In our hyper-digitalised day and age, a website needs to be engaging, interactive, and easily navigable – with a high level of technical performance, capability, and usability – to provide website visitors with the best, most positive user experience and site impression.
Site performance, technical capability, and level of interactivity are particularly important to website visitors when they click on, navigate and engage with a website’s pages and internal links, as well as when they view and interact with the website’s page content – whether it be written copy, visual images (both static and animated), and videos and gifs, or other on-page website media. Importantly, to fully maximise your site’s performance and usability, there are 7 crucial steps you need to follow to ensure that your website is performing to its optimal technical capacity. These steps are all outlined in this article, so just read on to learn more.
1. Build Your Website Using a Quality CMS Web Development Platform
A CMS, also known as a Content Management System, is a web development computer software that is utilised to build, develop and maintain websites and their content. There are many CMS development platforms to choose from to build your website – including WordPress, Shopify, Joomla, and Magento, to name just a few – and choosing the best CMS for your website build can be overwhelming.
As such, it is advisable to engage the services of a web development agency in Melbourne to assist with making this difficult decision for you. By doing this, you can ensure that you are receiving expert advice on the best CMS choice for you, and of course, the agency will also build your website for you utilising your chosen CMS web development platform.
It is important to note that a good web development agency will always recommend the best CMS that is suited specifically to your website’s purposes. For example, if you are building your website to create an online eCommerce store, the agency will likely recommend a CMS such as Shopify. For more complicated or involved websites with a high level of interactivity required, Magenta or WordPress may be recommended instead.
2. Meet Search Engine Optimised Technical Criteria and Specifications
Needless to say, there is no point in building a website without also considering whether it is being optimised for SEO. Search Engine Optimisation, as SEO is also known, involves the process of optimising a website to ensure it is ranked preferentially by a website. This includes ensuring that the website meets technical specifications per the criteria a search engine such as Google or Bing prefers.
Often referred to as Technical SEO, optimising the technical characteristics of a website for SEO purposes focuses on improving specifications such as page loading speed, internal link navigability, and general usability of a website. Each of these elements will of course improve your site’s performance, as well as optimise it for SEO purposes to maximise your ranking and visibility in search engine results pages – in turn increasing your website traffic and audience reach. Read on as we go into each of these technical specifications in further detail.
3. Improve Page Loading Speed
Page Loading Speed, also referred to as Page Load Time, is one of the most important factors determining a website’s ranking in search engine results pages. For Page Load Time to be considered optimal, it is recommended that your website landing pages load in less than 1 second overall.
4. Improve Internal Link Navigability
Similarly, internal link navigability is also considered by search engines when indexing and ranking your website. For instance, the ‘crawlability’ of your website – that is to say, how easy it is for a search engine to navigate – will heavily influence how highly your website is ranked within search engine results pages.
5. Improve Website Interactivity
Website interactivity is based on several factors, including how engaging your website is to audiences. Consider using both static and animated images on your site to increase the level of audience engagement with your website. You may also wish to incorporate special effects such as moving banners, sliders, headers, and footers to maximise interest when site visitors are viewing your site.
6. Foster a Positive User Experience
User Experience, or UX, is one of the most crucial elements which defines how site users engage and interact with your website. For the best UX, a superior UI or User Interface – the online space website users interact and engage with – should be used.
7. Determine, Identify, and Target Your Website Audience
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, ascertain who your website audience will be, and tailor your website content to them. For example, if you’re aiming for a corporate audience, you will want your website to appear seamless, clean, minimalistic, and professional. For younger site visitors, you may wish your site to be more interactive, and for the website content to include animation and special effects.
