Performance Booster: How to Optimize a Website in 5 Simple Steps
As a small business owner, your company website is absolutely fundamental to your success – especially when it comes to competing with the heavy hitters in your niche.
Having a strong online presence plays a major role in attracting more website visitors so you can grow your business and achieve your goals.
Whether you’re running an eCommerce store or you’re selling your services online, your website is the backbone of your business. That’s why it’s essential to keep your website optimized, up-to-date, and performing its very best at all times.
But how exactly are you supposed to do that?
Don’t worry! As the experts in digital marketing solutions for small businesses, we’ve got you covered. Here are our top 5 easy ways to optimize your website and boost its performance in no time.
1. Perform search engine optimization on your website content
Content is a major factor in determining where your website lands on search engine results pages.
By optimizing your website’s content for search engines, you better your chances of ranking higher in search results, making your business easier to discover online.
So what exactly does optimizing for search engines mean, and how do you do it?
Simply put, search engine optimization is all about improving your website’s visibility. By identifying the relevant keywords your target audience is using when searching for your products or services online, you can incorporate them into your website text and help your site rank.
For small business owners who are busy tending to the ins and outs of running a company, it’s often best to enlist some help. SEO professionals have the expertise and access to the necessary SEO tools to help you climb the rankings and increase organic (non-paid) traffic to your website effectively.
2. Improve loading speed for website visitors and search engines
Website speed makes a huge impression on your website visitors, one way or another.
These days, online audiences expect websites to load in an instant. Visitors aren’t going to hang around for slow loading times, and they’re highly unlikely to return to your website after they’ve been frustrated with their experience.
Not only does page speed impact user experience, but it also affects search engine rankings, so you really can’t afford to let your website’s loading speed slow you down.
There are a number of things you can do to improve loading speed across all of your web pages:
- Enable browser caching: This allows files to be stored locally on a user’s device so these elements can be loaded from their browser cache instead of having to redownload them when they revisit your site.
- Minimize HTTP requests: By minimizing the elements on each web page, you reduce the amount of processing power and time required to load.
- Optimize images and videos: Without compromising the quality of your visual media, compress their file sizes so they don’t take as long to download.
- Use Content Delivery Networks: These networks distribute your website's static files across multiple servers worldwide, so files are delivered from the server closest to user location to reduce latency.
- Optimize server response time: Make sure you’ve got a reliable website hosting provider, and that you’re on their most up-to-date hosting plan.
Sound a little overwhelming? Using a good website performance optimization tool like
Google Pagespeed Insights can simplify the detailed process of sharpening your loading speeds.
3. Ensure your website has a responsive design
Having a website with a responsive design means its layout, navigation, and functionality are adaptable to mobile devices with a variety of screen sizes.
With 45% of all web traffic in the U.S. coming from mobile devices, it’s absolutely essential for all businesses to have a website that’s easy to access and use on phones and tablets. Just like with slow loading speeds, users simply won’t accept a website that doesn’t work on the device they’re using to research and shop online.
Mobile optimization is a significant part of attracting and keeping customers on your company website, and it plays a big part in search engine rankings, too.
To keep up with customer demand, Google considers mobile-friendliness an important ranking factor. So, optimizing your site for mobile users can help your website rank higher on results pages, making it more discoverable to new audiences.
4. Keep Everything Fresh and Up-To-Date
A truly optimized website is one that functions seamlessly and delivers necessary, relevant information to visitors in a clear, direct way.
Make sure your website’s content is fresh, up-to-date, and 100% accurate. Having clearly outdated information and photos on your website makes it harder for your audience to trust and engage with your online business.
Whether you’re doing a spring clean of your existing text, adding in new offerings, or posting a blog – regularly updating and posting fresh content to your website is a great way to keep audiences interested while helping your website rank on search engines.
Don’t forget to remove anything that’s no longer relevant to your business, keep your online store stocked, and fix any broken links to give your website the best chance.
5. Track Website Performance Using Tools LIke Google Search Console
Website optimization is an ongoing process.
Once you’ve spent some time honing performance and visibility, it’s important to continuously monitor its progress so you can continue to make adjustments and get the most out of your website.
Track your website’s core web vitals, like performance, visibility, and engagement, so you can discover areas for improvement and make adjustments accordingly.
Website optimization tools like Google Analytics can certainly help you with your optimization efforts. But, best practices in the online space are constantly changing and evolving. As the owner of a small business, you can’t be expected to look after everything on your own.
Why not enlist the help of digital marketing experts instead to tap into the true potential of your company website – without any of the stress?
Optimize your website with the help of the digital marketing experts at 406 Marketing
If you'd like to discuss an in-depth strategy for achieving prime website usability, our digital marketing experts would love to help.
At 406 Marketing, we have years of experience helping small businesses expand their reach online through website optimization strategies, website edits, monthly analytics, updates, SEO, and more.
Reach out, and let’s get started today!