How to Optimize Your Website

Free Book Preview Ultimate Guide to Social Media Marketing

In his book Ultimate Guide to Optimizing Your Website, SEO and online marketing expert Jon Rognerud shows you how to build a high-performance website and get top ranking on all search engines. In this edited excerpt, the author outlines a broad strategy for successfully optimizing your website.

The goal of search engine optimization is to have the search engine spiders not only find your site and pages but also specifically rank the page relevance so that it appears at the top of the search engine results. The process of optimization is not a one-time process but requires maintenance, tuning, and continuous testing and monitoring.

Below is a broad four-step process for a strategy for search engine optimization. Use this as your top-level checklist.

Step 1: Target Market Business Analysis

• Website analysis. Analysis of meta sets/keywords, visible text and code to deter­mine how well you’re positioned for search engines. For example, how much code do you have on a page compared to text?
• Competitive analysis. Examination of content keywords and present engine rank­ings of competitive websites to determine an effective engine positioning strategy. Pick the top five results in the Google listing results to begin this process. Expand as necessary. Use tools such as Semrush.com and Keywordspy.com.
• Initial keyword nomination. Development of a prioritized list of targeted search terms related to your customer base and market segment. Begin with this: What would you type into a search engine to find your business website or page? Then, ask your customers!

Step 2: Keyword Research and Development

• Keyword analysis. From nomination, further identify a targeted list of key­words and phrases. Review competitive lists and other pertinent industry sources. Use your preliminary list to determine an indicative number of recent search engine queries and how many websites are competing for each key­word. Prioritize keywords and phrases, plurals, singulars and misspellings. (If search users commonly misspell a keyword, you should identify and use it). Please note that Google will try to correct the term when searching, so use this with care.
• Baseline ranking assessment. You need to understand where you are now in order to accurately assess your future rankings. Keep a simple Excel sheet to start the process. Check weekly to begin. As you get more comfortable, check every 30 to 45 days. You should see improvements in website traffic, a key indicator of progress for your keywords. Some optimizers will say that rankings are dead. Yes, traffic and conversions are more important, but we use rankings as an indicator.

• Goals and Objectives. Clearly define your objectives in advance so you can truly measure your ROI from any programs you implement. Start simple, but don’t skip this step. Example: You may decide to increase website traffic from a current baseline of 100 visitors a day to 200 visitors over the next 30 days. Or you may want to improve your current conversion rate of one percent to two in a specified period. You may begin with top-level, aggregate numbers, but you must drill down into specific pages that can improve products, services, and business sales.

Step 3: Content Optimization and Submission

• Create page titles. Keyword-based titles help establish page theme and direction for your keywords.
• Create meta tags. Meta description tags can influence click-throughs but aren’t directly used for rankings. (Google doesn’t use the keywords tag any­more.)
• Place strategic search phrases on pages. Integrate selected keywords into your website source code and existing content on designated pages. Make sure to apply a sug­gested guideline of one to three keywords/phrases per content page and add more pages to complete the list. Ensure that related words are used as a natural inclu­sion of your keywords. It helps the search engines quickly determine what the page is about. A natural approach to this works best. In the past, 100 to 300 words on a page was recommended. Many tests show that pages with 800 to 2,000 words can outperform shorter ones. In the end, the users, the marketplace, content and links will determine the popularity and ranking numbers.
• Develop new sitemaps for Google and Bing. Make it easier for search engines to index your website. Create both XML and HTML versions. An HTML version is the first step. XML sitemaps can easily be submitted via Google and Bing webmaster tools.
• Submit website to directories (limited use). Professional search marketers don’t sub­mit the URL to the major search engines, but it’s possible to do so. A better and faster way is to get links back to your site naturally. Links get your site indexed by the search engines. However, you should submit your URL to directories such as Yahoo! (paid), Business.com (paid) and DMOZ (free). Some may choose to include AdSense () scripts on a new site to get their Google Media bot to visit. It will likely get your pages indexed quickly.

Step 4: Continuous Testing and Measuring

• Test and measure. Analyze search engine rankings and web traffic to determine the effectiveness of the programs you’ve implemented, including assessment of individual keyword performance. Test the results of changes, and keep changes tracked in an Excel spreadsheet, or whatever you’re comfortable with.
• Maintenance. Ongoing addition and modification of keywords and website con­tent are necessary to continually improve search engine rankings so growth doesn’t stall or decline from neglect. You also want to review your link strategy and ensure that your inbound and outbound links are relevant to your business. A blog can provide you the necessary structure and ease of content addition that you need. Your hosting company can typically help you with the setup/installation of a blog.

Free Book Preview Ultimate Guide to Social Media Marketing

In his book Ultimate Guide to Optimizing Your Website, SEO and online marketing expert Jon Rognerud shows you how to build a high-performance website and get top ranking on all search engines. In this edited excerpt, the author outlines a broad strategy for successfully optimizing your website.

The goal of search engine optimization is to have the search engine spiders not only find your site and pages but also specifically rank the page relevance so that it appears at the top of the search engine results. The process of optimization is not a one-time process but requires maintenance, tuning, and continuous testing and monitoring.

Below is a broad four-step process for a strategy for search engine optimization. Use this as your top-level checklist.

