The content you publish on your website will go a long way toward building customer loyalty, attracting new leads and driving more sales. But nobody will take the time needed to read your content if your website performs poorly. To that end, one might think of website performance as a precursor to successful web content creation and digital marketing.
With this in mind, the following are a few tips to ensure your website achieves its peak performance capabilities:
- Use simple code: If you have any experience in web coding or have someone on your team who does, go through the code you have and make sure it is simple, yet effective. Overly complex HTML or CSS, for example, can bog down performance over time.
- Optimize your images: Although you certainly want to have high-quality images on your website, you also want to make sure these images are not compromising your performance and speed. Compress images to the point at which they still look great, but have smaller file sizes.
- Use a quality host: It may be tempting to sign up for the cheapest plan available when you purchase your hosting package, but you should make sure you are choosing a plan that can actually handle the traffic you expect to get. Without a dependable, quality host, your site may suffer from performance issues.
- Remove broken links and minimize redirects: Not only do redirects and broken links create a poor user experience, but they also lead to your website getting punished in Google’s search rankings. You can use free online broken link checkers to easily resolve these issues.
- Use responsive design: You could create a special mobile website, but a responsive design allows you to use the same design for both desktop and mobile, with the site automatically optimizing itself based on the viewer’s platform. People are using their mobile devices more than ever to browse the web, so you absolutely have to take those devices into consideration with the way you construct your site.
- Make use of CDNs: By hosting your site on a content delivery network, you can keep static assets hosted in data centers all over the world. This means a person accessing your site from London would not have to send server requests to somewhere in the United States. This provides for faster loading times and reduced strain on bandwidth.
As you engage in your web content creation strategy, don’t forget about the basics of a good website. Keep these tips in mind, and work with a web developer if you believe your website may be a little too slow.
ProPRcopy is a professional copywriting services firm that develops articles, press releases, blog posts, website copy and more for businesses and organizations across virtually all industries.