As a website owner, you need to have a broad range of skills.
Things like creating content, managing social media, promoting articles, analyzing traffic patterns, improving revenue, and much more are all part of everyday life for a website owner.
In this article, we’ll tackle some of the more technical website elements.
You are going to learn 7 technical tweaks that will make you a better website owner.
1) Go mobile or see your website left behind in the dust
It’s 2018. Your website needs to display well on desktops, smartphones and other devices.
This should come as no surprise as most of us have heard the smartphones are taking over the internet call for several years by now.
However, there are still sites that aren’t showing properly on mobile devices. And that’s bad.
Not only are you losing mobile followers, your website will also rank lower in Google search.
Your main website needs to be mobile friendly. Redirecting users to a mobile version of your website is no longer enough. You need a responsive website that works on mobile devices by changing the website the layout to fit. Not one that redirects.
All of this may sound technical and scary. And if you were to create your own website from scratch, it would be.
Luckily, we have WordPress. And most modern themes are already responsive, meaning they look great on all devices.
If your WordPress theme is not responsive, you need to get a new one.
You can use this Google tool to analyze whether your website is mobile friendly: https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly.
Enter your website URL and Google will tell you whether it deems your website mobile friendly. You will also be able to see a preview of the mobile layout of your site.
You can of course also view your site on your own smartphone.
This can help you understand the mobile look and feel of your site better.
However, be wary that there are many different mobile devices with different screen forms, resolutions, and sizes. Your own smartphone is just one of many different configurations that your website needs to display correctly.
The only exception to the mobile-friendly rule is if your website truly isn’t meant for mobile platforms. Some platforms are still best fit for desktop viewing. But you really need to consider if you are in this category before you decide not to care about mobile devices.
Website improvement: Get a responsive theme and test it on mobile devices.
2) Simple Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has always been a topic of heated debates in the internet marketing world. Some swear to it, others despise it and some just dabble a bit here and there.
No matter your conviction, there’s no way getting around SEO if you want to improve your traffic from search engines.
If you really don’t care about search engine traffic (you should), then you can skip the rest of this section.
For hard-core SEO fans there are always more tweaks and settings to fiddle with if you want to improve your rankings. However, most of us would rather spend time on other things, so the general SEO principles should be simple and effective.
Here are some guidelines:
Get a SEO WordPress Plugin
I published a couple of posts on my own site before I installed the Yoast SEO plugin. As soon as I had installed it I could see what I had been missing out on.
The difference was immense.
Yoast SEO is a great plugin, but I’m sure there are other options of there if you don’t want this one. Here are just some of the things it’ll help you with:
Create and show your sitemap so you can add it to your Google Search Console.
Give you readability and SEO tips and an overall score when you are writing your content.
Integrate with Google Search Console to show errors should there be any.
Tweak and improve the overall SEO of your website.
And much more. Let’s just say you’d be stupid not to have an SEO plugin like that if you want to improve your search engine rankings.
Website improvement: Get an SEO plugin for your WordPress site.
Follow the basic SEO principles
SEO doesn’t have to be complicated. Especially not if you want to stay on the white-hat side of things. Which I recommend you do.
What Google really wants you to do is make the user experience as great as it can be for your users and you will be rewarded for it.
Simple, right? Not necessarily easy, but simple. But then again, nothing is easy when it comes to running a great website.
From Backlinko’s Definitive Guide To SEO In 2018, the basic SEO principles are:
1) Have users spend more time on your page. A user spending a lot of time on your site means that the user found what she was looking for. Google likes that.
2) Have a good click-through rate (CTR) on your search results. If people click on your link in the search results, Google considers this an indicator that your page is relevant to the search term.
3) Write comprehensive, in-depth content. Your page should cover everything relevant to a topic so users do not have to jump to other sites to get the full overview. This means at least 2000 words.
4) Content and links are still key. SEO is still all about high-quality content with good backlinks.
And there you have it. Four simple SEO guidelines that you should follow to improve your rankings.
Website improvement: Follow the basic SEO principles.
3) Backup, Backup, BACKUP!
Website backup is a boring topic to write about, but it may also be the most important piece of this article.
Sure, most of us may not ever need it.
However, when lightning strikes you’ll thank the gods that you have a backup. Or if you don’t, you’ll have lost all your valuable work.
There are two core rules you need to follow when setting up a backup system:
1) You need automated backups at regular intervals.
