Once you’ve mastered the basics of good web design, your site is ready for additional enhancements. This is the second article of our “Your Website” series, where we break down a website into three stages of web development: the basics, intermediate, and advanced. In the intermediate stage, we focus on making your website sustainable. Below goes into details on how to do so.
Browser and Server-Side Caching’s Role in Web Design
If you aren’t familiar with caching, learn more about it here. At the very least, your site needs browser and server-side caching. This process can be complicated, but it will improve the overall customer experience. Your website will load quickly, which can improve your bounce rate.
For most CMS platforms like WordPress, you can find caching support through plugins. Plugins are not a one-size-fits-all. Have your web design team confirm which works best by testing it alongside your existing website workflow. A wrong plugin can cause your website to crash, so take extra precautions during implementation.
Website Analytics that Actually Gets Used
Another key tool for your website is analytics. With it, you can periodically benchmark your site performance against key metrics, such as page views, time on site, unique users, and traffic sources. Depending on your analytics strategy, your data analytics can be as sophisticated as needed. For instance, you may want to identify low-performing pages and breaks in the customer journey or the exact hotspots on a web page where customers hover their mouse.
Google Analytics is the gold standard for website analytics. It’s easy to use and implement for your web design team. Basic reporting is available, and more advanced reports can be built out. Google Analytics integrates with almost everything and is free to use!
Good Web Design Means Backing Up Your Website
We’ve noticed that many business websites skip backups, which is a big no-no. We recommend performing daily backups and keeping copies for up to a week, as well as monthly backups. This quick and cheap process provides great peace of mind.
One of the most frustrating yet common things is crashing your site after performing a routine update. Without a backup, your web design team is likely screwed and will need to invest a bunch of time and resources to rebuild your site. Not to mention, any data, including contact details, that you’ve been collecting is lost. And if you’ve got customers from paid media accessing your site who are ready to buy, you’ve lost them, too!
For most modern websites, backups should occur through a plugin and your hosting provider. We recommend having your web design team enforce backups at both levels for redundancy if one fails. With a backup, your site can be up and running in 5 – 10 minutes. Trust us, you only make this mistake once, and we wouldn’t wish this on your worst enemies. Don’t skip this step!
The Bottom Line / TLDR
After launching your basic website, the next step is to implement caching, analytics, and backups. These website enhancements are designed to keep your site running and provide a good customer journey. Contact Uplancer today to start taking your website to the next level!
