It was the best of speeds, it was the worst of speeds.  Not a tale of two cities, but a tale of two websites.

One has been optimised for speed.  The owner sorted out a good, effective, efficient and fast server with all of the best support available.  The owner sorted out a designer who knew about good design, design that included the brand look and feel, design that included good navigation over desktop, tablet and mobile, design that included SEO compliant structure (speed, content & structure).

One has been done on a budget.  The owner went for the lowest priced hosting package around, the site worked and showed.  They went for a budget site built off a template without knowing fully how to optimise it, they just updated some images and text to give it a look and feel.  They applied no SEO techniques.  Overall, the site showed their product / business but it loaded slow and had a high bounce rate.

Both sites operated in a market place that had reasonable competition but it wasn’t crowded.  One site got visibility on the search results which led to sales and paid off the investment in the better hosting package and website design.  One site didn’t.  It was done on a budget, but without any serious attempt to get ahead of the competition – and that was what happened.

However, wherever you are on the spectrum there are measures you can put into place today.  Load speed ranks very high in Googles factors that it builds into it’s SERPs algorithm.  So if you need to get your site more effective, let us look at 5 factors you can implement today to get your site faster.

#1 – Optimise How You Are Seen On A Mobile

Mobile devices account for around 50% of internet traffic, in some countries websites were developed for mobile traffic only due to late internet infrastructure development; balance that off with the USA having around 40% of internet traffic being browsed on a mobile.

The numbers are vast, yet website designers start off with a design using a desktop view.  This is a starting point because visually you can get the site look, feel, navigation, structure and brand easier on a larger screen.  To then think the navigation and message work just as well on a mobile is an error.  Images, headers on image backgrounds, menu navigation, sidebars all look and respond differently.

Have a look at the following example from this site!

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#2 – Optimise Your Images

However your website is built, you need to examine your images.  Ensure your images are fit for purpose, don’t put a .png up where a .jpeg will do, as they tend to take up more loading time on a website page.  We have examined that the longer it takes a page to load, the higher the bounce rate and the lower the SEO score.  In addition we have found that sites that have fewer images tend to get a higher response rate from users by conversion.

Once you have selected the images that reflect what you want to say, run them through a compression site (there are several around).  You upload your image, it can compress them by 30-75% and the image loss is barely noticeable, but the files are much smaller.  You can see from this example below with a live test it was compressed by 77%.

Good images play a part in a visually attractive site that draws the eye of a user browsing, but just putting them up randomly to have as many banners, large images, background images can hit your page rankings on search engines.

#3 – Use Video Listings With Strategy

Video watching is hugely popular, it provides the visitor with a reason to stay longer on a page, this increases page engagement and ticks and SEO box.  It also, gives your visitor a reason to like your page, you are giving them an additional reason, visual moving feedback as opposed to the static text and images.  If it is a teaching/how-to video then that makes it better.

Now you can self host a video or have it hosted elsewhere, popularly on YouTube or Vimeo.  Self hosting a video gives you far greater security control if the video is intended to be limited in use (e.g. it may be a training video for a paid membership program); you can control who sees your video, put it behind a log in membership area or apply changes to the server .htaccess file (other options are available).

The problem with self hosting, it can increase your page load time and put a heavier strain on your traffic (some hosting packages limit how much ‘traffic’ you can have – a bit like a ‘data’ package with a mobile phone which can be exceeded and your data stops).

You can use YouTube and if you don’t want it to be found by people on YouTube, set it to ‘unlisted’.  It won’t be found by anyone searching on YouTube but you can embed it on your website.  That means when your page is loading, you are allowing YouTube servers to deal with the load.  Vimeo is another video hosting platform that works well and has free video listings as well a paid.  A disadvantage of YouTube (for your average small business) as when the video has finished playing, other options show of other views that may not be related or connected and user may start video browsing and not continue with your page!

TIP.  If you want to upload a video, to help decrease the video size and make loading faster and reduce bandwidth; put your video through a video compressor.  Handbrake is one app you may want to download and run your video through.

