Have you ever wondered why every business, no matter what scale, runs or owns a website nowadays? Recently, I came across a website that caters to shoe repair services and it is unusual considering that how mundane tasks like shoe repair are turning into full-blown businesses with the aid of their online presence; mainly, via their websites.
Can we deny how the Internet is taking over our lives, impacting the way we live and work immensely? Today, our routine is run by a trail of web applications and websites that aid in smoothly accomplishing a varied range of tasks both at home and workplace.
In fact, after the advent of social media, the World Wide Web has become the one-stop shop for anything and everything you need. Whether you want some entertainment or are running out of groceries, you can find a plethora of websites and web applications that can even run on your smartphones to expeditiously meet and greet everyday needs. The digital world we live in is rapidly becoming an agglomeration of websites, online platforms, and web applications designed to make our lives more convenient.
As discussed afore, you must have noticed that organizations are increasingly opting for websites instead of staying offline. The reason behind this change is the growing number of net-savvy target audiences. Whether a business’s target audience is children or professionals, the key to communicate with potential customers in a better way is consistently maintaining and updating a website as per the changing trends and algorithms of search engines like Google.
Amidst growing competition, the only way to thrive is by maintaining your business’s online presence and that can be surely achieved via a strategically designed website. It can be rightly said that in the current scenario, your business’s online presence can make or break your business.
What will you do if you ever come across a website that isn’t pleasant to look at or is hard to navigate? The answer to this is obviously switching to the website of a competing business. Why will anyone care to spend even a second on undecipherable webpages? This is exactly why UX is deemed as the ultimate battleground for commercial websites, considering that a memorable viewing experience can help convert visitors into customers.
The average selective attention span of healthy adults and teenagers is 10 to 20 minutes but when it comes to a webpage the timespan amounts to merely 12 seconds. Within these seconds, a webpage should, in terms of design and content, be capable of grabbing and holding the visitor’s attention or it will fail to fulfill its purpose. A visitor will scan the contents of a page on your website and will form a perception about your organization within seconds. This is the reason why User Experience is treated as a crucial factor when it comes to deciding the success of a website.
Website performance optimization can rapidly transform any website into a highly impactful version that is capable of not just enhancing visitor rate but also aid in lead generation. The visitors of your website often turn out to be potential customers, which is the reason why optimization is considered highly remunerative for businesses.
Optimization reduces the loading time and enables smooth navigation, helping visitors easily go through the content and develop a better understanding. Cluttered webpages often take a lot of time in loading the text and images. This can often be irritating for the visitor, who has to wait for a long time to get the information he intends to achieve by visiting your business’s website. In fact, he might even feel compelled to close the tab and visit the site of a competing business. So, optimizing your website via various techniques is essential, a few of which are explained hereinafter.
The codes that become the base of a website’s framework such as HTML and JavaScript affect the loading time of its pages. The more elaborate a website is, the more are the codes involved that subsequently affect the overall operation, causing an increment in the loading time. To alleviate this issue, file compression is deployed; this process can compress files by as much as 80%, thereby massively enhancing the responsiveness of the site and reducing the loading time.
The performance of a website can be massively influenced by the discrepancies caused by the inaccurate interpretation by network elements of codes written by developers. In this aspect, code minification can immensely help by removing the crunch variable names, comments, and extra spaces.
Heavy image files massively affect the performance of a website, which is why image optimization is a crucial part of business process services like website performance management. To accomplish the same tools like JPEGmini, TinyPNG, and Kraken.io are deployed in order to reduce image size whilst maintaining quality.
The vector graphics on your website also have implications over the site’s performance. This is the reason why replacing vector graphics with raster graphics that are resolution-independent is recommended. In fact, as per experts, this resolution is best suited for both plain geometric patterns and images.
Adapting to cloud-based monitoring, which runs on Cloud Software as a Service (SaaS), is also a great way to enhance the performance of your website. Offloading your website to managed cloud hosting offers benefits like cost-saving, efficiency as well as scalability.
Restricting HTTP AKA Hotline to prevent anyone from embedding the assets of your website on their site is also a great step to enhance the overall performance. In this process, the bandwidth is protected via prohibition issued to other sites from displaying your website images.
The database of your website should be highly optimized for performance enhancement. Tasks like index creation for quicker access and removal of futile tables and content can immensely aid in database optimization, thereby boosting the website’s performance.
These are just a few of the ways to enhance the performance of your website for better user experience. By adapting to them your business can benefit in endless ways. These measures aid in smooth navigation through the pages of a website, which is essential to hold on to the attention of visitors who can often be converted into potential leads.
For survival amidst the stiff competition presented in different domains, it is vital that commercial organizations consistently work on improving their digital presence. Whether it’s a website or a social media page, how presentable and inviting it appears to the visitors is what matters the most. You cannot just dump content and graphics on a website to generate the intended traffic and profit; to make the most out of it, you need to strategically modify it as per your target audience.
The efforts put in designing the structure and picking elements like the content of a commercial website, reflect in its success and growing viewership.
Today, businesses are increasingly availing business process services for optimizing their websites to create an impactful user experience. This trend is here to stay, considering the changing dynamics of the business world and rising competition.