How to boost performance with website optimisation

One of the most crucial tasks for website operators is to make sure a visitor’s experience on their site runs as smoothly as possible. When optimising a website, it’s important to consider improving both technical and content-related aspects.

What is website optimisation?

The term website optimisation covers various SEO measures that website operators can take to improve the experience for their website visitors. The various goals depend on the purpose of the site, such as increasing visitor time on your website or increasing the number of purchases.

Content optimisation

Content is of course an important factor for every website. Interesting content ensures that readers spend more time on your website and will continue to come back.

Tip 1: Find keywords and integrate them

When performing search engine optimisation for your website, you should define some keywords that visitors could use to find your site. Special keyword tools can help you with your research. Once you have selected the appropriate keywords for which your website should rank, the next step is to adapt your website’s content to these keywords, for example by using the keywords in headings or in the body of texts.

Tip 2: Content quality

An important factor in website optimisation is, of course, the quality of the content on your website. While keywords are essential, they shouldn’t be the sole focus when creating content. It’s equally critical to organise your content logically, incorporate interactive content, and ensure everything is presented well. Don’t repeat content and avoid duplicate content within your content strategy.

Be aware that not as many people use their home PCs to surf the internet anymore and prefer to use mobile devices instead. As a result, it is important to optimise content for this target group. The rule here is ‘less is more’. Avoid long sentences and complicated descriptions. Instead, use bullet points and subheadings when optimising your website for mobile devices.

Tip 3: Navigation

The structure of website navigation is a crucial aspect of user experience design, which plays a central role in an optimised website. Make sure that visitors can easily find their way around and do not have to spend a long time searching for the content they’re looking for. You can use responsive navigation to ensure that your website also works on mobile devices.

Technical operation

Undertaking a variety of technical improvements is crucial, both for enhancing search engine performance and improving the user experience. These adjustments are designed for website optimisation, to speed up your website or to make it easier for search engines to index your website.

Tip 4: Metadata

The metadata is the first thing potential website visitors notice when your website is displayed in the search results. It should therefore be formulated in an inviting and concise way to entice users to click on your website. The following points in particular should be taken into account when writing optimal metadata:

• Length: Make sure that your meta title is between 50 and 60 characters long. An optimal meta description should not exceed 150 characters.
• Keywords: If possible, include important keywords in the metadata.

For meta search engines or local search scripts, it’s important to consider not just metadata that can be read by humans but also other meta tags.

Tip 5: Mobile optimisation

Not only the content, but also the design of your website should be adapted to accommodate users visiting from mobile devices. Website optimisation for mobile devices can include responsive web design or even the mobile-first approach, which ensures that your website looks appealing on any device and is intuitive to use.

Tip 6: Improve page speed

It is crucial that your website’s content loads quickly. If loading times are too long, you will unnecessarily lose many potential customers. You can test your current website speed with free website speed tests such as Google PageSpeed Insights or with the IONOS Website Checker.

Keep the following points in mind when improving your website’s speed:

• Hosting: Ensure you have sufficient bandwidth to manage all requests from users. If your services are mainly intended for the local market, opt for a server within the country. However, if your aim is to reach an international target group, consider using a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
• HTML, CSS and JavaScript: The more code that has to be read and converted, the longer it takes to load your website. Therefore, use separate files for CSS and JavaScript and compress your code. The programming technique WebAssembly can also be used.
• Images and external content: Each image or photo added increases the loading time of the website. Therefore, make sure to load as few elements as possible from external pages and compress images using tools. SVG (scalable vector graphics) icons or the efficient image format WebP also have a positive effect on the loading time.
• Caching: Use the visitor’s browser, a reverse proxy server or cache software such as memcached to serve as a cache.

Tip 7: Crawling

Web crawlers are used to automatically analyse a website’s content. This is relevant for indexing, among other things. You can facilitate the crawling process for search engines by modifying your website’s sitemap. Additionally, it’s important to generate a robots.txt file for your website and include all the subpages that you wish to be crawled in this file. Make sure you keep the file up to date if your website structure changes.

Tip 8: Speaking URLs

How important URLs are for SEO should not be underestimated either. With the help of descriptive URLs, you not only give your website visitors an overview of how your website is structured, but search engines also benefit from speaking URLs. This is because they provide information about the website’s directory structure. If keywords are included in the URL, speaking URLs can also have a positive effect on the keyword ranking.