How to Optimize your Website for SEO in 8 Simple Steps
A website is a powerful tool for your business that can help you to grow. But if it's not optimised, its benefits can be limited. It's important to understand the basics of what makes up an optimised website so you know how to get the most out of yours. Here are some key points:
- Optimise Your Site For Mobile
- Use A Content Delivery Network (CDN)
- Optimise Your Database
- Hiring a web design agency to optimise your website
- Remove Unnecessary Plugins and Add-ons
- Configure Caching And Compression
- Enable GZIP Compression
- Minify HTML and CSS Files
- Reduce Server Response Time
- These are important aspects about making a website
- Conclusion
Optimise Your Site For Mobile
Mobile optimisation is important because almost half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices. If your website isn't optimized for mobile, it's going to look bad on small screens and users will leave your site quickly. The good news is that there are several simple steps you can take to make sure your site works well on any device.
When it comes to mobile optimization, there are three main areas you should focus on: responsive design (designing a single website that automatically adjusts its layout for different screen sizes), making sure the content loads quickly using caching and compression technologies like HTTP/2 or Google AMP, and ensuring everything works well with touchscreens (such as mobile browsers). Here's how:
Use A Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Content delivery networks are a great way to improve the performance of your site. They store copies of certain types of files on servers around the world, so that if someone is trying to access those files, they can be served from the nearest location.
A CDN will help to speed up page load times by reducing the distance that traffic needs to travel between your server and users’ devices (by storing cached copies of assets), as well as reducing latency in general.
Although this doesn't directly affect page speed, it does improve security by keeping some assets off-site—meaning no one can access them unless they have physical access to one of those servers.
Optimise Your Database
Optimise Your Database
The database is the heart of your website. It contains all of the content, photos and information that you want to display on your site. The database can be slow or not performing well if it has too much data in it or poor structure.
There are a number of ways to optimise your database:
- Optimise for speed - If you have a slow-loading page or section of the website, then this may be due to large amounts of information being stored in tables. You can get rid of unused data by deleting old rows from tables without affecting any current functionality by using DELETE queries. To do this effectively, we recommend first creating views (which display only relevant columns) before using them as source tables for queries that remove obsolete rows from databases like MySQL (or other DBMSs).
- Optimise for size - When creating new tables or adding extra columns to existing ones, try to keep them as small as possible while still having enough detail required by each specific application/functionality scenario based upon what type(s) data types (fixed length integers versus variable length strings etc.). Also consider removing unnecessary fields such as comments which add no value but take up space unnecessarily within table recordsets."
Hiring a web design agency to optimise your website
Hiring a web design agency to optimise your website is the best way to ensure that your site is well optimized from the start.
The best way to hire a web design agency is by asking around. You can do this by asking friends, family and colleagues who they use and what they think of them.
Once you have found some companies that look like they would be suitable for the job, take a look at their portfolios so that you know what kind of work they do before making an appointment with them. See if there are any reviews online about these companies; this will give you an idea as to how much experience they have and what kind of feedback they get from their clients.
Finally, always check out the price list before agreeing to anything! As it stands now, this varies greatly between agencies but generally speaking there are three main types: fixed-price projects; hourly rates ranging from £50 per hour upwards; or monthly retainers starting somewhere between £1k – £2k per month (depending on where in Europe/North America it might be).
Remove Unnecessary Plugins and Add-ons
If you are not using a plugin, remove it. The only reason to have a plugin is if you are using it.
If you are using a plugin and wondering if you should remove it, ask yourself if there's another way to achieve the same goal with less effort. In some cases yes, in others no.
If there's no other way then ask yourself if there is any value in keeping the plugin on your website (or whether it's time for an upgrade).
Try to use as few plugins as possible or at least make sure they are optimized as much as possible. Don't use too many active plugins on one page because this will cause issues such as CPU usage increase and slow loading times due to high resource consumption by all those scripts running simultaneously on each page request (even more so if these scripts are hosted off-site).
Configure Caching And Compression
Caching is the process of storing webpages to make them load faster. Compression is the process of reducing the file size of webpages so they can be downloaded faster.
Caching and compression work together to speed up page loading times. Caching stores static elements like images, CSS and JavaScript files in a local server storage area which enables your visitors' browsers to retrieve them more quickly than having to download them again from the origin server (i.e., the original source) each time they are requested by an end user's browser.
The cached version will then be sent back to anyone visiting that page, rather than having to rely on a fresh copy from its original source each time this happens; this means it takes less time for pages containing these static components like images or style sheets/scripts etc., which would otherwise need re-downloading every single time someone visits them (especially if there were lots).
Compression works slightly differently: rather than just being stored locally on servers within your business network where users may access them directly through web browser requests - ie., without needing any kind of direct connection between those computers themselves - when configured correctly with caching enabled too (which is fairly often done automatically), then we're basically talking about compressing all those resources down into smaller packages before sending over HTTP connections so they don't take up much bandwidth while travelling across networks between machines involved in downloading those resources - eg., between servers containing content hosted online via CloudFlare CDN services like ours here at WebDevStudios HQ!
Enable GZIP Compression
GZIP compression is a compression algorithm that can be used to reduce the size of HTML, CSS and JavaScript files. It can be used to reduce the amount of data that needs to be transferred over a network, which in turn results in faster page load times.
If you are using a CDN (Content Delivery Network) and if your web server supports GZIP compression then you need not do anything for this as it will automatically compress your HTML, CSS and JavaScript files and serve them with compressed content to visitors. If however your web server does not support GZIP compression then follow these steps:
Minify HTML and CSS Files
Minify HTML and CSS files
So, you have your website up and running but it’s not performing as well as it should. You’re getting the odd conversion but nothing like the results you were hoping for.
Don’t worry, there is a solution to make sure that your website is optimised and working at its best!
Minifying HTML or CSS code means that any unnecessary characters are removed from code which makes it faster to load in a browser. This also has another benefit of making the file smaller so it takes less bandwidth when loading onto your site.
Reduce Server Response Time
Reduce Server Response Time
A CDN, or content delivery network, is a group of servers that are strategically placed across the world. When you request a file from your server, the CDN will serve it up from the closest location to you. This can help reduce page load time by making sure that your user can access the content they need faster.
The benefits of using a CDN are numerous: lower costs for hosting; increased speed for customers who are geographically dispersed (and therefore likely to be in different countries); better security and protection against DDoS attacks; and more efficient bandwidth usage on your own infrastructure (because there's less demand on your servers).
These are important aspects about making a website
These are important aspects about making a website. They can help you make your website faster and more efficient for users.
- Optimise for mobile: The most common mistake is to create a desktop version of a website and then expect it to work on mobile devices as well. This is not the case, as mobile users have slower internet connection speeds than desktop users, so they need to see a different version of the site with different content or images. Designers should build two versions, one for desktops and one for mobile phones that can be accessed through mdot (mobile device optimisation toolkit).
- Use CDN (Content Delivery Network): A CDN helps by distributing your resources throughout several servers around the world in order to increase loading speed. It also has caching technology which stores copies of static files so they do not need to be downloaded again each time someone visits your site; instead it reuses them from its local cache memory if available instead of downloading them again from server side every time someone loads your page on their device or browser window opens up if no such content exists locally at that point in time when requested."
Conclusion
We hope that this article has helped you to understand the importance of optimising your website. It’s important to remember that there are many other aspects that can affect site performance and speed, and we didn’t cover all of them here (such as minifying images or enabling caching). But at least now you have a better understanding of how these work together, so go ahead and start making changes on your site!
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