Step 1: Target Market Business Analysis

• Website analysis. Analysis of meta sets/keywords, visible text and code to deter­mine how well you’re positioned for search engines. For example, how much code do you have on a page compared to text?
• Competitive analysis. Examination of content keywords and present engine rank­ings of competitive websites to determine an effective engine positioning strategy. Pick the top five results in the Google listing results to begin this process. Expand as necessary. Use tools such as Semrush.com and Keywordspy.com.
• Initial keyword nomination. Development of a prioritized list of targeted search terms related to your customer base and market segment. Begin with this: What would you type into a search engine to find your business website or page? Then, ask your customers!

Step 2: Keyword Research and Development

• Keyword analysis. From nomination, further identify a targeted list of key­words and phrases. Review competitive lists and other pertinent industry sources. Use your preliminary list to determine an indicative number of recent search engine queries and how many websites are competing for each key­word. Prioritize keywords and phrases, plurals, singulars and misspellings. (If search users commonly misspell a keyword, you should identify and use it). Please note that Google will try to correct the term when searching, so use this with care.
• Baseline ranking assessment. You need to understand where you are now in order to accurately assess your future rankings. Keep a simple Excel sheet to start the process. Check weekly to begin. As you get more comfortable, check every 30 to 45 days. You should see improvements in website traffic, a key indicator of progress for your keywords. Some optimizers will say that rankings are dead. Yes, traffic and conversions are more important, but we use rankings as an indicator.

• Goals and Objectives. Clearly define your objectives in advance so you can truly measure your ROI from any programs you implement. Start simple, but don’t skip this step. Example: You may decide to increase website traffic from a current baseline of 100 visitors a day to 200 visitors over the next 30 days. Or you may want to improve your current conversion rate of one percent to two in a specified period. You may begin with top-level, aggregate numbers, but you must drill down into specific pages that can improve products, services, and business sales.

Step 3: Content Optimization and Submission

• Create page titles. Keyword-based titles help establish page theme and direction for your keywords.
• Create meta tags. Meta description tags can influence click-throughs but aren’t directly used for rankings. (Google doesn’t use the keywords tag any­more.)
• Place strategic search phrases on pages. Integrate selected keywords into your website source code and existing content on designated pages. Make sure to apply a sug­gested guideline of one to three keywords/phrases per content page and add more pages to complete the list. Ensure that related words are used as a natural inclu­sion of your keywords. It helps the search engines quickly determine what the page is about. A natural approach to this works best. In the past, 100 to 300 words on a page was recommended. Many tests show that pages with 800 to 2,000 words can outperform shorter ones. In the end, the users, the marketplace, content and links will determine the popularity and ranking numbers.
• Develop new sitemaps for Google and Bing. Make it easier for search engines to index your website. Create both XML and HTML versions. An HTML version is the first step. XML sitemaps can easily be submitted via Google and Bing webmaster tools.
• Submit website to directories (limited use). Professional search marketers don’t sub­mit the URL to the major search engines, but it’s possible to do so. A better and faster way is to get links back to your site naturally. Links get your site indexed by the search engines. However, you should submit your URL to directories such as Yahoo! (paid), Business.com (paid) and DMOZ (free). Some may choose to include AdSense () scripts on a new site to get their Google Media bot to visit. It will likely get your pages indexed quickly.

Step 4: Continuous Testing and Measuring

• Test and measure. Analyze search engine rankings and web traffic to determine the effectiveness of the programs you’ve implemented, including assessment of individual keyword performance. Test the results of changes, and keep changes tracked in an Excel spreadsheet, or whatever you’re comfortable with.
• Maintenance. Ongoing addition and modification of keywords and website con­tent are necessary to continually improve search engine rankings so growth doesn’t stall or decline from neglect. You also want to review your link strategy and ensure that your inbound and outbound links are relevant to your business. A blog can provide you the necessary structure and ease of content addition that you need. Your hosting company can typically help you with the setup/installation of a blog.

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Everyone uses search engines to find products and companies these days. About 60% of all consumers use Google search to find businesses, and over 80% of online searches result in direct sales or in-store visits. You want to optimize your website so that you show up on the top of these searches. This should be a top priority for any business owner.

Unfortunately, search optimization is not a fix it and forget it type of task. Google’s search algorithm is constantly evolving as they attempt to provide the best results for their searchers, and, of course, make as much money as possible in advertising. Your website has to keep up. You can’t simply hire an SEO expert to optimize your website once and forget about it for years; you’ll begin to see diminishing results.

With that in mind, you should be doing these following tasks on a regular basis to continually optimize your website, and stay ahead of the search curve.

5 Steps to Optimize your Website

1. Keyword Research

All search optimization begins with keyword research. You have to have an understanding of the current search landscape and your keywords. This is critical to not only do at the beginning of any marketing strategy, but also occasionally re-evaluate. These numbers always change, and you want to stay up-to-date.

Using Google Keyword Planner, begin with your industry and location. The tool will then give you a wide range of search terms, how often they are searched, and the competition over those words (based on how many businesses are buying ads based on those search terms.) You’ll want to find as many relevant keywords for your business as possible that have low competition but high search numbers.

Once you identify those terms, write them down word for word. Any slight variations on your identified keywords will hurt your optimization. Use these keywords in all of your efforts to optimize your website moving forward.

2. Create Great Content with Keywords in mind

Content is the basis for the entire Duct Tape Marketing approach, and posting regular content will help your website show up on more searches. When approaching content, you must keep the keywords in mind. The entire point of the content is to reach people who are looking for it.

Use your keywords as a springboard for content ideas, and try to work your keywords into the posts as often (but as naturally) as possible. For even more tips on optimizing each post for search, check out Kala’s post on post optimization.

