You’ve spent a lot of time and money getting your new website live, so why is it doing nothing in the search results or running slow? There are many factors that could cause a slow performing website from poor hosting to oversized images on your pages. It could simply be that the initial website optimisation wasn’t done when your website was first built.
It’s important to remember that search engine algorithms and web technology are constantly changing. As a result, a website is not something you build, put live and leave it for someone to find. You’ve got to maintain and adapt it regularly.
Just like a car, your website requires regular check-ups and an annual service to make sure it continues to function and perform well.
What Are Some of the Most Common Issues?
It’s likely there is more than one issue that’s causing your website to perform badly. Here’s a list of some of the common problems your website may be experiencing:
Page Image Sizes
Your images are too big. This could be both the actual file size or the size in pixels. Before uploading an image to your website, resize it and compress it. This will reduce the file size by at least 80%. If you’re using WordPress, make sure you use the correct size version in your pages and posts to help with page load times.
Server Response Time
This basically means your server took too long to respond. Shared and cheap hosting accounts will always have this problem as the load on the servers is high and there are fewer resources.
File Compression
When turned on, your server will compress your website files, which are sent to the visitor’s browser at a faster speed. Not all servers have this enabled by default so this needs to be switched on for your website.
Minify HTML, CSS and JS
Minification basically means the all blank spaces and blank line in your files are removed making them one long line of code. Unminified files are what we use while building your website as they are ‘human readable’. One space equals one byte and 1024 bytes is the same as 1KB. This might not sound like much, but with hundreds of files, scripts and styles, this adds up to a saving of a quite a few MB.
Render blocking Javascript and CSS
This simply means that your site has additional styling and script files to load before the browser can show the page to the visitor, resulting in the page taking longer to load.
While it all might sound complex and a bit boring, tackling these common problems for better site optimisation is the best place to start.
What Can Be Done About It?
Website optimisation is rarely sorted in a few clicks. Depending on how your website is built, there are easy fixes and more complicated ones.
The good news is that many of the issues we’ve listed above can be fixed fairly easily. Image sizes, for example, involves either compressing existing images or removing those that are too large and replacing them with smaller ones.
WordPress sites can use compression, minification and caching plugins, but these need to be used carefully. Enabling every option available will almost always break your site, so it’s important to understand what can be sorted by plugins and what needs to be fixed in other ways.
Server response time can be improved by simply moving your website to faster, high performance hosting.
Optimisation Tools
There are many tools out there that will analyse your website and report any issues found. Some are free, some are paid for. Our favourite free tools include:
These tools analyse your website, and provide you with a score out of 100 along with a list of issues that need improving.
Can I Get 100/100?
It’s virtually impossible to get a perfect score, but you can get close.
If your website uses Google Analytics, Google PageSpeed Insights will tell you to improve the delivery of their own scripts! Conflicts in results like this often mean you will never be able to get full marks.
So, rather than spending hours and hours trying to fix the impossible, we will help your business by focusing on the most important areas that can be fixed, in order to give you and your website visitors the best possible experience.
Send In The Professionals
We outlined a number of common issues along with ways they can be fixed above. They can be done by anyone, but unless you know exactly how to configure the correct settings, you could risk breaking your website or even worsen the performance.
Leave it to us. We’ll analyse, report and improve your website optimisation score all within your budget. Here’s how:
Analyse
We’ll use Google’s tools, Pingdom Tools and GT Metrix as well as other premium analysis tools. All of these score and report differently, so it’s important we cover all areas that could affect your website’s performance.
Report
We’ll draw up a detailed report with our findings, scores and areas that need improving. We’ll even colour code each item from high to low priority.
Improve
Before we do anything more, we’ll chat through what needs to be done with you, suggest the best course of action, and provide a fixed cost to do everything.
Existing Customer?
Upgrade your Support & Maintenance package to Pro to receive a monthly Speed Report for your website.
Upgrade to Ultimate, and we’ll produce the reports and use these findings to keep your website in peak condition throughout its lifetime.
Like what you hear? Get in touch.
Please complete the form or call us on 01404 819159 to discuss your website. Whether it’s a new website or you’re just looking to improve your existing website, we’re happy to help.