A final consideration is saving your video to an MP4 of WebM, most browsers will play them both.

#4 – Watch Out For Your Scripts & Files

Websites & their pages are made up of elements and these elements are generally HTML/PHP, CSS or JavaScript controlled.  Each time an element is loaded in the page, there is a HTTP request to the server to grab each element.  If your page has 40 elements to load, then there are 40 requests between the users browser and the hosting company.  If your page has 20 elements then only 20 requests are made.  If both page elements are similar then one site will be much slower than the other.  We have published in other articles that a site with less elements, will not only load faster (reducing the risk of the bounce rate), it also has a higher conversion rate (when you want an action (selling site, sign up page etc)).

If you want to see what and how many HTTP requests are being made from the page you are on, to the server,  you can use the Network Panel in Google Chrome to see what requests are being made.  Other browsers also have development tools of some capacity.

Aside from ‘designing’ your page(s) for speed, you can also look at combining scripts so less HTTP requests are being made.  If you don’t know how to do this, some WordPress plugins can do this, and some themes on WordPress have it built in.  You can see this screen shot from a theme performance panel, it has CSS compiling, JS (JavaScript) compiling and other options to help speed up your site/page loading time. This saves you on needing to get a plug in, which in itself adds extra pressure.

At the end of the day, test, test and test. Look at the Network Panel, turn some features and plugins on and off (activate/deactivate) and see what difference it makes to the number of requests.

#5 – Follow Page Size Guides

Ultimately you may have a specialist site, where your pages need to be heavy, your visitors don’t mind waiting a little (especially if it’s a private membership area, supplier ordering area), but there is a general principle

The average website page is around 2 MB but Google recommends having them around 500 KB, so have a look at the totality of the above, look at the guide sizes and see what is necessary and what is ‘dressing’. If you do have videos, look at hosting speed. If you do have heavy images (e.g. a single large image could be 2 MB, but compressed to far less), then look at considering a CDN (Content Delivery Network). If you want to read more, just look at our tags for CDN.

A good server with a fast delivery also helps. It comes down to some basics. Good hosting, good thought through design, keeping it simple, watching ‘elements’ and compressing what you can or having it sit somewhere else (CDN, YouTube). If you have any questions, you can use the contact form below.

Any questions you have about your site load time, please feel free to ask.

The post How To Speed Up Your Website Load Speed – 5 Tips For SEO Success appeared first on LifeTools Digital.

We know how frustrating it can be when you are busy and waiting for a website to load. Sometimes it appears to hang, we want information fast or we only have a short amount of time to access a website before we have to move on.

Guess what. Search engines know this. Search engines work because they try their best to fit the what a user wants with websites that deliver. Over recent years with more and more mobiles being used, search engines have been involved in ranking sites higher that have a good user experience and takes mobiles into account as much as traditional desktops and laptops. There are factors involved in this which we cover in our full SEO guide, but load speed has been shooting up in importance!

There are two main elements of a website load speed.

1. Hosting. Having a good hosting company that is able to load a website fast plays an important role. If you want to find out about hosting, please CLICK HERE. There are tips, techniques and services you can use within a hosting environment (including the use of CDN’s) that can help your load speed. The use of website builder programs, that self host a website, have a part to play, but you have no control over the website load speed.

2. Website Design. There is a reason why good designers end up costing more than a site which appears to have been knocked up quickly. Attention to detail, keeping graphics lighter, not loading too many scripts, compressing your images as much as you can, not having too many elements loading in the home page all play a part. Aside from other aspects such as a good user interface (UX), good site structure and in-built SEO elements.

The difference between a well designed site and one built on a site builder with default elements and no awareness of speed, structure & SEO can be the difference between a successful listing and not being found. If your business is reliant on internet traffic to gain sales, clients or enquiries then a poorly designed site without taking these elements into account will not rank as well as a site that has all of the ‘boxes’ ticked in the design side (speed, responsiveness, SEO etc).