2) Your backup needs to be stored somewhere away from your website server.
You can’t rely on yourself to take regular backups. You need automation. And if you do not store the backups somewhere away from your website server, they are of no use if your server crashes or you lose access to it.
I use the WordPress plugin UpdraftPlus for backups on this site. It can take scheduled backups and store it safely on extern storage like Amazon S3, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.
There are many other plugins and solutions out there, and all you need is something reliable. Whatever you decide on, just get it up and running straight away if you do not already have it.
Website improvement: Get a backup solution immediately if you do not already have one.
4) Capture your metrics
A good website owner installs Google Analytics. A great website owner unlocks the full potential of metric capturing.
If you want to know what works and what doesn’t on your website, you need to properly capture your website metrics.
This means that you need to take the time to learn and capture your important numbers.
Generally, your most important numbers are the ones with the most impact.
E.g. the conversion rate of a sales page is often one of the most impactful metrics. Minor changes to this number can mean a world of difference to a website.
E.g. 100 daily visitors at a 2% conversion rate for a $49 product is $98.
At 3% it is $147.
Improving the conversion rate from 2% to 3% means $49 more per day. An increase of 50%. (The increase follows directly from increasing the conversion rate from 2% to 3% which is a 50% increase.)
The same sort of principles applies to other impactful conversion rates. Minor changes can have major effects. Start with landing pages, email sign-ups, click-through rates on newsletters, etc.
You should monitor these metrics closely.
Here’s an example of a spreadsheet I’ve made for monitoring my offers:
I record impressions, offer views and sales. With that, I can compute the conversion rate for the sales page and the marketplace ad.
You should make it a habit of recording similar impactful metrics for your website.
And then analyze how things are going on a regular basis. Once a month is a good rule of thumb. And the end/start of a new month is usually a good time to reflect on the past month and see how things are going.
What about traffic numbers? Email subscribers? Social followers?
These can be important numbers too. And they most likely are.
In the example before, improving traffic by 50% from 100 to 150 would give the same increase in daily revenue.
What you shouldn’t do is just randomly look at your Google analytics and interpret the status of your website from the number of daily visitors.
This is often the path new website owners follow.
More visitors on that screen looks good. And it may feel good. But it’s not necessarily telling you much about how your website is doing.
You can have tiny visitor numbers and do extremely well. And you can have all the traffic in the world and not make any profit.
Don’t just randomly look at traffic numbers. Invest time in learning your important metrics, capture them and use them.
It will give you a much better overview.
Website improvement: Know your most important metrics, record them and use the information to analyze how things are going and where you can improve.
5) Increase your font size
One of the first things I did when I launched TheJourneyOf was to increase the font size.
The default theme font size was way too small for optimal readability. Unfortunately, this is the case with many WordPress themes.
Increasing your font size can improve readability, usability and increase visual impact.
Website improvement: Experiment with bigger font size, starting from 20px and upwards.
6) Improve your website speed
Website speed is another one of those technical tweaks that can improve user experience and SEO at the same time.
Google has stated that site speed does affect rankings. So if you want to rank higher, you may want to take a look at your site speed.
But speed isn’t just about rankings. It’s also about losing users. According to Google, most websites lose more than half of their mobile visitors because their websites are too slow to load.
Yes, you read that right.
If you have an average load time, more than 50% of your mobile visitors are leaving because your site is too slow.
You may think this absurd. I was quite astounded when I started digging into these stats. Just take a look at how the bounce rates increase with loading time:
Are people really that intolerant of slow load times?
Think about it, when was the last time you closed a web page before it fully loaded on your smartphone?
I did it just earlier this morning.
And come to think of it, I often have to stop loading pages when I’m on a poor connection.
But how often do you have a poor connection on your phone?
As it turns out, a lot. Also in the near future.
By now I have hopefully convinced you (scared you?) that you need to care about your website speed if you want to capture your mobile visitors.
And as the number of mobile visitors is only going to increase, you should want to tap into this audience.
Now let’s look at some of the ways you can easily improve your website speed.
Start with a baseline
Let’s check your website before we apply any tweaks.
You can test your website using the following tools:
WebPagetest. It looks horrible, but it’s an open source project supported by Google. Gives you some good information, and some of the other speed tests below are in fact powered by this project.
PageSpeed Insights by Google will give you recommendations and optimization score.
