What is meant by optimizing a website?
Optimizing a website can mean several things, from optimizing for search engines. To user experience and a number of other ways as well. In this blog post, let's take a look at these different aspects of optimizing a website, and how you can apply it for your website.
Optimizing for user experience
The user experience of a Web site is an important factor for several reasons. At the top, of course, is the reason that if a website is nice to use, it is more likely to invite visitors to stay longer, make a conversion or otherwise have a positive experience with it. The user experience or UX as it is also called depends on a number of pillars of your website. The text and content of the website should be nice to read, buttons should work and be easy to click, and navigation should be clear.
Most WordPress themes will already take care of this for you and get it right out of the box. However, you may need to take this into account when creating websites yourself. And have several people look at this before you land on a design. Because within a team or developer, it can still become tunnel vision projects. Which can ultimately come at the expense of usability. At a later stage it is always possible to further engage and fine tune, but it can save a lot if you put this on the priority list right from the start.
Loading speed
The loading speed of a website is also an important factor with regard to optimizing a website. This includes several components, but often starts with choosing the right hosting party. At MIjnHostingPartner.nl we have the fastest packages ready for you that are set up to your needs. This includes multiple databases that you can use for your website, such as a choice between MySQL 5, MySQL 8, MariaDB and even MS SQL with our .NET 7.0 hosting. So here you can use the latest technology to ensure that the core of your website, the database, is lightning fast and reliable.
Furthermore, the loading speed also has to do with the choices you make for your website, do you want to display ads on the website? Then you should also be at peace with a somewhat longer loading time. In fact, such ad networks provide a certain speed delay in every scenario.
The choice of theme and technique used are also important aspects for the loading time of your website, a theme within WordPress can make a big difference in the loading time of your website. So always dwell on this and see what others say about it in the reviews of the theme before you make a decision in this.
Images and media
Images and media are also a big part of optimizing a website, you should not upload fullsize images in 4K for example. This can cause a slow website for both mobile and desktop users. So with a website, you need to compress images and use the right dimensions. Often your theme or Content Management System itself has certain guidelines for this. Such as not to use more than 1204 in pixel width. This can be easily controlled through tools and plug-ins, but you can also just do it with paint within Windows.
After resizing the photos and images, you can run them through a website like Tinypng one more time. Then your images are reduced in size one more time, without losing much quality.
Optimizing a website for search engines
Optimizing a website for search engines can be a technical part, for example Google takes into account more than 200 factors to determine whether your website is suitable to be placed at the top of the search engine for a certain search term. Search engine optimization is also an ongoing task, as fresh content needs to be served for this, and the necessary further steps need to be done both internally and externally for your website.
Would you like support with this for your website or business? Then take a look at our partner MijnWebdesignPartner.nl, here we can help you optimize for Google!
