Web site optimisation techniques and best practice

Don’t write a blog post just for the sake of it, a poorly written article can hinder your site rather than help it!

When written well, and written for your reader rather than the Search Engines, the pages will naturally contribute to the keywords on your site, then be patient, the traffic should come.

We do not particularly recommend using link building schemes, even so called "white hat" ones, as links should hopefully grow over time.

There are however a number of ways to capture or focus the attention of your reader.

Having a site with a padlock shows most end users you care about their safety, and aren't a fly by night cowboy.

It may slow your site down slightly, but this is now worth adding, and is a must if you plan to sell items online or allow members of the public to login and use your site.

Google is now using HTTPS as a page ranking signal, meaning that secure sites get a slight boost compared to their rivals not using it. In the future it is probable that websites that sell things online using standard HTTP or a weak certificate will also get punished in their page ranking.

A Content Delivery Network is a great way for higher volume sites to push their content closer to their end users, but isn't necessarily for everyone.

If your site receives a low amount of global traffic then this can be pointless, because you just end up adding an extra step in sending the data to your customers.

This is a bit more simple than most people realise. When sites are in development, most programs will insert tabs before elements to make it easier to read for humans. 

While this is great in development, it considerably increases file size and server resource usage. A simple fix can be to use shift+tab in Visual Studio until all items are left aligned.

This simple trick can save thousands of bytes per request.

Like our HTML page, CSS is generally built with a lot of white space to make it easier to read, when releasing to live, strip this out, the only people looking at your code will be nosy web developers! Also remove comments where possible, these are getting sent but never read.

Please feel free to use our free tool which strips out these comments, unnecessary white space and tidies up a few other bits. Alternatively run your site through PageSpeed insights and use the data they send back.

As with our HTML and CSS pages, JavaScript is generally built with a lot of white space to make it easier to read, when releasing to live, strip this out, the only people looking at your code will be nosy web developers!

Please feel free to use our free tool which strips out some comments, unnecessary white space. Alternatively run your site through PageSpeed insights and use the data they send back.

Most sites are now built using one of the many website builder tools available like WordPress and/or with rapid deployment technology like Bootstrap and Angular, but these can bloat the number of files included on your site, causing first page load times to be slow while the browser does multiple requests to download the various files.

If you have access to the back end of your site site then it is generally a good idea to try and combine similar files into one request.

Design your sites to work properly on mobile devices, then add additional improvements for users on desktop displays. Mobile devices now account for around half of all searches worldwide, and Search Engines are clever enough not to send a mobile to device to an non optimised page.

If your site is not mobile friendly you could be losing 50% of your potential traffic. If this is the case then it may be worth looking at getting your site looked at.

Images generally account for the large proportion of data within each request. 

There are a number of free online and offline tools that can be used to optimise each image, we have listed a few of the below and will be adding to them over time;

png (Portable Network Graphics) - features lossless data compression algorithm for images.

• TinyPNG (online converter)
• ImageOptim (Mac app and web service)
  
• pngquant (command line executable we use as part of OusiaCMS)
• pngout (command line executable we use as part of OusiaCMS, after pngquant)

jpeg/jpg (Joint Photographic Experts Group) - a lossy compression algorithm for images.

• TinyJPG (online converter)
• jpegtran (command line executable we use as part of OusiaCMS)
  

svg (Scalable Vector Graphics) - xml based vector images.

• svgminify (online service)
  

Compression reduces the file size on the server using various algorithms to before sending the visitors device which then decompresses the data and uses the file as normal. The most commonly supported compression methods are listed below;

• GZip
  
• Deflate
  

If possible and you use a Content Management System, enable dynamic compression as well. Further reading on how to set up compression on your web server.

Enable Compression (Google)

The SEO services that we provide are;

• Social Media
  
• Choosing the right platforms
• Set up
• Branding
• Ongoing management
• Web Site Optimisation (We know users of our CMS have one of the fastest available, but we are happy to work with any provider you use)
• Optimising Images
• Optimising CSS and JavaScript
• Mobile friendliness.
• Identifying other areas for improvement
• Website design (where necessary)
• Content analysis and usefulness
• Navigation and menu ease
• Identifying content that can be improved and refreshed, or stripped out
• Ease of getting in contact
• Linking to social media platforms

There are a number of tools available to test your site. We use the following to analyse every site we build. 

We've also highlighted some of the major pitfalls and where possible, how to negate them.

Structural testing tools;

• Google PageSpeed Insights (online, provided by Google)
  
• YSlow (Installs to your browser, available in Chrome, Firefox and Safari + a few others)
• GTMetrix (analyses your site with reports from PageSpeed and YSlow)

One thing to note is that if you test the same site in all of these tools, they may give you conflicting information. Also remember they are only guides, not always 100% accurate, and some errors may be outside of your control.