How we can optimise your website
17 January 2013
We pride ourselves on building fast, functional websites that are easy to use and manage. A lot goes into this that isn't always obvious. Here are some examples of how we can, or have already, optimise your website against different criteria:
Speed
Fast page load times are important to keep visitors on your website, and are also a factor in Google's ranking algorithm. We use a variety of tools and techniques to make your website as fast as possible.
Firstly, all HTML, CSS and JavaScript files are automatically compressed using gzip for transmission. The CSS files are combined and minified on the server using the ModPagespeed Apache extension. JavaScript code is also minimised to save space.
Finally, we run a CDN using CloudFlare for shared resources in order to reduce lookup and download times.
Images
Images that make up your template are optimised and where there are small icons or backgrounds we converted them to a Data URI to reduce the number of requests. Any images you upload are also automatically resized and optimised.
Text-only browsing
It may seem old-fashioned, but if your website is not navigable using a text-only browser such as Lynx or W3M then it may be difficult not just for vision-impaired users, but also for search spiders to find and index all of your content.
Keyboard navigation
This includes assigning access/control keys to the main navigation menu, specifying a logical order for tab stops on links and form elements, and removing tab stops from images where it would create unnecessary duplicate links.
Mobile devices
Phones and tablets often have smaller or different shaped windows for browsing. Using responsive CSS media queries your website can reshape itself to fit into different devices and orientations.
Search engines
Our content management system and database modules generate clean, valid HTML, and much less than the typical blog or CMS, making pages faster to load and easier to index.
The CMS allows direct editing of the TITLE and META Description for editable pages and for database modules this text is either editable or generated automatically.
Further search engine optimisation requires a process which starts by selecting suitable keywords for your website based on your content as well as an analysis of search traffic in your target country and language. Contact us to get started.