3. Speed it Up

Google is beginning to punish slow running websites. You want to make sure your page is always up to speed. Luckily there is a tool to do just that. Google Speed Insights will not only tell you if your page is running slow, but it will give you suggestions on how to speed it up.

It is important to do this regularly and even follow up on those suggestions. Things you are doing on your website (posting new content, new products or pages) can slow your website down. You don’t want to be penalized for slow speed if you don’t know it is occurring.

4. Use Landing Pages

You want every single one of your landing pages to keep your keywords in mind. If you’re creating a landing page for a new product or promotion, try to work a keyword that is most relevant to your individual product into the title and body copy of the page.

If there are multiple keywords you think apply to this promotion or item, you may want to test multiple landing pages with each page focused on one keyword. Do this too often, though and you’ll slow your website down, so be sure to delete underperforming landing pages.

5. Update Your Page Titles

Quick question: what are the page titles of your website? Most business owners have their page titles as simply the name of your business. This is great if your business name is perfectly optimized, but most aren’t (the best search names usually follow the City + Service format, like Kansas City Auto Body for example.)

Try changing your page titles to include your #1 keyword. This can be something as simple as “Your business name + Top Keyword” but you can get creative. Try to incorporate a slogan that includes the keyword.

Optimal Results

With these five tips, your website will be consistently delivering you optimal results. Be sure to evaluate those results, find what works and what doesn’t. Also, this is not a complete list by any means. SEO is an incredibly deep and ever-evolving strategy, but that means there are tons of great resources to help you along the way.

Alex Boyer is a Community Manager and Content Ninja for Duct Tape Marketing. You can connect with him on Twitter @AlexBoyerKC

Making a bad first impression can be the difference between attracting new business or losing out on an opportunity. With your competition only being a click away online, it’s important that your website immediately presents your business in a way that matches your expertise and professionalism.

With that being said, your homepage is the most important part of your website because it gives off the first impression of your business. It is typically the most visited page on your website. It is the easiest remembered URL. It shares your mission, values, and goals – and should quickly communicate to your audience how your product/service addresses their needs. A variety of different traffic types come to your homepage, so it needs to cater to every one of your buyer personas.

That’s a lot to ask of one page!

To make sure you have the best homepage possible, with a lasting impression, we’ve outlined 9 steps that need to be taken. Go through these steps and make sure you have completed each of them.

1. Set your goals. (Most crucial step.)

• What is your website about? How can you educate your audience?
• Aim to get users beyond the homepage.
• Use measurable goals to track performance.
• Incorporate calls-to-action to show the next steps. Don’t let a user self-direct. Take them down the path that helps them make an informed decision.

2. Create content.

• Homepage content is your business value proposition.
• Focus on one primary, long-tailed keyword. What words/phrases is your audience searching for to find your product or service?
• Use headlines and bullet points. Make your content easy to scan.
• Split content into columns – no more than 4.
• Have whitespace, so you don’t overwhelm the visitor with content.
• Use internal links to help guide through the website.
• Add relevant, small images.
  • With big images, layer them with text as a call-to-action.
  • Overall, educate the visitor.

3. Optimize the page for Search Engines (SEO).

• Make the page unique by using one main keyword that describes your business.
• Add the primary keyword to your:
  • Page title
  • Meta description – a CTA (call-to-action), up to 150 characters.
  • Headlines – H1, H2, H3 (only have one primary headline (H1))
  • Content – should be “above the fold” with bolding and bullets
  • Images – file name and alt text (alt text describes the image to search engines and is used for screen readers for the visually impaired)
  • Anchor text links (the actual text that gets hyperlinked. Use a keyword instead of phrases like “click here.”)

4. Create an eye-catching header.

• The simpler the better.
• Use your logo.
• Include your phone number.
• Add courtesy links in top right for quick navigation.
• Add a login link – if needed.
• Have a consistent header throughout the whole website.

5. Build the menu/navigation.

• Make it big enough so that it can be seen from 5 feet away.
• Use a clear font for easy reading.
• Keep it consistent across the website.
• Have descriptive short menu headers.
• No more than 8 menu headers going across. 5 or 6 is an ideal number.
• Again, keep it simple and clear.

6. Include Calls-to-Action (CTA).

• You have 3-5 seconds to engage the visitor – use CTAs to attract and engage.
• Each CTA should appeal to a different visitor type.
• Not all need to go to landing pages. Some can point to blog posts, for example.
• Incorporate A/B testing – use 2 different CTAs and test them against each to see which receives more clicks.
• Look at your analytics to see which CTAs are the most effective.

7. Incorporate social media.

• Add a CTA to join your social networks – assuming you’re active in social media.
• Add follow and share icons in header and footer.
• Be descriptive and show reason and value to join.

8. Create a footer.

• Include company legal name and copyright year.
• Add contact information and important links. Users often use the footer as an active site map.
• Keep it consistent throughout the website.

9. Continuously test your homepage.

• Are you reaching your goals?
• Did the goals change?
• What can be added or adjusted?

Our last overall recommendation: look at the data and adjust. Using a tool like Databox (We are a proud Databox Partner and affiliate, we receive commission on purchases made through links on this page.), you can set up monthly marketing dashboards, which allow you to evaluate your most important KPIs — across multiple platforms — in a single data dashboard. Add annotations, notes and send a live link of your data report to your marketing department, client or C-Suite, highlighting your successful homepage optimization. Use the Google Analytics Website Performance dashboard to benchmark your website data now, and check back monthly to see how your optimizations are working for you.