Test Your Mobile Website by Google will show your mobile performance by testing the site from a 3G network. You can also download a detailed report with recommended improvements.
Pingdom Website Speed Test will show you detailed stats and allows you to test from different locations.
There are plenty of sites out there that will test your site. However, the four above should give you more than enough data to see where you can improve your speed.
Website improvement: Test your site speed and see where you can improve.
Caching
Caching can improve site speed a lot.
If you want to know how, I’ve written a quick explanation below. If not, just skip the next paragraph and move on to how you can use caching to speed up your site.
A bit of a technical explanation about caching: caching is a tool websites use to store data such that future requests can be served faster. E.g. first time you visit a website home page, the web server may have to load the page from scratch, which most likely involves several queries to the database. This slows down the website loading speed. But once you have visited the home page, there’s a chance you (and other people) will visit it again shortly thereafter. The server knows this, so it will keep the page in cache so it can show it faster next time, without having to build the whole page using database queries. There’s much more to actual website caching, but it’s more technical and not that useful for most website owners to know about.
All you really need to know is how to use caching for your own site. Luckily, there are tools that can help you.
The easiest way to get caching is by using a WordPress plugin. You can see some of the best candidates here.
Website improvement: Use website caching to improve site speed.
Optimize Images
Images are usually the heaviest items on a website.
They take up much of the loading speed and bandwidth. According to Httparchive.org, images take up more than 50% of website bandwidth.
If you want to improve your site speed, images are a good place to do so.
To improve your image loading, you can optimize your images for online use.
Optimizing website images is a rather complicated process as it depends on a lot of factors like image size, type, use and so on. And to make things even harder, image optimization best practices are changing as technology improves.
You can read much more about image optimization here and here. Fair warning, these are rather technical articles.
Luckily, there are services that will take care of all that complicated stuff for you.
In the Google post about automating image optimization, they list a number of services and solutions. You can find them here.
One that may be compelling to try out is Cloudinary as they have a free tier that will be sufficient for most smaller websites.
If you want an even easier solution, the WordPress plugin WP Smush can optimize images on your WordPress site without using any third-parties.
Website improvement: Optimize your website images to improve site speed.
7) Get SSL (Secure Socket Layer) for your website
SSL is the standard security technology that allows websites to securely communicate with users.
It’s the little lock icon you see on secure websites in your browser:
When you see a connection over HTTPS instead of HTTP, this is a secure connection using SSL.
Again, as we are trying to make things as simple as possible, you do not need to know how SSL works. It’s a complicated process requiring signed certificates, cryptographic functions and more. All you need to know is that SSL is something to consider for your website.
There are many reasons why you should get this for your website. Here are some of them:
Security. The obvious benefit is that you and your users are safe to browse your site without adversaries being able to interfere.
Search engines prefer SSL. Setting up SSL for your website may improve your rankings.
You are more trustworthy. The little lock icon saying secure shows that your site is secure to browse. This is a good sign to send your visitors.
Now is the time I tell you that setting up SSL is an extremely complicated process and doing it wrong may actually misconfigure your site so visitors won’t be able to enter.
Good news is that you don’t have to manually set up anything.
Cloudflare will do all of it for you. And they even have a free plan for smaller websites.
You can get an explanation of their service at the website, but essentially they place themselves between your server and your visitors and optimize a ton of stuff automatically for you.
And one of the things they do is provide a secure connection (SSL) for your visitors. They can also protect you from attacks and help you optimize for better website speed.
I’m quite a fan of their service, to say the least.
All you have to set up is your website account and migrate your nameservers. Their guide will show you how to do this.
Website improvement: Get SSL for your website. You can get your own certificate or use a service like Cloudflare.
Final thoughts: you do not have to become a tech expert
I’m not a server or website expect, but my interest in technology and my degree in computer science means that I like to tinker with this stuff.
However, you don’t need to be a savvy tech expert to run a great website. If you apply just one of these tweaks you will improve your site.
Also, seek help if you get stuck.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that Google has an answer for almost everything. If you have an issue, chances are someone else has had this issue before and posted about it.
Becoming a better website owner
– Learn how to plan your website, and just as importantly: what not to plan in this article.
– Build a traffic system for your website to get more consistent and reliable traffic sources.
– How To Get 118,098 Visitors By Clicking a Big Red Button. The story of how I managed to get lots of visitors with a stupidly simple strategy.
