Speeding up the website is one of the biggest keys to increased sales and conversions. Our Nashville web design team has seen increased conversions time and time again once the site starts humming. Studies from Google and other major analytics companies back up the statistics that conversions help create more sales and a better user experience. Yet, many businesses still operate with slow websites. Today we want to introduce the Optimize Package and change that.
As a Nashville web design team that works with companies all over the country, we’ve seen slow websites in every industry and every company size. The Optimize Package was designed just for this. It helps speed up the website, improves the customer experience, and helps earn higher rankings in search engine results. It’s offered as an ongoing package because it’s tested month after month and tuned where necessary. We want to make sure each website that uses it gets lasting results.
How does the Optimize Package work?
When a customer needs a faster website, our Nashville web design team begins to implement the Optimize Package. It starts with an analysis of the website to best understand why it’s running slow. This includes running multiple speed tests, looking over the site’s assets and resources, checking the plugins or extensions used to build it, and looking for slow queries against the database. While all websites need a solid caching mechanism, it’s not always enough to get the website running as quickly as it needs to be. Best practices aren’t always followed when a website is built for many reasons. Our job isn’t to fault the development team but to help fix the problem.
After a thorough analysis, our Nashville web design team begins implementing the improvements. It starts with taking care of the things we find, such as removing or substituting inefficient plugins, fixing slow database queries, and improving the size of images to be optimized for the web browser. Next, we make sure the cache is as finely tuned as possible without breaking the website. This greatly reduces the load it takes for the server to display the website to a customer. Some unnecessary code is removed to further secure the website. Finally, we’ll add a CDN to offload some of the website’s assets to speed up the time it takes for the browser to load and display it to the customer.
At this point, a well-trained eye will notice there is nothing groundbreaking about the steps taken thus far. Our team is not reinventing the wheel or adding some magic potion that is only known to us. However, having a good understanding of website load times, server optimization, and background analyzing code allows us to make improvements that basic website developers cannot do. In fact, most of the issues that slow the websites down drastically are due to the way the website has been designed. Using a page builder that has inefficient queries and outputs poor code results in a slow site. Coincidentially, a caching plugin will only go so far in cleaning up the mess.
Several alternatives to the Optimize Package exist and we want to go through them with you. Learning how to make improvements to a website gives a business the ability to understand what goes into optimizing it and a choice as to whether having someone else implement the Optimize package is valuable or not. Our best guess is yes, as we’ve sold many and improved the site speed time and time again. Here you can find some ideas if you wish to either do it yourself or just to better understand what goes into it.
A thorough audit starts with the plugins or extensions. For the sake of this article, let’s stick to WordPress plugins because it is easier to offer an explanation and requires less complex development. Go through each plugin and make sure it is up to date. Look at the way it is maintained and ensure it is still on the marketplace and is supported. Ensure it has adequate reviews and that they are five-star. If not check the one and two star reviews to see if there are reported page slowness or if it is just design complaints. Check if the plugin is set up and being used or if it can be removed. Also, check the purpose of the plugin, as often it is not even needed and simple code will suffice. Finally, check the server logs to see if the plugins are creating warnings, notices, or errors that indicate they can be removed or should be resolved.
Next, use a plugin like Query Monitor to see if errors and slow queries exist. In the interest of time, we can’t go into all the specifics here but if you download the plugin and poke around on the website you can use the debug bar to look for errors. Since there are many options for errors, we can’t elaborate on how to fix them but you must do so. This will go a long way to speeding up the website. Don’t forget to disable and remove the plugin afterwards.
Finally, optimize your website cache and add a content delivery network (CDN). Using a plugin like W3 Total Cache or WP-Rocket, you can reduce your image sizes, format them in a way that works best for the browser, combine some of the assets, and lazy load images to defer loading until the visitor’s scrolls through the site. By itself, this will speed up your website, however, we’ve seen this take the Google page speed score up only 20-30 points out of the necessary 100. To get the maximum benefit, you must be caching optimized code.
The downsides to these solutions are the frequency they must be done and maintained. Every time there is a change on the website, the cache must be cleared and rebuilt. The quality of the code needs to be assessed and the slow query check needs to be run. When code changes using a third-party tool, it needs to be audited to ensure that it’s not slowing the site down. The main problem with this is when designers and marketers make changes, they don’t have this capability. Over time, or even very quickly, a website can slow down or errors can occur that are hidden from someone who doesn’t know how to look for them.
In conclusion, the Optimize Package will speed up your website and give you higher conversion rates and a better customer experience. You have the option to speed up the website yourself but it often doesn’t make sense. We offer a free consultation to discuss it further and a risk-free guarantee or your money back.