Make your website remarkable and stand out against the crowd by implementing these steps, if you haven’t already. Make that first impression a lasting impression that will continuously bring people back to your site, and hopefully turn the visitors into leads and customers.

Is your website optimized?

Bonus Google SEO Tutorial: How HubSpot Uses Blogging to Rank #1 on Google

Learn the three major strategies that HubSpot employs to rank for target keywords in Google search results. Check out this free lesson from HubSpot Academy. (Note: We are a HubSpot affiliate and receive a commission if you purchase any HubSpot products)

A brief look at several known factors in 2020 that will improve your website ranking through content and other methods that are not always definite.

There are factors that influence website ranking in search engines. Considering these factors determines how a website is ranked in search engines.

Many people wonder how the major search engines rank websites to determine which websites are the best for keyword searches. This is particularly something that people who are just starting into online marketing find perplexing. The answer to how to improve the ranking of a website through search engine optimization (SEO) methods is not always definite, but there are several known factors that have been known to significantly influence the ranking of websites.

Among the most significant factors that increase search engine optimization and influence the ranking of websites in major search engines to include a website’s content, a website’s architecture and a website’s link popularity. Even as the search engine innovations continue to advance, these have remained key factors to search engine optimization and determination of the websites that are best suited for keyword searches.

The website’s content

The old saying, “Content is king” can never be overemphasized. A website’s content is no doubt the number one factor that determines a website’s ranking by search engines. In fact, search engines are constantly developing new technologies to reward quality content on the web. The higher the quality of content on a website, the higher the website will be ranked by search engines. In turn, the high ranking of a website is a definite mark of approval that a website is relevant for particular keyword searches.

Among the things in a website’s content that are considered by search engines when evaluating the relevance of websites for keyword searches include the headers and page titles in websites, formatted texts, and links in a website, URLs of websites and page content in websites. These things help search engines establish websites that deserve high ranking for keyword searches. Therefore, for a website to be ranked highly through search engine optimization, it is very important that it maintains a good balance of these aspects of the content because they affect the ranking of websites in varying proportions.

More on the website’s content

The correct balance of keywords on a website’s page should generally be between four to five percent within the content of a website. This helps increase the odds of a website being ranked highly for keyword searches. Added to this, if the keyword is included in the URL of a website, a website’s page title and a website’s header the website increases its chances for favorable ranking by search engines. Different from earlier technologies where search engines only looked at the tags that indicated the description of a web page, today the search engine technology used by major search engines goes beyond the mega tags to look more keenly at the website’s content appropriateness for keyword searches.

The originality of a website’s content is therefore paramount to establishing and maintaining a favorable ranking of a website for keyword searches. To farther improve the chances of a website’s ranking in search engine searches, bolding the keywords can sometimes help. This indicates that a website is properly maintained, which goes a long way into convincing search engines that a website is good for keyword searches.

Website’s videos and SERP rankings

One of the reasons videos are nowadays a privileged form of content is because they are very well when it comes to delivering large amounts of information in a short/concise manner. A picture is worth a thousand words, we all know that and following that logic, we can communicate about 1.8 million words in a minute-long video which is around 3 600 pages of text.

From the standpoint of SEO, this is a big deal. The longer your visitor’s “dwell time” or session is, the greater your chances at getting search engines like Google to see your video’s value and the trustworthiness of the webpage it’s hosted on – and, ultimately, give the page a higher rank.

In addition to providing Google with textual information about your video, it needs to have an attractive thumbnail too.

in a recent e-mail interview, Sergey Pavlishin, the CTO and co-founder of Movavi, said,

When it comes to website performance, speed matters. If your website isn’t loading as fast as possible, you could be losing a lot more than just revenue. According to research conducted by the Aberdeen Group, a slow loading website leads to:

• A decrease in page views and customer satisfaction
• Lower conversion rates
• Negative impact on search engine rank

All of this leads to a loss of revenue. However, the good news is that all of it can be avoided. In this article, we’ll show you how to improve your website performance so you can keep your visitors coming back to your site and keep your profits high.

Six Ways to Improve Your Website Performance

The most common advice online when it comes to improving website performance is to use a caching plugin. However, there are a few other ways to improve the performance of your site.

1. Optimize Your Images

The first tip on the list is to start with your images and optimize them. There are several ways that you can optimize your images to reduce their size and make sure they aren’t the main culprit for your site loading slowly.

• Compress your image files – no matter which format your images are saved in, use a tool like TinyPNG or ShortPixel Image Optimizer to reduce the file size of JPEG, PNG, and GIF images.
• Use the correct dimensions – another tip to keep in mind is to save images in the dimensions that are used on your site rather than relying on HTML and CSS to resize them. This can help reduce the overall image size and help improve your page loading times
• Consider SVG icons – instead of relying on PNG icons, consider replacing them with SVG icons. Aside from having a smaller size, and SVG icon will look good no matter the size of the screen it’s displayed on which means you won’t need multiple icon sizes for various resolutions.
• Save images in the correct format – finally, make sure you’re saving the images in the proper format. If you need a photo that portrays a photographic scene, a landscape or a portrait, JPEG format is recommended as it tends to result in a smaller file size. If you have to preserve the transparency, then saving the image in PNG format is the way to go.

