness
- Achieve a better Return-on-Investment
Some techniques to apply if you want Google Search Console to rank your site performance higher include the following:
- Faster website speed
- Good website content quality
- Mobile compatibility
- Great website organization
How to Optimize Your Website Speed
Audit Your Website
Before optimizing your website, it is important to do a Search Engine Optimization audit to know about its current performance. The primary job of an SEO audit is to analyze an entire website to verify its crawlability by search engines. This includes checking the website codes, indexing, loading speed, broken links, status code errors, content accuracy, and backlinks.
If you cannot afford an SEO audit, you can also use a free tool online like Google Search Console Page that will provide a colour-coded score reflecting your website’s overall performance and identify opportunities for improving your score.
Prioritize Potential Fixes
After you have identified what is causing your website to slow, do not rush or feel worried and decide to try to fix all the problems at once even if you have all the resources and time to do so.
Instead, it is wiser to focus more on fixing the problem that matters most to your website visitors. For example, if your website takes a long amount of time to load, you need to prioritize solving what causes the slow page response. The cause can be hosting provider problems or Domain Name System issues.
This should also be your priority if your website finds it difficult to load the content on your website page speedily. Do you know why? Your website visitors will not stick around to see your content if the page itself takes too long to load.
You can also check for user experience, compatibility on multiple devices, speed, and many more. Note that the more you know how your website performs, the better your ability to identify and fix the problems.
Use Mobile-Friendly Design
According to statistics, more than half of the world's web traffic comes from mobile devices. With this information, it is a smart decision to first design your website for smaller screens and then scale up over time. Not to mention the obvious fact that this approach gives a much better user experience and keeps the ever-impatient mobile users engaged on your website.
When you focus more on simplicity, speed, responsive layouts, minimalistic menus, and lightning-fast load times, your website will be flooded with many users. Also, this approach aligns with the most important factor that Google uses in ranking websites.
Optimize Website Images and Videos
One of the biggest contributors to your website’s slow speed is lazy loading images and the overall size of videos on your website. Let us face it, they are also some of the best and easiest ways to optimize your website speed. So, the best way to solve this problem is to reduce the size of images and videos before uploading them to your website.
You can use image compression without compromising quality by using formats such as JPEG, PNG, Adobe Photoshop, and GIF. It is also important to choose the right compression tools for your needs and preferences.
Use Content Marketing
Content marketing is the process of creating and sharing content through videos, podcasts and other relevant media to attract, engage, and retain an audience. Content marketing is also used by brands to let people know about their brand’s mission, vision, products, and services.
Here’s how to use content marketing to optimize your website:
- Connect all your social media platforms to your website and talk to your audience on your social medial platforms and emails about the blogs you post on your website.
- Create landing pages with clear and visible calls-to-action (CTAs) as this allows people to go to your website and buy from you.
- Post blogs regularly on your website to let your website visitors know about the latest industry trends, product updates and how to use your product or service.
- Make use of the most relevant keywords on your blogs to attract more people to your website.
- Use email marketing to reach out to your website subscribers regularly to let them know about the latest updates on your product or service.
Improve User Experience (UX)
We can all agree that user experience is very important, and it is one of the most common ways brands and business owners can optimize their website speed. Why is that so? Because when users are satisfied with how your website loads and functions, you will see your website bounce rates dropping. Also, the time visitors spent on your website page goes up significantly.
Improving your website user experience makes your users find your website easier and feel good while browsing through it. And we all know when someone finds using your website fast and easy to navigate, they will definitely come back for more information.
Reduce Your Total Redirects
When you use redirects on your website, its job is to send your website visitors from the page they have clicked on to another different page. Although, in many cases, website redirect has shown to be a great way to connect high-ranking, high-traffic pages on your website to the new content you just created. The problem is that, when you have more redirects, your website can load slower which in turn discourages the users.
There is no problem using a redirect when you are just starting out and want to keep the views on your website content steady. However, using this strategy for a long time will affect the efficacy and speed of your website. This is why we advise you to reduce redirect on your website
Analyze Your Performance
Let us state the obvious, it is very hard to drive traffic to your website if you don't first know what is working, and not working for your website. Carrying out an A/B testing and multivariate testing is a great ideal for gaining clear insights into single changes, and multiple aspects of your website page simultaneously.
Monitor Your Progress
Knowing if the Optimization strategy you just implemented is working is without a doubt a great way to monitor your website's progress. When you analyze your website performance and monitor its progress, you can see if there are any other website issues.
Using tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console can help you track your website performance with key metrics such as traffic, bounce rate, conversion rate, and page load times.
The Bottom Line
Your website speed optimization is necessary if you want to stand out from your competition and keep your visitors coming back. To achieve this, you need to pay precise attention to your website structure and content because they both affect search engine rankings and the overall user's experience. Following the tips shared above will also set you up for effective website optimization, which enhances customer conversion and retention.
Unify Wizards is a digital marketing company that is well-established in the industry. We have expertise in helping brands optimize their website speed and have worked with many satisfied clients. As a company, we understand the value of a good-quality website for elevating your brand’s visibility.
When you partner with Unify Wizards, we will make sure that your website does not lag on any latest updates that can optimize its speed, and your digital presence will also be taken good care of.