Website Optimization

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What’s Website Optimization?

To put it simply, website is all about improving your website’s traffic, usability, and conversion rates. There are three types of website/search engine optimization (SEO): on-page, off-page, and technical optimization. My business focuses on technical optimization, which goes hand-in-hand with custom-coded websites.

What’s Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is all about improving various technical aspects of your website to make it easier for search engines to understand it. Key aspects to technical SEO include improving your website’s speed, mobile friendliness, and making it easy for search engines to crawl & understand.

What does a technically optimized website have?

It’s important that your small business has a well-optimized website so that it’s easy for search engines to understand and rank your content. Let’s go into some detail on what a technically optimized website looks like.

— 1. It’s fast

Let’s face it: we’ve all been in the situation where we’ve clicked on a website only for it to load extremely slow. According to a study done by Google, 53% of mobile users abandon sites that take over 3 seconds to load. It’s imperative that your small business’s website loads quickly so that your users don’t immediately abandon.

That’s where custom-coded websites come in. Since every website is built from the ground up specifically for your business, there’s no bloat. Website builders usually have bloat associated with them that bogs down loading times. Later down, I talk about some specific studies that highlight this.

— 2. It’s mobile friendly

In the early days of the internet, mobile friendliness was optional. In today’s world, it’s imperative your site functions on mobile, as 55% of website traffic comes from mobile devices. That means that a majority of your visitors will be on a phone, and if your site isn’t up to par, then you lose out on a potential customer.

— 3. It’s secure

Site security is expected nowadays, and a site without security is just asking to be hacked. It’s not just about ranking higher; your users expect your website to be secure. If you can’t make your website secure, how can your visitors expect your small business to handle anything important? It’s about branding as much as it is about ranking.

— 4. It’s easy for search engines to understand

It goes without saying, but making your website easily understandable by search engines plays a big role in a technically optimized website. Coding in meta tags such as a title and description allow a search engine to better understand your website.

Another important factor is your site structure. For example, take a look at the current URL of this page. You’ll notice how the current page (website-optimization) is underneath the services section. Having your website structured in this way allows search engines to better understand your site’s content and structure.

What’s the role of website builders vs. custom-coded websites?

Website builders often score poor marks for technical SEO compared to custom-coded websites.

— Website builders

Let’s talk about website builders and how they factor into Google’s Core Web Vitals metrics. A study comparing 400 websites from each of the top website builders shows disappointing results. Every website was scored based off of Google’s Core Web Vitals performance metric for desktop and mobile. On desktop, the study found that 11/12 website builers, on average, were in need of performance improvement. In addition, the study found that every single website builder, on average, needed performance improvement on mobile devices.

The study also found that on mobile, the average mobile loading time of all websites on every website builder tested was a whopping 11.48 seconds. According to a study, for every second delay in mobile page load, conversions can fall by up to 20%! Slow loading times lose your small business money.

— Custom-coded websites

Custom-coded websites generally perform quite well in technical SEO. This is because they’re built for your business with little to no bloat. In fact, I’m so confident in my custom-coded websites, that you can test any page on this website or my clients’ websites on Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool, which measures technical SEO. Green scores are marked as good. Simply visit https://pagespeed.web.dev/ and type in any of the pages I feature.

Read more: Google Core Vitals

Okay, let’s wrap it up

Website optimization has a few different types, with my business’s focus being technical SEO. Technical SEO is all about improving load speed, mobile friendliness, security, and structure so that search engines have an easier time understanding and ranking your website. Website builders often score poorly, with the average mobile page speed being more than 11 seconds. My business specializes in building fast, technically-optimized websites specifically for your small business.