2. Minimize HTTP Requests

For every image, CSS, and JavaScript file on your site, a visitor’s browser has to make an HTTP or HTTPS request to your site’s server. Multiple requests like this add to the loading time of your site. Here are a few tips to help you minimize the number of HTTP requests:

• Combine multiple CSS and JavaScript files – create one master file for all the CSS files and one for all the JavaScript files. Copy each individual CSS and JavaScript file into their respective master files.
• Use CSS instead of images whenever possible – rather than using images for horizontal lines, dividers, or backgrounds, try using CSS. This will improve the performance of your site as visitors won’t have to wait for the images to load.

3. Minify Stylesheets and JavaScript files

It’s not unusual for CSS and JavaScript files to contain page breaks, white spaces, and line breaks that make the code easier to read. But, the downside is that such formatting increases the size of those files which in turn negatively impacts your site’s performance as the browser has to read and parse a larger file. A tool such as Minify can remove those white spaces and line breaks, making CSS and JavaScript files significantly smaller.

4. Enable Gzip compression

Another way to improve your site’s performance is to enable Gzip compression on your server. This will compress HTML and CSS files used on your site before they get sent to the browser.

Usually, a browser will check if Gzip compression is enabled and if it is, the visitor’s browser will download the Gzip file rather than requesting and downloading original HTML and CSS files.

If you’re running an Apache server and are code-savvy, you can enable the Gzip compression by modifying the .htaccess file and adding the following code provided by GTMetrix:

Once you’ve added this to the .htaccess file, you can check if Gzip compression is working properly by visiting Check GZIP Compression site.

Alternatively, you can use a caching plugin like W3 Total Cache or WP SuperCache if you don’t feel comfortable editing the .htaccess file manually.

5. Use a CDN

CDN stands for Content Delivery Network and refers to a distributed computer network that delivers static files such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript as well as images and video files to visitor’s based on their geographic location. In essence, when you’re using a CDN, files mentioned above will load from a server that’s closest to the visitor browsing your site.

6. Upgrade Your Hosting Plan

If your site has grown in size and you’re receiving a high volume of traffic and visitors, it’s time to consider upgrading your hosting plan. Switching to a VPS or managed hosting plan does mean your cost will go up but it also allows you to have more control over the server resources in case of VPS hosting or access to optimized server configuration as well as take website maintenance off your plate in case of managed hosting.

7. Test the Changes

Once you’ve implemented the changes you should test your website to see the improvement in page loading times. You can use a tool like Pingdom Tools which will show you which resources are causing your website to load slow as well as let you test your site from different locations.

You can also use a tool like Google PageSpeed Insights. This tool will show you the resources that are slowing down your site and let you download optimized resources which include images, JavaScript, and CSS files.

Improve Your Website Performance

Your website performance makes a significant difference on user experience, pageviews, and your bottom line. Use the tools within your ManageWP dashboard to check the performance of your site and then use the tips in this article to improve areas that need optimizing.

Ana Amelio

Ana Amelio is a freelance web designer and writer that geeks out about anything WordPress, branding or social media marketing related. When she isn’t busy running her design and copywriting business Ley Design, she can be found reading or practicing calligraphy.

Updated 3/21/2019 (originally posted on 3/1/2018 )

Is there anything you would improve about your website? If your answer is “I’m not sure,” use these 20 tools to measure your website’s performance in various categories. They’re all free, and none require you to create an account or sign up for a free trial.

As is the case with any automated tool, the options listed below do not offer the same level of insight you’ll get from a human marketing professional, but each does a great job of identifying issues and helping you decide where to focus your website improvement efforts.

Website Report Card

Want a quick snapshot of how your website performs? FreeGrader.com will scan your site and give it a number grade based on mobile friendliness, social presence, keywords, site description and other SEO elements.

If you provide your email address, HubSpot’s WebSite Grader will give you a personalized report with an overall number grade as well as individual scores in the categories of performance, mobile readiness, SEO, and security. You’ll also get tips for how to raise your website’s score.

The free version of SEMRush offers a Site Audit tool that gives your website a comprehensive technical audit and flags issues that need to be addressed.

Mobile Friendliness

Mobile internet traffic accounts for more than half of all web traffic worldwide, so it’s crucial that your site provide a great experience for mobile users. To check if your site is mobile-friendly, take Google’s Mobile Friendly Test to see if your website meets Google’s mobile requirements.

Page Speed

When it comes to websites, lack of speed kills. To make sure your website isn’t frustrating customers and getting dinged by Google for slow load times, enter your site’s URL into a free page speed tool such as GTmetrix, Pingdom, WebPageTest, or Google’s PageSpeed Insights to see site load times and scores on a variety of other factors.

SEO Audit

Keeping up with the latest in SEO best practices is a full-time job, and it’s difficult to know if you’ve made mistakes in attempting to optimize your site.

The Found SEO Audit Tool will give you a quick audit of the SEO on your site, including technical and content issues and the quality of your site’s external links.

The Quicksprout Website Analyzer offers a simple, easy-to-read website analysis, including scores for traffic, speed, and SEO, and lists the number of errors, backlinks, and other key factors. You can even compare your site with up to three others.

Varvy’s SEO tool also provides a quick SEO overview, including links, social likes, shares and recent mentions, keywords and much more.

Screaming Frog’s free version will let you crawl your entire website to find broken links and errors, analyze page titles and meta data, identify duplicate pages, and more.

