There are several key success factors that will boost your digital marketing. In previous blogs, we discussed content-related matters. Now it’s time to get technical! The speedier and securer your website, the better it will rank in search engines. Grab your web developer – if necessary 😉 – and get ready for 3 essential tips to improve your website’s speed and security.
1. Compress web content
Your website load speed has a positive influence on user experience. Next to that, a slow loading website increases your crawl budget – which is bad.
Good to know: Google divides its resources in time frames over all the websites it needs to index. The faster your pages load, the more pages and content the search engine can index in a certain period.
So how do you make your website speedier? The first thing you could do is making sure you compress and minify your web content (HTML, jScript, CSS). Most of the time, you can enable file compression in your hosting environment. This will lead to a faster loading website.
2. Compress and resize images
Images make your website attractive, but they take up a lot of space. To speed up your website, your images should be resized into the size that you show them on pages. For example, it doesn’t make sense loading a 5-megapixel image, while you only use it as 600px x 480px on your website.
Photos with a large file size often contain additional information about the photo camera, the device, iso settings, etc., so make sure to only use compressed files resized for their specific purpose.
Pro tip: This information can easily be removed using image compression tools such as TinyPNG. By uploading the files on TinyPNG and then downloading them again, your pictures will be reduced in file size and ready to upload on your website.
You could work out an image uploading route for the content managers of your website. A simple procedure could be:
- Resize the image to the correct dimensions
- Rename the file name and include the most important keywords
- Compress the image using a compression tool, such as TinyPNG (works also for jpeg files)
- Upload and add the image to the webpage
3. Enable Secure Socket Layer (SSL)
By enabling a secure connection on your website, you ensure no one can hijack the traffic between your website and the user’s browser. This is a must! Especially when your website contains contact or login forms. Every website should implement SSL to gain the trust of your visitors.
You can recognise a secured connection by the website address. Instead of with http://, the address starts with https://. When all web content is loaded over SSL, a small padlock will become visible in the browser near the URL.
Good to know: Most hosting providers offer a basic SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt. For standard websites, this should be sufficient. The beauty of Let’s Encrypt: it is free of charge.
This blog is part of a series about online marketing. Read more on how to improve your website usability, question-driven content, SEO and keywords and social media.