Now I have 3 site speed elements for you to learn about, be aware and apply.

Google Has A Site Specific Algorithm For Load Speed

In 2008 Google launched a new for how it calculates a website loading speed in it’s complex algorithms.  If a site loads slow, it gets ranked lower.  In addition if you use Google Ads and your site relies on Ads to return money, that will also be affected.   So if your website keywords & structure meet the users browsing experience and there is an identical site; yours loads a little faster – you will be ranked higher.

If you use Google Analytics to monitor your visitor engagement length (bounce rate), a faster loading page decreased the bounce rate; meaning visitors are more likely to stay longer and get to the point of what they intend to find.

1. Design Your Site With Mobile Responsiveness

When you design a website you need to have mobile responsiveness in mind. Having a large screen to design a website and make it look amazing can make your clients very satisfied. However, that will soon be lost if their clients are accessing a site on the mobile and the images are not displaying right, text is overlapping, response features (sign up forms, buttons etc) are not displaying correctly; then you can expect your client not to engage with you for much longer.

The mobile experience is much different, they do not often get the wide view (even on a mobile in landscape) that comes from a larger screen, so the visual context needs to be narrower (or made smaller), you need to change the look and feel of the navigation to get the same functionality.

2. Design Your Site With Speed In Mind

At the moment mobile sites are behind desktop sites in key metrics of engagement, such as bounce rates, a visitors number of pages or how long is the average they have spent on site. However, around 30% of retail purchases are now done on mobiles; so you cannot build up an accurate picture of a users journey. Research shows 40% of consumers will leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load. In addition 79% of shoppers who are not happy with a sites performance say they are less likely to repurchase on that site again.

No matter what your site, design with speed in mind to avoid high bounce rates (which in tern also affects your ranking), it builds up more loyalty and will increase the effectiveness of your site.

3. Design Your Site With Content & Layout

Don’t overly complicate your site. In a two split test on a ‘shopping (e-commerce)’ site they made one site heavier with images, sections (container) and one lighter in the structure of the page. In addition the amount of ‘scrolling’ a user has to go through to get to what they want is exacerbated on a mobile compared to a desktop, where a wider visual spectrum allows the user an easier navigation. Mobiles need to keep it more simple.

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The more elements a page had the more complex it was and the more the navigation needed to be sorted and the higher the bounce rate, in addition the more images that were on a page, the lower the sales conversion rate tended to be. Test your site segments out, take out unnecessary ones (including images) and test the load speed. Split test two pages and ask friends/strangers or take out a small run on paid ads and see what design gets the better response.

Conclusion

Mobile website design, getting good loading times and having effective page navigation can make a big difference in how your site gets ranked by Google. Google does use a bounce rate in it’s algorithm. Essentially, if you don’t design it right at the start and you attract a higher bounce rate, then the combined effort of a slow load speed and high bounce rate, it becomes a double whammy.

There are lots of tips on refining a page (it could be a site home page or a marketing landing page), from choosing the right image types, compression, amount of elements that load through to issues you can control on your server setting. To get our checklist or ask any questions, use the form below. Sign up to email list and get new articles as they come out with more tips, checklists, support and training, use the ‘Stay Updated’.

Contact Our Team Now For Website Mobile Design Tips For Google Ranking.

The post Site Loading Speed Is A SEO Critical Element – Learn More appeared first on LifeTools Digital.

Most people setting up a new business will need specialist hosting if they want an effective website to help their business get sales, communicate their business and get listings on search engines. There are a whole host of companies out there who provide hosting, but choosing the wrong sort of hosting can affect your business website visibility, security and support.

Website Visibility

When you have a website you want it go gain visitors to turn into customers. You want it to communicate your service/products. You want a contact point for prospects to call, email or leave a form message to enquire. You want your site to be found and visible.

You have two options in essence.

