How To Optimise a Website – 10 Proven Strategies

Why You Should Optimise Your Website

If you are still wondering why you need to optimise your site, this section will clear all your doubts.

1. Reduce your bounce rate

Did you know? Half of the internet users bypass sites that are not secure, or if they feel that the site does not inspire them visually, that’s a hell of a bounce rate! It is the number of visitors who came to your website and left it right after without visiting any other page. Having a secure, design, and easy site can reduce this bounce rate because internet users will have a better experience with your site.

2. To be different from your competitors

Attract Internet users to your site! If your website is secure, ergonomic, and modern, Internet users will prefer to surf your site rather than your competitors.

3. Maintain Your Brand Image

On the internet, one’s website is the company’s lifeline. It must be well-designed and simple to use, but most importantly, it must inspire confidence and allow you to see your merchandise immediately. Being present on the internet isn’t enough: your site must adapt in tandem with the web’s changes to portray a progressive brand image.

4. Increased security

HTTPS use is encouraged by Google, which considers this favourable signal in its SEO algorithm. This is part of Google’s goal to make the internet safer, and selling products on the Google Shopping platform is required! With a cyber attack, you run the danger of losing your data. With a secure site, your data is encrypted and therefore unusable by any malicious individual. A mark of trust for your users, not to be overlooked.

5. Better conversion rate

On the internet, one’s website is the company’s lifeline. It must be well-designed and simple to use, but most importantly, it must inspire confidence and allow you to see your merchandise immediately. Being present on the internet isn’t enough: your site must adapt in tandem with the web’s changes to portray a progressive brand image.

How to Optimise your Website?

A well optimised page results from the combination of several elements. It is necessary to act on the content, the images, the tags, the links, the URLs. To properly optimise a website, here are the different elements on which it is necessary to intervene:

1. Optimise The Page Content

It is the content that makes the strength of a site. This is why it must be particularly cared for to make it attractive to visitors and crawler robots. Above all, you have to make sure that the text and images published on the page are relevant. Do they bring something useful to website visitors? Creating unattended pages of interest is useless and can even harm the SEO of the site. You must observe the following instruction: for each page, a message is to be transmitted.

The content of the page must correspond to the chosen keyword. It must contain the semantic universe associated with it to give more power to the text. For this, do not hesitate to use synonyms, associated vocabulary, and long-tail expressions. For example, for a page dealing with the sale of sofas, it is advisable to include in the text terms such as “living room”, “leather”, “fabric”, “buy a sofa”, “convertible sofa”, “sofa angle “,” sofa “,” sofa bed “,” armchair “… The goal is for robots to quickly understand that it is indeed the sale of furniture and not aperitif toast.

Each content must be unique, under penalty of being inflicted a Google penalty up to the downgrading of the site. The website optimisation will therefore consist in modifying the contents in duplicate or triplicate or in deleting them.

The content should also be organised. For this, it is advisable to use the h1, h2 and h3 tags. Please note, they must be used in their hierarchical order.
Finally, if your page contains images, it is necessary to have alt tags.

Title and Description Tags

The title tag specifies the page’s title, which arises in the result pages. It is also the first element crawled by robots. Consequently, it must be correctly drafted. It should not exceed 65 characters and should summarise the theme of the page. It should not be identical to the h1 tag.

The description tag has an incentive value. This is the little summary that appears in the results. Its purpose is to allow the Internet user to click on your site. It should, therefore, not be neglected.

2. Search Engine Optimisation

Website optimisation can never be complete without optimising the website for search engines. There are three types of SEO which you have to do in order to make search engines understand that your website is worthy of ranking. Let’s have a look at all three.

On page optimisation

In this you have to optimise the headings, subheadings, URL slugs, and meta tags. You have to make sure that the primary keyword is there in the content of the page, especially in the H1 and H2s. This will help google understand what your page is all about and increase the chances of ranking.

Off page optimisation

In this you have to make sure that enough people are mentioning about your website on the internet or we can say you are getting enough links from other niche websites. Off page optimisation includes link building, social mentions, guest blogging and more.

Technical SEO

As the name suggests, technical SEO includes fixing broken links, fixing redirection errors, making the website mobile friendly, crawling and indexing of pages, optimising XML sitemap, optimising URLs of web pages and more. Technical SEO of the website is as important as on page and off page SEO of the website. This helps in removing the errors from the website and the fewer errors your website has, the more are the chances it has to rank well in the search engines. If you are not an expert in technology, it’s better to get help from an SEO agency.

3. Technical Optimisation

The technical optimisation of a site aims in particular to improve the loading speed of the pages. Too long a waiting time will encourage the user to leave the site and increase the bounce rate, which is a bad indicator to transmit to search engine robots. Indeed, they associate a high bounce rate with irrelevant content and lower the site’s positioning.

An expert team will also clean the source code of the site if it is not consistent. They will also ensure that the server used by the client for web hosting is efficient enough. Other technical aspects will also be analysed such as the crawl of indexing robots, analysis of server logs, etc.

3. Technical Optimisation

The technical optimisation of a site aims in particular to improve the loading speed of the pages. Too long a waiting time will encourage the user to leave the site and increase the bounce rate, which is a bad indicator to transmit to search engine robots. Indeed, they associate a high bounce rate with irrelevant content and lower the site’s positioning.

An expert team will also clean the source code of the site if it is not consistent. They will also ensure that the server used by the client for web hosting is efficient enough. Other technical aspects will also be analysed such as the crawl of indexing robots, analysis of server logs, etc.