Accessibility

Website accessibility means your site can be used by anyone, including those with visual, hearing, or other impairments. To check your website’s accessibility, enter your URL in the Website Accessibility Evaluation Tool (WAVE) to see errors like missing alt text and poor visual contrast, as well as suggestions for how to meet accessibility standards.

Search Trends

What are people searching for online? The answer can help you develop relevant content ideas to solve your customers’ problems. Google Trends shows you the most popular search terms over time, and lets you compare search terms and see trending stories and regional interests.

Keywords

If you need help figuring out what keywords to use on your site, Keyword Tool can generate hundreds of keyword terms using your seed term and results from the autocomplete features of Google, YouTube, Bing and the App Store.

The free keyword research tool from Wordtracker gives you thousands of popular search phrases based on a single keyword, and shows you the search volume, level of competition, and cost-per-click for each term.

To check out which keywords you (or your competitors) are ranking for, enter a URL into SEMrush’s Position Tracking tool to see how you rank for up to 10 keywords and how you measure up to your competitors.

Links

Having the right types of links on your website is one of the best ways to improve your search ranking, boost traffic, establish the authority of your site, and improve the customer experience. But all those benefits are lost if the links don’t work.

Your website probably has dozens if not hundreds of links. To make sure none of them are giving users the dreaded 404 error, try BrokenLinkCheck, which not only scans your site for broken links, it tells you exactly where those dead links are located in your HTML code so you can quickly find and fix them.

Local Search

If you’re a local business, you need to make sure your customers can find you, and that means being optimized for local search. Check your local listings by entering your business name into Moz Local’s Check Listing tool, which tracks your local search engine presence, allows you to check your listings for accuracy, and gives you a local listing score.

Content Duplication

No one has the right to use your website content without your permission. To make sure no one’s scraping your content and reposting it on their own site, enter a URL into Copyscape to see matching content across the web.

For help with services like Performance Audits, Competitive Benchmarking, and SEO, contact Web Solutions today.

Autoptimize is a free WordPress optimization plugin. In addition to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript optimization, Autoptimize also includes optimization features targeted at other aspects of modern WordPress sites.

In this post, we’ll share the best Autoptimize plugin settings to improve the performance and page speed of your WordPress site.

Why Autoptimize?

Before we dive into the best Autoptimize settings, let’s quickly go over three reasons why Autoptimize is a great optimization plugin.

1. The free version of Autoptimize has a complete feature set for optimizing your WordPress site.
2. Autoptimize is strictly an optimization plugin and does not do any HTML page caching. This means it is compatible with all web hosts – even ones with custom page caching configurations like Kinsta.
3. Autoptimize has over 1 million active installs in the WordPress repository and is consistently updated with new features and bug fixes.

Autoptimize JS, CSS, and HTML Settings

HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is Autoptimize’s bread and butter. As with other optimization plugins, digging into Autoptimize’s extensive feature set and settings can be a daunting task. To make things easier, we have compiled the best Autoptimize settings for improving your site’s performance.

JavaScript Options

JavaScript optimization in Autoptimize.

Optimize JavaScript Code

We recommend enabling this option. When “optimize JavaScript code” is enabled, Autoptimize will minify your JavaScript files.

Aggregate JS Files

Autoptimize’s “aggregate JS files” option will combine all of your JavaScript files into a single file. In the past, combining JS and CSS files was a key step in WordPress optimization. At Kinsta, we use modern HTTP/2 servers that support parallel downloads and multiplexing – this means combining files is no longer as important as it used to be because HTTP/2 allows multiple files to be downloaded at the same time. With that said, aggregating CSS and JS files will still result in a speed bump for certain types of WordPress sites, so we recommend testing your page speed with this option enabled and disabled.

Also Aggregate Inline JS

The “also aggregate inline JS” option extracts inline JS in your HTML, and combines it with Autoptimize’s optimized JS file. Since this option can cause a rapid increase in Autoptimize’s cache size, we recommend keeping this option disabled unless you have a specific reason to enable it.

Force JavaScript in

In most cases, we do not recommend forcing JavaScript files to load in your site’s HTML element. Forcing JS to load early can result in render-blocking elements that may slow down your page speed. If you have JavaScript files that need to be loaded in the element, we recommend excluding those scripts from Autoptimize.

Exclude Scripts from Autoptimize

This option allows you to exclude specific directories and JavaScript files from aggregation. By default, Autoptimize excludes the following scripts.

• wp-includes/js/dist/
• wp-includes/js/tinymce/
• js/jquery/jquery.js

Note that adding a script to be excluded only affects aggregation by default. Excluded JavaScript files will still be minified unless “minify excluded CSS and JS files” is unchecked under “Misc Options”.

Add Try-Catch Wrapping

Enabling the “add try-catch wrapping” option will wrap your JavaScript code in try-catch blocks. This option is useful for debugging issues caused by JS minification and aggregation. If your site only works with “add try-catch wrapping” enabled, we recommend working with a developer to go through your JavaScript files to identify the one causing the issue because excessive use of try-catch blocks can reduce JS performance.

CSS Options

Autoptimize CSS optimization.

Optimize CSS Code

We recommend enabling this option. When “optimize CSS code” is enabled, Autoptimize will minify your CSS files.

Aggregate CSS Files

Autoptimize’s “aggregate CSS files” option will combine all of your CSS files into a single file. As we mentioned earlier, this feature may not benefit sites that support HTTP/2. We recommend A/B testing this option on your site to determine if there is any positive impact on page speed.