One. You can rely on people visiting your site because you advertise and drive sales through adverts, you hand out leaflets, you ask others to share your page on social media, you have friends with email lists and they promote it. You are doing activity to drive traffic directly.

Two. You rely on search engines (Google has 90% of the search traffic, so that tends to get the focus) to drive traffic to your site. You want new people to find your site, you have researched the ‘traffic’ and your site has been adjusted to get visitors.

Question.

There are 10 businesses offering dog training within a county, each business has a website with a page offering dog training classes. A user searches for ‘dog training school in XYZ county’. How does Google decide in what order it should list the sites?

It uses an algorithm of circa 200 points to assess where the site gets listed. A fast loading site is 1 of the main ones near the top. If you are on a hosting package with impaired loading time and with constricted bandwidth of the data, it transfers and your site loads slower than a competitors (assuming they are not on the same or a similar hosting package), it becomes a negative factor in the algorithm. Now here is the ‘double whammy‘ the longer it takes a site to load, the more people will just leave it and browse elsewhere – it’s called a bounce. The higher the number of bounces the greater risk of a negative factor in the algorithm. This will affect where your website gets listed.

So having a hosting package not geared up to fast loading can affect your business. If you rely on point TWO (organic search engine traffic), or point ONE (driving traffic yourself), if your site loads slowly, no matter what method you employ you may find yourself struggling.

However, if you have a hosting package that is geared up for fast loading you tick 2 boxes, website speed load time and a reduction in the bounce rate. Your business, if you are dog training, gains a listing advantage over your competition and your visitors are much more likely to visit again as they waiting and load experience wasn’t delayed. Other factors such as site design also affect load speed and we cover those in other articles (click tags website design, CDN & site loading time) to learn more.

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Security

Security is a major issue for businesses these days, it is a common practice for people to ‘hi-jack’ your data. They can run a code that encrypts it, making it useless for your business (or anything that sits on your servers). That can be your email correspondence, website, database, accounts packages, digital output and work in progress. To free it, you have to pay a ransom. It happens to small businesses all the time and also happens to large businesses, universities and other public institutions – often they have no choice to pay.

Security is key. A good web hosting package will have several measures in place. It will insist on a more complex password structure for all email addresses, it will have daily back-ups for client sites, it will encourage all clients who have websites hosted to have security software on their sites to counter hacking attempts. Other measures on the server are also tailored behind the scenes, but the ones mentioned above are the ones our clients can access and set up with their own secure log in.

Support

From time to time we all need to access a support team member, any software, hosting, training or anything we do, sometimes there are snags, hitches or just ‘how do I’ questions that need addressing. Having access to a fast support is critical. It allows you to address an issue fast, resolve it and move on.

Having a same day response, 24/7, gives peace of mind. Whether you need to access a file back-up, need training on how to set up an ‘away from the office auto-response’ or need to talk about setting up a sub-domain for your website: having a support package is vital.

At LifeTools Digital Agency we have specialist hosting facilities for small business owners, new business, charities, community organisations and others. Every hosting package comes with a free support package which includes:

• Access to support ticket platform
• Live website chat blog (not always manned 24/7 due to COVID)
• Access to our team on social media
• Access to a private training area with ‘how to’ videos and guides
• Access to our free marketing group (Facebook)

Conclusion

No matter who you use for your hosting, you should be looking out for those 3 key areas.  Hosting speed with no bandwidth restrictions, security and support.  Support will also include access to your own panel so you can set up information as required (e.g. upload a file to your server for a client to download, adding a new business email address on etc).

Hosting is the overlooked element in having a website.  I have heard it be known as the unnecessary cost.  Anyone with that attitude tends to look for the cheapest and this sometimes reflects back on them with website SEO issues, support issues and getting access to back-ups if their has been a security failure along the line.  Be careful, look around and check what you get.  A good hosting package is one you hardly notice when it’s all up and running, but it keeps your website and emails live and on-line.

Any questions, ask using the form below and our team will be please to help you.

Contact Our Team Now Regarding Hosting.

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