5 Types Of Optimisation To Help Improve Your Website

by Georgia Monk on 6th May 2022

With everything so accessible now including tutorials, helpful guides and insightful blog posts we have such a wider range of information on how we can improve our marketing skills, website, tracking and everything digital and design. Understanding how and why we use certain tools as digital, design and development specialists can really help your average Joe on improving their website/marketing etc. In this blog post i’ll cover 5 very quick and easy ways to improve your website.

So what do I actually mean by improving your website? Users want one thing. A good user experience. So what does that mean? In short, as our attention span shortens we are looking for a fast loading website. Often when searching we will click onto a site we’ve found and if it takes more than a couple of seconds to load it’s likely the user will simply click back and go to another website. That means you’ve just lost a potential customer/client in a couple of seconds. So to improve your website speed there are quite a few things you can do which will also be covered in the below topics.

One of the main issues we come across when working on websites is the loading speed. Google values page speed so much that by not optimising your website you could harm your rankings and lower your chances of improving your visibility.

There are loads of different types of optimisations that you can complete but our stand out top 4 must do’s are explained below!

 

Hosting

What does your hosting package look like? Is it suitable for the size of your website? Often we can get pulled in to cheap deals and “great offers” but is the package you’re receiving great? At Capsule, you can host your website with us on our dedicated server. A dedicated server means there are a limited number of sites sitting on our own physical server meaning resources are available instantaneously. Not only do you receive fast powerful hosting from ANS (formerly known as UKFast – The UK’s largest independent cloud provider with over 20 years’ experience) you receive high quality service from us insuring plugin updates are completed as well as storing back ups for if your website ever encounters a problem!

If you’d like to host your site with us get in touch and we’ll send you the details.

 

Image optimisation

If you’re a downloader from shutterstock and upload that large image file then you need to stop! Although you want to have a high resolution and great quality image you do not need the full original size. If the image is going to fit into a square that is 800px by 800px why would you need to upload a 4000px image? You are asking your website to load an image that is 20 times bigger than it needs to be, using resources that could be spent elsewhere and will help to improve your site speed. There are loads of great tools, such as Squoosh which you can use to optimise image file sizes which will also help with page speed and loading the images into the page.

Also if your image has a solid background then always use a JPG rather than a PNG as the file sizes are much lower. If you want to get really optimised then you can use plugins such as reSmush-it which uses an API to regenerate your images to have optimised versions and then pull these through on to the site. Find out more about image file extensions and when to use them.

You should also ensure that every image has a descriptive alt tag. Alternative tags are used to help describe the purpose and function of the image. By informing search engine crawlers it allows them to index an image correctly as well as adding information for accessibility users.

 

Caching

Relating back to the speed required for websites another major factor would be ensuring you have a good caching system in place. We often see websites with 5 or 6 different plugins all actioning the same items so therefore you are loading an additional 4 or 5 scripts and files to action the same item.

Caching is a process that stores copies of files, data and pages in a temporary location. Web browsers will cache CSS, JS, HTML, and images in order to load websites faster. Some plugins also offer the ability to minify CSS and JS files, creating a powerful caching plugin that massively boots Google Page Speed score.

There are an unlimited number of plugins that you can use to add caching to a website. Our favourite caching system has to be WP Rocket. Not only does it complete caching it also offers file optimisation, lazy loading for images and options to optimise your database.

 

Minify CSS & JS

Scripts and links will have the biggest impact on your website load speed. Linking out to other files and data takes up resources and usage on the site hence why your speed score might be lower than other sites. Another disadvantage to linking out to links and scripts is that you are unable to minify/optimise these files as you have no control. By using files in house and compiling code you are able to increase efficiency and load all resources much faster.

 

SEO

So what does SEO stand for? Search engine optimisation, in simple terms, is about getting your website and content viewable on Google and other search engines as well as improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to your website. If your web pages have very little content, search engines won’t be able to get a clear understanding of the page and are unlikely to rank it highly. We always suggest including a minimum of 500 words to ensure Google and other search engines can crawl the page and get an understanding of what the page is about.

There is a multitude of factors that impact the results as the competition is always so tough. Ensuring you have quality related content with keywords and descriptive alt tags for images, you will soon start to see an improvement in users visiting the site and perhaps prolonging their session. Other ways you can optimise your content include:

  • Researching the keywords your audience is likely to use
  • Using short and descriptive URLs
  • Ensuring your page title and meta description are at optimal length and descriptive
  • Including internal and external links

 

User experience

As we touched on above, user experience is one of the most important factors to users, if their experience is bad it’s likely they will come straight off your site without any type of conversion such as getting in touch or signing up to your newsletter. All the above optimisations will certainly help your user experience but something we pride ourselves on is providing fully responsive, UX-designed websites. This means we think about how a user enters and exits a page, and how this looks responsively across mobile devices and tablets. We also always look at incorporating our client’s main goals, whether that means more website traffic, more enquiries through forms or emails or perhaps more phone calls.

If you’re looking for extra support in getting your website optimised and appearing in the search results our development & digital teams will work together to optimise loading speed and your website for visitors and search engines.

Georgia Monk

Written by Georgia Monk

Georgia is our Lead Website Developer with a fantastic knowledge of the WordPress content management system. After completing her apprenticeship and working as a frontend developer at a local agency she joined our team. A typical day for Georgia involves building and maintaining websites for all of our clients. Georgia has a bright and bubbly personality that is reflected through her work. Despite being a web developer extraordinaire, at the weekend she’s a dance superstar running her own school. Some say she brings a whole new lease of life to the kick-ball-change, all we know is that she’s a huge chocolate lover and adores her new pet kittens!

Read more posts by Georgia
X