4. Internal Linking

Internal links are used to give juice to specific pages of the site. They should not be placed at random. They are as important as backlinks. These links keep users engaged and also increase the time users spend on the website. But it must be important to have relevant internal links within the content. If you find it difficult to do then the expert team will study your entire sitemap and offer you a coherent and relevant internal network.

5. Mobile First

If the company’s website does not have a mobile version, then you are surely missing something. Mobile activity brings more than half of all web traffic. This number will undoubtedly be lower in specific countries but more significant in others. As a result of this tendency, having a mobile-friendly website is important.

One must adapt their website to mobile devices even if they have a separate mobile app; otherwise, they risk losing potential clients. If the company has been in function for a long time and your website is several years old, you should consider mobile optimisation. Because old technology did not support mobile optimisation, ancient sites may display incorrectly on mobile devices.

6. User Experience

The thing which plays a major role in a website gaining visibility is the user experience. If the user won’t find the content relevant or the site friendly, he won’t stick around. So having an online store is one thing but making it friendly to users is another. You need to take into account what the user is looking for and based on that you should include content that is useful, accessible, and valuable.

Other than this user intent should not be overlooked in any case. You definitely can rank your site when you include relevant keywords in the content. No matter how great your content is if it is not meeting the searcher’s intent, you won’t be able to rank it. Google uses machine learning and other types of algorithm to find if the content is offering what the user is looking for. If it matches that criteria then only you will be able to rank it. So user intent is another important thing.

7. Schema

You might have noticed when you search for something on the search engine, a box appears on the top of the page with some bullet points, that is the schema. The very thing about the schema is it makes things easier for the end user, they get what they need on the top of the page. A schema is an enhanced description that answers the user query. It saves users the trouble of browning different websites. All the search engines support schema and adding a schema is not rocket science, one can easily do it. There are many plugins available that help you to add schemas on WordPress.

8. Good Web Host

To have a successful site, you have to have an efficient, logical host. For example, your host must be able to provide you with the latest version of PHP, which brings its share of improvement in terms of website optimisation, which will result in better loading.

The most reliable, but it arrives at a cost, is to have your dedicated server. One doesn’t share the server with any other site, so you don’t lose performance.

On a shared server, you necessarily share the performance with other websites. If the sites on your server have high traffic, they will consume the server’s resources and therefore decrease its efficiency and speed.

9. Image Size

Many websites do not take the size of their images into account. Therefore their site loads in over 4 seconds.

The visitor departs the website even before the pages are loaded. The referencing of the site is thus penalised by the search engines.

Choose the correct format, size and optimise the weight of your images, use sprites or even lazy loading.

Above all, do not neglect it!

10. Configure your cache

Much more technical, the cache is a system that allows the client-side (the Internet user’s browser) to keep in memory the static elements of your pages: menu, content, images.

You thus lessen the fraction of applications on the side. Server and increase your site loading speed.

Compress and merge your CSS and Javascript files

It’s simple:

You compress your CSS and javascript files; you reduce their weight; you merge these files; you reduce the number of requests.

How to Optimise Website Loading Time?

To properly optimise your website for speed:

• Use the Google Page Speed Insights
• Compress your images
• Decrease the number of total elements and scripts per page
• Use a caching module for the content
• Have a fast and efficient server located near you and with Gzip compression
• Adjust the elements of your mobile or adaptive version to make the site lighter and faster

The loading time is a determining factor in the SEO ranking as decided by the search engines so it is crucial to decrease the loading time of a site. Among the dozens of factors established by Google, Bing and Yahoo!, the loading time benefits from a fundamental weighting in the final ranking that a website will obtain.

How To Measure the Website Performance?

The performance indicators of a website

This analysis can be carried out via key performance indicators, KPIs, essential to assess the performance and effectiveness of your digital strategy.
To carry out your statistical analysis, you are strongly advised to rely on the Google Analytics tool.

Measure your audience

One will be able to notice how many people have visited your site thanks to Google Analytics. You will find:

• New and old visitors
• A percentage showing new and old visitors
• Sessions: user visits, with precise behavioural data

Measure your conversions

Conversions are the actions that we want to see performed by Internet users. For an e-commerce site, the primary conversion is the purchase. Here are the main KPIs to assess:

• The acquisition cost (CAC): in other words, the amount you pay to generate sales or customers
• The number of conversions: how many actions performed by your visitors are part of your objectives (downloading a sales brochure, purchasing, etc.)

The conversion rate is the fraction of conversions sorted by the total number of visitors (over a given period).

Optimising a website for conversion rate

Optimising the conversion rate is a vital part of a website. To optimise the conversion, you must:

• Install several additional performance monitoring and conversion software
• If one owns a virtual store, do free shipping
• If you have a form, decrease the number of fields to increase the number of requests
• Use customer reviews, recommendations, and testimonials to increase trust

Tools to track the performance of a website

While tracking statistics should be done on an ongoing basis, it’s essential to have all the right tools in place.

• Google Analytics to track your traffic statistics
• Google Search Console to track your positions in Google and monitor issues
• Use Heatmap software for clicks

Conclusion

That’s it! Here we have mentioned all about web optimisation and how to optimise a website. Online business is much more than having a website. If you are running a store online then you should know there are many rivals out there and to stand out you need to have a well-optimised website that can bring conversions and sales. We hope that this guide might have cleared all your queries about the same. If you have any doubt regarding the website optimisation, feel free to get in touch with RVS Media. Here we have certified developers and designers who can optimise your website for SEO, user experience and conversion rate.