Posted on by Brian -

2 Essential Steps to Improve Your Website’s Performance

The work isn’t finished after your website goes live. Moving forward, you will need to regularly work on enhancements and updates to improve its performance and satisfy your customer’s changing needs. Now that you have an attractive and functional website running, the next aspect to focus on is developing an excellent on-site experience for your users. After all, users prefer websites that are fast and easy to navigate, similar to what search engines favor. 

Putting your users in mind as you improve your website’s performance can help you create a user experience that will encourage them to keep coming back and perform key actions. In this article, we will share two essential steps you can take to improve your website’s performance: 

1. Secure an SSL certificate

Google started showing all non-SSL websites as “Not Secure” in 2017. This means that without an SSL certificate, there’s a big chance that customers who see this warning will lose trust in your website and your business, possibly even before entering your site. As a result, you may see a rise in your bounce rate. 

If you want to avoid this, be sure to get an SSL certificate for your website from recognized authorities. Once your certificate is verified, you will see a padlock symbol in your browser address bar, and ‘HTTPS’ instead of ‘HTTP’ in your URL. An HTTPS encryption provides extra protection for you and your visitors against third-party tampering. 

This is a standard for improving your website’s performance. Additionally, Google penalizes sites that do not have an HTTPs encryption, so it is wise to install the certification right away or work with a digital marketing agency to do it for you. 

2. Improve site speed

Nobody wants to wait on a website that takes ages to load. In fact, studies show a significant 20% drop in conversions for every second it takes to load a mobile page. Furthermore, don’t forget that your users can quickly move on to your competitors’ websites if they don’t get what they need from your website and quickly. 

Aside from ensuring that your website has appealing aesthetics and has all the necessary features and functions, it is also important to work on minimizing its load time. The last thing you want is to frustrate users every time they click on a new page on your site. Always strive to provide a smooth and convenient user experience so that they are more likely to perform key actions and convert. 

Here are some steps you can take to improve your site speed: 

  • Use Google PageSpeed Test to gauge your site’s performance and acquire tips on what to optimize. 
  • Simplify your web page’s design by combining your stylesheets. 
  • Compress images and format them properly using the ‘Save for Web’ option in editing software like Photoshop. 
  • Limit the use of redirects as much as possible. 
  • Improve your server response time by using a CMS that caches page data, or upgrading your disk resource.

Conclusion

Whether you’re an SME or a big corporation, your website gives you plenty of opportunities to establish your branding, reach a wider audience, increase your customer base, and improve your sales. Getting your website up and running is just the first step of the bigger picture. After that, you will want to make sure that your users have a simple and painless experience interacting with it, or it will hurt your business. If you do not have the in-house expertise to do these, getting help from web development agencies is a smart investment decision. 

Our team of professionals can provide you with web development services for your business in NJ. If you need help with web design or reputation management, get in touch with us today to see how we can build a stellar website for your business!