In todays world, it’s important to know how to boost your website performance. In fact, it can either make or break your business success.
2020 the world was hit by a pandemic like no other. Many businesses closed down, and yet many expanded and hit new heights. How? Quite simply, they knew how to boost website performance and adapt quickly.
In this article we explore 7 key tips on how to boost your website performance and maximise your revenue potentials.
What is website performance?
You always hear marketers talking about the distinction between website performance and how the website looks and feels to the target audience.
However, unless you understand what is actually meant by website performance you can quite quickly be missing the point.
That’s because rather than informing people of what website performance actually is and why it’s important marketers want to kick you into a sense of insecurity and sell you a new shiny toy, that often looks better for target audiences but still falls short on performance.
In short website performance is the way your website performs at three core levels:
- Attracting traffic to your website
- Conversion of the traffic on your website
- Ability to retain your customers through your website
By increasing performance in all three of these levels by 10% you can quickly scale your performance by 30%. Is it that difficult? Not if you know how to boost your website performance.
How to test your current website performance
To understand how to boost your website performance you first need to understand your current performance metrics. The most effective and efficient way to do this is to get a full website audit. Visit our guide on what is a website audit and what it should include.
However, there are some ways to perform a quick view of this yourself. The following tools will give you a great understanding of your website performance levels:
It’s worth noting these aren’t the only tools but can often give you a good base understanding of the issues your website currently has. Too many people ask for more traffic without even knowing their current volumes, and the overall impact or reasons why the traffic is not coming to their amazing new website.
How to boost your website performance
So now you know how your website currently performs, now it’s time to make some easy changes. The most important part of a boosting your website performance is action.
1. Pick a great website host provider
Many people starting out their business want to keep their costs low. And that’s completely understandable, however saving costs on website hosting should be avoided at all costs.
Great so you have to pay more money? In comparison to the cheapest providers and packages out there yes. Considering SEO, site performance and reducing the bounce rate of users is worth the additional money.
For a fairly decent hosting provider you should expect this to cost in the region of £10-£30 a month.
Always check that you have dedicated website hosting and not on a shared server, this impacts the response times, space and performance of your site.
2. Set up the right website foundation
Your website could look amazing and still not appear in Google or other search engines. This reduces the impact you have on potential customers. What we then see is businesses throwing ads at their website to attract customers and throwing budgets down the drain.
A website should be built with the right foundations. Concentrating on consistency, accessibility and mobile responsiveness. Every page on your website should include all of the following:
- Title Tag – Use your title tag to determine how your site is presented in search engines
- Meta description – Further definition for search engines and retail space to attract your prospects
- A single h1 tag – ensure your webpage has only one h1 tag on the page that includes your keyword
- At least one h2 tag – A secondary title adds more context to a page and the right signals to search engines
- Mobile responsive design – Ensure all call-to-actions are sized for best interaction on mobile/tablet devices
3. Asset control and management
Most modern sites and businesses add custom fonts, images and videos to their websites to improve the interaction with its audiences. Little do many know all of these assets add weight to your website and can have a huge impact on your ability to boost your website performance.
Look to manage these assets. Keep the number of custom fonts to an absolute minimum, or make sure these are being used in the most optimised manners. All images and videos should be compressed and if possible delivered by a CDN of some form or another to improve the overall delivery to your website.
Can you do this to a site that already has hundreds and thousands of assets? Of course, depending on the infrastructure you have in place and the amount of control you have using tool like cloudflare can make huge difference in your websites performance.
All of these steps are a great ways of how to boost your website performance.
4. Purpose driven content
Ever wondered why your traffic doesn’t take action on your website? Astonishingly from our local business research we found over 70% of business websites failed to direct their users to specific conversion signals.
A conversion could be different all business types from generating new leads, sales or even bookings. Your website should provide users with carefully thought out content.
Creating a content strategy can hugely assist with ensuring your content always hits the mark and delivers key actions for users. Whether thats in the format of a landing site, content or blog article.
Your content strategy needn’t stop there. Every page should be laser focused on what and why it exists, how each of the headers feed into relevance and how you will deliver important information to your customers. You don’t always have to be in sell mode.
The better your content strategy, the more search engines will promote your site and the longer users will stay on your website.
5. Continuous improvement
Creating a website is one thing, but without continuing to build on that website and adapt its content and look and feel you will soon be left behind your competition.
With so many website builders enabling businesses and manage their own websites, we are seeing more and more websites being created but never adapting, being left behind and being buried in the endless list of search engine results.
Now we don’t mean change your branding, look and feel every 2 weeks, or every month. But keeping on top of your website is sure way to ensure yo continue to boost your websites performance.
Find new content, add new imagery make adjustments to the website and increase the interactions your customers can have on your website.
6. Emails
Yes that’s right, that old fashioned technology we all still use can have a huge boost on your website performance. How? Sending emails to your existing customers, people interested in your brand and those already loyal to you will bring quality traffic to your website.
This traffic can then be offered unique propositions, personalised offers (not always discounts) as these audiences are already engaged and will help to boost your website performance.
If you don’t already leverage your email lists or have a way to collect more emails from potential prospects, you absolutely should be thinking about doing so. The return on investment (ROI) marketing toward existing customers / warmed audiences is higher than marketing toward cold audiences.
7. Channel management
As you make updates to your website content, introduce new product lines or even rebrand, do not forget to update your other communication channels to drive traffic to your website.
Common sense? A staggering 67% of the local businesses we have researched forget to do this simple exercise which re-engages audiences that are interested in your services and products.
Not too dissimilar to the effects of email management, managing all your channels correctly will boost your website performance. Posting your updates will drive traffic to your website that are specifically interested in your business.
Make sure you post across:
- Social media platforms
- Google my business posts
- Relevant forums and threads you are attached to
How to boost your website performance conclusion
In conclusion the steps required to boost your website performance are simple, but it all comes down to time management. How much time do you have to get your house in order and maintain that foundation?
Many businesses fail by picking this up and then putting it back down which quite honestly doesn’t work and ends up costing more in the long run. The best steps to take to really boost your website performance are:
- Either audit your own site, or pay someone to run a full audit for you
- Allocate resource, time and/or budgets to the maintenance of your website with clear objectives
- Build on the performance you already have and do not become complacent
If you’d like to find out more about how we can specifically help you and your business boost your website performance please do not hesitate to get in contact.