Every startup business website has the same goal: to attract visitors and turn them into customers says Peter Decaprio.
As everyone knows, these are the vital things every startup needs to quickly start making money. So hiring a professional designer is an investment that will pay off considerably in no time. You can find many beautiful templates online at very affordable prices.
But let’s focus on what’s actually most important for your business website, the quality of the content. It doesn’t matter how beautiful it is if no one can read it!
You need to create a useful site that will help you stand out from all the others and eventually stand at the top of your industry.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you to spend days writing about your products or services… Yes, everyone knows that keywords are still relevant in today’s SEO world, but creating engaging content will always benefit you more than just stuffing tons of keywords into it. You want people who are really interested in what you have to offer – so why force them?
Great content is written with passion and love so it would be a shame to waste this valuable resource. How can you make sure people will read it?
Well, by making it easier for them of course! Optimizing your startup business website is an essential step in increasing traffic and downloads. Just a few tweaks here and there along with some tips and tricks can help you skyrocket your visitors’ engagement. Let’s have a look at how we did it…
9 Simple Steps to Optimize Your Startup Business Website:
- Install a Content Delivery Network (CDN). A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a large distributed system of proxy servers deployed in multiple data centers across the Internet.
- The goal of a CDN is to serve content to end users with high availability and high performance. A content delivery network is a collection of computers – or nodes – that are located on fast networks and have the sole function of delivering web pages, videos, images, etc. to your visitors from the closest place possible so they can download information from you faster explains Peter Decaprio.
- Reduce the number of files that need to be loaded by browsers:
- Use a CDN along with a minification plugin to decrease loading time for your WebPages. Plus it helps search engines crawl and index your site faster too!
- Implement browser caching: Browser caching allows client web browsers to save resources like HTML pages, JavaScript files, and style sheets and media elements locally in order to reduce server response times and improve page load speeds. Simply put, it means that your server will not need to process the same request again and again. JavaScript files can be cache for a few minutes or hours. CSS style sheets and image files should be cache for weeks and HTML pages usually don’t change mostly enough. To warrant setting an expiration date greater than one day.
- Keep your original image resolution: By allowing the browser to scale down images (on its own). You’ll use less bandwidth in exchange for showing visitors lower quality pictures. So always upload your photos in the highest possible resolution knowing that they will look crisp on any device – big or small! Another tip is to avoid using JPEG format because every time you save an image in this format it loses some information, making it less clear when it is saved and re-opened.
- Convert images to the Web Optimized format: PNG, JPG and GIF images can be compressed. To reduce their size and improve loading speed in a process known as “Optimization”.
- There are online tools available that allow you to optimize your JPEG images for free such as TinyPNG. But you can also load them into Google’s Web Optimizer or Yahoo’s Smush.it (both only work on JPG files). If you really want to take this optimization one step further, look into Lossy Compression. Which reduces file sizes even more by throwing away some data says Peter Decaprio. It might affect image quality but if done right it doesn’t change things too much.
- Minify JavaScript and CSS: Minifying is the process of removing unnecessary characters from source code. To reduce its size thereby improving load speeds. You can use any minification plugin to automatically shorten your URLs, strip out tracking codes/elements, remove comments/unnecessary white space, etc. Which are all things that slow down page loads explains Peter Decaprio.
Conclusion:
So there you have it – 9 simple steps to optimize your startup business website and significantly increase traffic! You should start seeing results within a week, but if not give yourself 3-4 weeks. Good luck!