Tips for Optimizing your Website

Many tools make it easy to build a website yourself these days (we offer a super easy-to-use web builder ourselves). However, building your website is only part of the battle. Once you build your website you want to make sure it is optimized for performance and SEO. Whether you build your website yourself or hire a professional to do it for you - below are some useful tips for you to be aware of to make sure your website is well-optimized.

Don’t use extremely large images

This includes both the size of the file and the dimensions of the image being used. It is important for users that when they visit a page on your website, that it loads quickly. The more your customers have to wait for your page to load, the more incentive they have to leave your site and go elsewhere. It’s for this reason that Google and other search engines consider this when it comes to determining your rank. Want to be ranked higher? Load faster!

What you can do to decrease the size of your images:

• Make sure your images are in the right dimensions. There is no need to load a 4000-pixel wide image on your website. Decreasing the dimensions will also decrease your file size.
• Use the save for web feature in Photoshop to decrease the size of your images.

For more details on this, watch a video we made about optimizing your images for the web using Adobe Photoshop.

Use real text, don’t embed it within your images

When you include site content within your images rather than as actual text you create issues both with the page speed and search engine optimization. The more images that the web browser needs to load, the longer it will take to load. Whereas plain text loads much quicker.

Search engines also rely on real text to index your site and serve it to users who search for particular words or phrases. Web crawlers cannot read the content within images, even if it is extremely valuable information. You are doing yourself a huge disservice by not allowing search engines to know about this content and provide it to their users.

In addition to these points, embedding images within text create accessibility issues for visually impaired individuals who rely on screen readers to dictate content to them.

Make sure your site is mobile-friendly

Everyone has slightly different statistics to back this up, but one thing that is universally agreed upon is the growth of web viewing through mobile devices. If your website is not mobile-friendly, those users who are viewing it on their smartphone are going to bounce almost immediately - potentially costing you a customer.

Your website should be coded to be responsive so it will scale to fit whatever type of device your visitors are viewing it on. We’ve talked about responsive design before, so be sure to read that blog post for more valuable information.

What you can do to make sure your website is mobile-friendly:

• Test it out for yourself, open your website on a mobile device. If it is really hard to read and everything looks small, chances are your website is not mobile-friendly. You could be due for a redesign. If you don’t know where to start, reach out to use or a free quote!
• If you are building a website yourself, make sure your web builder offers responsive themes. Our web builder, WebdeXpress, offers a ton of mobile-friendly themes.
• If you have hired a Web Developer and the website they are building for you isn’t readable on a smartphone, consider that a huge red flag. Every website we build at PSPINC is responsive and meant for devices of all types.

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These are just a few of the things we take into consideration when we build websites for customers. There are so many other things we do to ensure the websites we provide are well optimized, extremely visible, and perform to the best of their ability.

If you are looking for a free quote, or have a question for us please contact us on social media, by phone at 1-800-232-3889, or email at contact@pspinc.com. We would be happy to help make sure your website is a valuable tool for your business!

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. 1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.