Over the past couple of months, I have been sharing more about my site and the inner workings of it. There is a lot that you should know about running a site and ensuring that it is well optimised and performing well. For context, I have been running this site for a very long time and for my full-time job, I work in marketing and run multiple e-commerce websites. I figured that in this post I would share with you guys five of the main things that I think you should do if you are looking to improve, optimise and advance your website.
Page load speed.
Recently, if I am ever advising people about what they can do to advance their site, I will always start with site speed. Over recent years, search engines put a lot of stock into how a site loads and will rank accordingly. To put it in its simplest form, if another site has similar content and is quicker, they are going to promote that over your own. Ensure that you do things to make your site quick, whether that is removing dead pages, reducing images sizes, etc.
Mobile friendliness.
My site was designed solely for use on a browsing window. Not on phone or tablet. However, after looking through analytics, it is easy to see that traffic these days doesn’t come from just one source as it perhaps did a decade ago. Because of that, I have had to work hard to ensure that my site not only looks good on mobile, but that all of the same standard functionality works on mobile.
SEO.
If you have read my blog advice posts before, you will be very aware about how I bang on about SEO. For me, anybody that is looking to improve or advance their site, needs to consider SEO and make some changes. This means distinguishing your keywords, implementing them on the site, adding relevant backlinks, structured data, meta descriptions and so much more. SEO can be a momentous task, but it is one that is so rewarding when it is done efficiently.
Content quality.
Nowadays, it is fairly easy to create new content. There are even tools online that can create the content for you, including the likes of Chat GPT. However, you will never see a greater benefit to your site than creating quality content that people want to read and engage with. Ensure that you are creating that high quality material and people will come back to you. It is common sense, but sometimes that needs to be spelt out clearly for people to understand. Ensure that you still align with your content and optimise it accordingly.
404 and errors.
This could be grouped into the SEO line above; however, I think it is worth its own mention. As I have shared before, I have run this site for a very long time. Because of that, there has been the odd site error that has cropped up over the years and my site has flagged a 404 error. If you leave 404’s or errors on your site, it can tell search engines that are ranking your pages that you aren’t actively trying to rectify wrongs with your site and therefore, it will not promote you highly.
