Website optimization has to be implemented in 2019. Most businesses have a website by this point, but many don’t invest a real effort into it. A website should not be a static entity that you can set and forget. You need to make sure it is optimized and ready to deliver good results. This post will delve into what those factors are and what is involved to website optimization for each.
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Claue – Clean, Minimal Magento 2&1 Theme is an excellent template for a modern and clean eCommerce store with 40+ homepage layouts and tons of options for shop, blog, portfolio, store locator layouts, and other useful pages. Claue version 2. 0 comes with a bunch of exclusive features including:
- Being based on the Luma theme.
- Meet all standards of Magento Theme
- Significant performance improvement
- Compatible with most third-party extensions.
- Fully compatible with Magento 2.4.x
This second advanced version completely differentiates from its previous one. Thus, if you are using Claue version 1 and want to update to Claue version 2, you can only rebuild a new website no rather than update from the old version. Now, let’s get back to the main topic.
Mobile-First
Google officially began rolling out the mobile-first index in March. Smart marketers were taking a mobile-first approach long before the official rollout.
Here are some basics for making your site mobile-friendly:
- Make your site adaptive to any device; be it desktop, mobile or tablet.
- Always scale your images when using a responsive design, especially for mobile users.
- Use short meta titles. They are easier to read on mobile devices.
- Avoid pop-ups that cover your content and prevent visitors from getting a glimpse of what your content is all about.
- Less can be more on mobile. In a mobile-first world, long-form content doesn’t necessarily equate to more traffic and better rankings.
- Don’t use mobile as an excuse for cloaking. Users and spiders need to see the same content.
SEO Optimization
Some find the idea of performing technical SEO to be intimidating. Thanks to the many SEO tools available, an SEO audit is no longer a daunting task. Know how to optimize SEO, you are close to website optimization.
The key, however, is to know how to interpret the data provided and what to do with it.
Website Speed
Page speed has a direct impact on both traffic and conversions. According to Google, “the average time it takes to fully load a mobile landing page is 22 seconds… yet 53 percent of mobile site visitors leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load.” Slow page speed creates a poor user experience, which is why Google takes page speed into consideration as a ranking factor.
Best practices for speeding up to website optimzation include:
- Minimize HTTP requests for the different parts of the page, like scripts, images, and CSS.
- Reduce file size by compressing them and combine common files to reduce requests.
- Have both CSS and JavaScript load simultaneously.
- Make JavaScript load after important files have.
- Reduce DNS lookup time.
- Improve server response time.
- Use an appropriate hosting solution.
- Leverage browser caching.
- Minimize image sizes.
- Use a CDN.
- Keep plugins to a minimum.
- Keep redirects to a minimum.
Content Marketing
It is projected that by 2020, 44 zettabytes of data will be produced every day. The challenge to break through the clutter will become exponentially more difficult as time passes.
In order to do so:
- Create a content hub in the form of a resource center.
- Fill your resource hub with a combination of useful, informative, and entertaining content.
- Write “spoke” pieces related to your resource hub and interlink.
- Write news articles related to your resource and interlink.
- Spread the word – promote your news articles on social channels.
- Hijack trending topics related to your content – promote on social media.
- Use your smartphone camera. Images and videos typically convert better than text alone.
- Update stale and low trafficked content.
Here are some useful extensions to upgrade your contents:
Advanced Content Manager for Magento 2
Schema
Schema markup, once added to a webpage, creates a rich snippet – an enhanced description which appears in the search results. All of the leading search engines, including Google, Bing, and Yandex, support the use of microdata. The real value in schema is that it can provide context to a webpage and improve the search experience.
There is no evidence that adding schema has any influence on SERPs and website optimization.
What Is Schema Used For?
- Businesses and organizations
- Events
- People
- Products
- Recipes
- Reviews
- Videos
Schema is actually quite simple to implement. If you have a WordPress site, there are a number of plugins that will do this for you.
User Experience
User experience (UX) is centered on gaining insight into users, their needs, their values, their abilities, and their limitations. UX also takes into consideration business goals and objectives. Best UX practices focus on improving the quality of the user experience and website optimization.
According to Peter Morville, factors that influence UX include:
- Useful: Your content needs to be unique and satisfy a need.
- Usable: Your website needs to be easy to use and navigate.
- Desirable: Your design elements and brand should evoke emotion and appreciation.
- Findable: Integrate design and navigation elements to make it easy for users to find what they need.
- Accessible: Content needs to be accessible to everyone – including the 10 percent of the population with disabilities.
- Credible: Your site needs to be trustworthy in order for users to believe you.
- Valuable: Your site needs to provide value to the user in terms of experience and to the company in terms of positive ROI.
Link Building
Links have been among the top ranking website optimization factors for quite some time now. In 2019, Google will become even more adept at identifying and devaluing spammy links.
That being the case, quality will continue to trump quantity.
The Best Link Building Strategies for 2019
- Utilize Resource Pages (a.k.a. linkbait or Skyscraper technique).
- Broken Link Building.
- Guest Posting (not the spammy kind).
- Backlink Mining.
- Link Reclamation.
- Claiming Unlinked Mentions.
Conclusion
The mounds of information and disinformation served up daily in various marketing feeds can be overwhelming. If you aren’t careful it can lead to analysis paralysis and nothing gets done.
That said, if you just focus on these eight essentials website optimization, you will set yourself up for success in 2019 and beyond.