Also Aggregate Inline CSS

This option will move inline CSS to Autoptimize’s CSS file. While moving inline CSS to a browser-cacheable CSS file can reduce page size, we recommend leaving this option disabled in most cases.

Generate Data: URIs for Images

When this option is enabled, Autoptimize will base64-encode small background images and embed them into CSS. We recommend testing out this option to gauge the impact on your page speed. While encoding images into base64 format reduces the number of HTTP requests, base64 representations files are typically 20-30% larger than their binary counterparts.

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Web pages and websites are getting bigger and becoming more complex every day. But when a website does not load quickly, it affects visitors’ behavior, which leads to decreases in sales conversions and revenue.

A website can slow down for a number of reasons, including low server memory, competing resources or data influx. If a web server is slow, it will hinder the website’s performance. Likewise, a site receiving a great deal of traffic can also slow down load times or disrupt a visitor’s experience entirely. Navigation, site design, images and apps can also affect how quickly and effectively a website is displayed.

Bottom line: Your website’s speed can be the difference between generating revenue and not generating revenue.

You should not stop monitoring a website’s performance. Monitoring your site should be part of your daily web design workflow. Check home page load time, checkout process load time, and conversion rates at regular intervals.

Web Performance Makes a Difference in Sales

Don’t think a couple of seconds can make a difference? Think again. According to Jupiter Research (which has since been acquired by Forrester), the average online shopper in 2006 expected a web page to load in four seconds. Today, those same shoppers expect web pages to load in two. Poor web performance is one of the biggest reasons people are dissatisfied when shopping online. People who experience performance issues will abandon a site or switch to a competitor. Because page load time is important to web browsers, even Google has begun factoring site speed into their algorithm when ranking websites.

Why This ‘.Sucks’ As A Trademark

Responsive Web Design Also Affects Web Performance

Website visitors expect the same type of experience on their mobile device as they do on their computers.

So now, not only do you have to think about how a website performs in various computer web browsers, you also have to think about optimizing a website for the many types of mobile devices. This is where responsive web design comes into play. Responsive web design (RWD) involves creating a site that adjusts depending on what type of device is doing the viewing. The text can be scaled down, to offer only the main text and images.

It’s important to note, though, that just because a site has responsive web design and looks good on a certain device, it does not necessarily mean that it will load faster. And just because it loads faster on a mobile device, does not mean a visitor or customer will stay on it longer.

Three Ways to Optimize Your Website

There are a few things you can do to make sure your site is performing at optimum speed. First, you can run a web page analyzer to help you see what is actually being loaded and what is taking the most time — and clean up any problematic HTML, CSS and Javascript code. Next , here are three best practices to consider:

1. Get a dedicated server. One way to improve performance is to move to a faster server or get a dedicated server. Although it may cost more, being on a slow server can cost you even more in sales long term.
2. Use a CDN. If your site has large amounts of content to display, consider using a content delivery network (CDN) — a company that employs a large system of servers placed in various locations to deliver web pages to visitors. Most CDNs are used to host static resources such as images, videos, audio clips, CSS files and JavaScript. The closer a CDN server is to a site visitor, the faster the content will be delivered to the visitor’s computer or mobile device. CDNs help improve global availability and reduce bandwidth. However, the main issue a CDN addresses is latency, or the amount of time it takes to deliver website pages to the visitor.
3. Compress images and text. Another way to improve website performance and speed up page load times is to compress images and text. A server does not have to send out as much data this way. Some hosting providers automatically compress websites, and there are a number of tools you can use to test whether or not it is compressed. Most sites are image heavy, so if you want to optimize an image without losing visual quality, you can use a tool like Yahoo ’s Smush.it. For web graphics, use GIFs or PNGs rather than JPGs.

Just like a physical store needs organizing, websites need cleaning. When it comes to page-load optimization, every kilobyte counts. Web performance is a critical part of a customer’s experience. Don’t put optimizing a website’s loading time on the back burner, as it can be detrimental to loyal readers or repeat business.

For over a decade, Mike Quinn has been active in website design and development. After completing formal training in multimedia technologies in 2002, he became a founding member of a Pittsburgh based design company, Yellow Bridge Interactive (YBI). YBI’s focus is creating SEO-friendly websites that utilize the latest design and programming techniques.

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched StartupCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.

Website design is a tricky skill to master. You have to be able to meet the needs of your customers, while producing something that the search engines are going to love. That means you should look into how you use royalty free stock photos, how you put together your menu bar, and the backgrounds you are using.

There are literally hundreds of different points of order that you can bring up to improve your website design. Not everything is going to work for every type of business. This guide is going to show you ten ways in which you can improve your website design.

Go for Responsive Design

Did you know that 31% of traffic coming to the top 10 websites in the world all came from mobile devices?

This is a significant number, and a number that continues to increase over time. If your website isn’t ready for mobile, you’re going to have a hard time keeping visitors on your pages. Responsive design means your site will adapt to any screen and device.

Choose a Simple Design

Web design embraces minimalism and a simplistic approach. Many years ago, web designs were incredibly complex. Today, all that has changed. Clean and flat designs are very much in, and this is what brands are steadily trying to adapt to.

Impress your visitors with your products not by how flashy your website looks. Furthermore, fancy website graphics will only slow down your site.

Use Stock Photos in Moderation

Stock photos are great for a lot of things. There are lots of sources where you can pick up free high-quality stock images. But what you have to keep in mind is that sometimes it pays to change things up by using a series of unique images. People can tell the difference.

