Tips For Improving Your Website
Welcome everyone to my personal tips on improving your website, this being part 1 of many in hope you’ll find a golden nugget that will help improve your awareness, image or optimise the way you work. The aim is to keep it short and sweet, but sometimes I will explain in detail how to setup certain parts for your website.
I’ve been self educated in my approach to business and how I work with them and I have to emphasis how much patience you do have to have with your own website. The days of quick fix improvements has gone and the dynamics to getting your website in front of an audience has changed.
I do hope you find use to what is given and if you require any more insight, don’t ever hesitate to get in touch.
The endless amount of hosting providers, but who do you choose?
I’ll always recommend my server as it is UK based, but again this is by choice and you may want to use my server to host your website. Web hosting providers vary from budget and your end goal aims, so the choice is really yours.
I do recommend choosing one that isn’t widely used by the masses as you’ll be more guaranteed a better service.
My hosting costs depend on what you require, as my clients contact me directly for changes or issues they face with their website. I also provide backup on all the websites I host on my server, so gives you a piece of mind just in case you need to rollback your website.
I continuously try to improve my website speed and it’s now core to search engines that your website load is under 6-8 seconds. Firstly, make sure your hosted on a server that isn’t shared with others and if it is, make sure you’re not being penalised for other websites having heavy loads. I run my own server and have direct access to all my client websites, which means any issues or improvements I need to make, I don’t have to reach out to support.
Website speeds differ from images to coding load ups and do require an expert to improve this, unless you’re using WordPress, which then you can install plugins such as WP Super Cache or other similar plugins. I don’t use any plugins and only optimise via code and .htaccess, but for beginners Super Cache is recommended.
You’ll also need to compress your images, as most servers do not use GZip compression or programs to compress your images.
If you’re wondering what your website speed is, why not try GT Metrix or Pingdom, which are tools that analyse your website and show improvements.
This has always been top of my list when it comes to any web development and it amazes me how little people know about it. Google Analytics is a very powerful tool and you don’t even have to do much to set it up and start. Used by agencies around the world, it tracks in real time users logging onto the website, capturing vital information for use on marketing and awareness campaigns. You also get an insight into locations, age, devices and more, which is useful to anyone who owns a website.
To install Google Analytics onto your website, simply visit: www.analytics.google.com and sign up via your Google account.
Once you’ve signed up, you’ll be asked to fill in information regarding your website and from here you’ll get given a Global site tag which you can install in the <head> of your website.
Below is the dashboard you’ll see if everything is setup for Analytics to read data and you can browse the side tabs to see in-depth information of users using your website.
This might seem funny to some people, but its critical nowadays to have a password that isn’t 123456 or something generic that relates to you. I use a program called LastPass which securely saves passwords and has a 2FA authentication for add protection.
Nowadays hackers are targeting websites to launch DDoS attacks or just simply out of boredom, want to hack a website. You have websites such as Password Generator that can create a strong password such as T3X’>PF42>n@~$q], even though a bit of a mouthful, it will be better as hackers or those wanting to cause harm to your business will find it harder to figure out what it is, even when using sophisticated software.
This isn’t to say that they can’t get past your password, but its a piece of mind to know that your password is more secure then ever.
I will gradually add more tips for you to improve your online presence and awareness, but this will be in time whilst working alongside my clients and other businesses that I am launching over the coming years. Stay safe and stay blessed, speak soon!.
