Once you’ve got the basics and intermediate of good web design, this article is next on your agenda. It’s part of our “Your Website” series where we dive into the basic, intermediate, and advanced guide for building a lasting website. At the advanced stage, you’ll find yourself locking in on some of the more granular enhancements and controls for your site. Take a look at three that we’ve identified below.
Content Delivery Network Equals Good Web Design
A content delivery network (CDN) is an extension of your caching. In a nutshell, your content is loaded at various locations across the globe and when customers access your site, they access your website through those locations. In other words, they don’t interact with or load data from your hosting and as a result, your website performance is significantly improved. There are additional advantages with a CDN, such as protection from network attackers and faster content delivery time.
CDN providers, such as AWS CloudFront, can be integrated with your website – note, these types of integrations can be a large lift. Caution must be taken to properly set up your caching policies to avoid your website from crashing or causing functionality issues with other services that your site is using. For example, your analytics may not fire on every page, losing you valuable customer data.
Good Web Design Constantly Optimizes for Website Performance
This is where Page Speed becomes your best friend. By benchmarking your site with Page Speed, you’ll receive a report detailing issues under four reports: performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO. As part of the reports, you’ll receive some common workarounds to resolve issues. It’s your job to address them and by fixing them, your site is greatly improved, resulting in a better customer experience. An optimized site also results in a better search position as compared to your competitors. In fact, SEO also impacts your paid media budget by reducing overall ad spend in the long run.
Website optimizations require larger upfront investments. However, once you’ve put the elbow grease in, you’ll find that maintaining and improving these performance optimizations become simpler tasks later.
Optimize for Website Content
At this later stage, you’ll likely have actionable results from all of your data analytics efforts. That means a deep understanding of your customers’ website habits, which can be used to identify enhancements for improving conversions. For example, your latest promotions may have experienced an increase in activity on the landing page. However, your sales are not increasing. Perhaps that’s an indication to use a more relevant call to action or the buyer journey is broken. Or you could uncover that customers leave after four seconds, indicating that some of your content may need to change.
Whatever insights you’ve uncovered will get your website one step closer to an optimal customer experience. Therefore, constantly challenge your website’s content and back up all potential enhancement decisions with data and insights.
The Bottom Line
At the advanced stage, you’ll realize that it’s mostly fine-tuning what you’ve already got. You’re not adding more complexity to your website. So long as you’ve got the right tools implemented, you’ll gain insights for improving your customers’ website experience. Connect with us today to discuss your website and optimize it for better conversions.