Try to use them both for the best results.

Keep Navigation Simple

Consumers that land on your page should be able to get to any page within two seconds. To earn links and gain credibility, people need to be able to find everything with no effort. Don’t give them too many options. For less important pages, stick them in sub-menus.

Make it Easy to Get in Touch

Sometimes it’s unbelievable how difficult it is to get in contact with the owners of a website. Your contact information should be available on every page in some form of side menu, or in the footer. If you are making it difficult for people to get in touch, you are already losing 95% of your potential leads.

Get Rid of Social Media Feeds

Social media is a powerful tool, but its primary purpose is to drive traffic to your website. You don’t want to add any distractions to your site by positioning your social media feeds there. The last thing you want to do is to send that hard-earned traffic back again.

Clickable Banners

Make it easy to always return to the homepage. Your banner or logo should be clickable and it should link back to the homepage. This just makes it easier to navigate, and so many websites have this feature now that it’s almost expected. This is sure to boost organic traffic and keep people on your website for longer.

Make Every Page a Landing Page

This is important because so many people concentrate on the Home page and neglect the rest of the site. See every page as an opportunity to force people further down the sales funnel. Imagine that every page is a landing page, which means it should in some way be contributing to making a sale.

There’s no excuse for not doing this in 2016.

Focus Above the Fold

Some webmasters complain that they don’t get enough user engagement on their website. One look and you see all the important information is below the fold. As soon as someone lands on a page, everything they immediately see is considered to be ‘above the fold’.

Place all the important information here. Anything that goes below the fold should be supplementary.

Review Your Web Design Regularly

Web design trends change all the time, and so do the demands of customers. It’s important to review your website every six months to see what’s current and what people are demanding. This doesn’t mean that you need to opt for a complete redesign. What it does mean is that you should see if you can make some minor tweaks.

How will you keep your web design updated today?

Online shoppers are looking for the fastest, most secure way to get to your product. According to an Akamai Technologies survey, 47% of consumers expect a page to load in 2 seconds or less. Here are ten ways to keep your website speed up to standard:

1. Implement your own content delivery network (CDN). A collection of global servers share a website’s static files, such as CSS or JavaScript, and they deliver from the server closest to the user’s physical location. In other words, when a user clicks on a video, the file loads faster because it is distributed from a server nearby. Larger websites implement CDNs to ensure visitors around the world have a much more accessible, fast experience.
2. Use adaptive images.According to the HTTP Archive, 61 percent of a website’s page weight on a desktop computer is images. Start by using tools such as Picturefill or Adaptive Images on your website to save bandwidth and improve page speed for your site. Another option is to adopt new image formats like WebP and JPeg XR—this can help reduce image weight by twenty to fifty percent without sacrificing image quality.
3. Cache, cache, cache. Browser caching stores cache versions of static resources, a process that quickens page speed tremendously and reduces server lag. When a user visits a page on your website, the cached version usually displays unless it has changed since it was last cached. This means the browser saves a lot of requests to your server and improves load speed for your site.
4. Evaluate your plugins. Plugins can bring new functionality and features to your website, but the more plugins your website has, the longer it takes to load. Poor or outdated plugins can slow down website performance dramatically, which could be fixed by removing plugins that duplicate functionality, are out of date or are no longer used.
5. Combine images into CSS sprites. If you have several images on a page, you are forcing multiple roundtrips of the server to get all the resources secured, which slows down page speed. Sprites combine all background images on a page into one single image, which means all images appear when the main “sprite” loads. This reduces the chance of flickering images and a smoother experience for your users.
6. Enable HTTP keep-alive response headers. HTTP requests are simple: they grab a single file, distribute and close. That said, this process is not always fast. Keep-alive allows the web browser and server to agree to use the same connection to grab and send multiple files. In other words, the server holds the connection open while a user is on the site instead of opening a new connection with every request, easing the load for the processor, network and memory.
7. Compress your content. You can compress your content significantly in order to improve your website performance. Popular web servers such as Apache and IIS use the GZIP compression algorithm to do this automatically on HTML, CSS and JavaScript. There are even compressor services online that remove unnecessary spaces and characters across your HTML and CSS code.
8. Configure expires headers. When a user visits your website, the website files are stored on their computer so that your website loads faster for them the next time they visit. There is an expiration date in the file header that determines how long these files will be stored on their computer, which is usually set to 24 hours by default. You can configure the expires header so that the files never time out, or you can increase the expiration date so that it doesn’t impact your server and page load time.
9. Minify JavaScript and CSS. By removing unnecessary line breaks, extra space, and so on, you will speed up parsing, downloading and executing. This simple task can cut bytes of data from your page, and every little bit counts. Tools like this CSS Minifier/Compressor can be very helpful in this department.
10. Move Your Website to Our New Managed WordPress solution. If you’ve taken these previous steps and your website is still loading slowly, you may want to consider a new hosting package. Lucky for you, we’ve got just the solution.

This summer (July 2020) we released our brand new Managed WordPress solution – designed with the sole purpose in mind to provide the industry’s best Managed WordPress solution – with a specific aim at boosting client website speeds.

We’re offering Month #1 for completely free (meaning we won’t charge your credit card until 30 days).

We’ll also migrate your website (or multiple websites!) from your current hosting provider to the new solution for absolutely, 100% free – taking care of the end-to-end migration process for you.

Check out the new solution by clicking the graphic below!