Every relationship can use a little fresh spark sometimes. Especially around Valentine’s Day. And that includes the way your customers relate to your website.
Is your website fast, responsive, and tailored to your customers’ personal needs? Does it maintain an attractive appearance and prove a reliable partner, all while serving up the occasional pleasant surprise? Or have things gotten a little stale and routine over the years?
No worries, it’s never too late to change.
If you’re looking to add some sparkle right on time for Valentine’s Day, we’ve got you covered with the Ryte stuff. Here’s a list of five easy website performance fixes to make visitors fall in love all over again:
Nothing kills a vibe like having to wait. It’s no surprise that when a website needs more than 3 seconds to load, 40% of users run for the hills (bounce).
Out of all the strategies to increase page speed, ensuring fast load times for the biggest images at the top of your site is number one. Google calls it Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and wants it under 2.5 seconds. Don’t sleep on LCP, because it’s one of the Core Web Vitals that really matter for search engine optimization nowadays.
One of the biggest sources of frustration in a relationship is feeling ignored and unsupported. That’s what happens when a user tries to interact with your site, only to find it lagging or unresponsive to user input.
Google is tracking these delays under the metric First Input Delay (FID). Since long delays give the frustrating appearance of a ‘frozen’ site, Google wants to keep this metric super low, less than 100 milliseconds if possible.
If this problem only persists on mobile devices, it may be time to get a checkup to see if your site is mobile-friendly enough.
No more excuses! Get your site in shape and looking fresh by finally adopting those new image formats like WebP. While you’re at it, optimize your images for SEO to benefit from faster load times (see 1.) and better search rankings.
Beauty also shines from within, so clean your site under the hood. Start by setting your meta tags properly: title, description, alt. You can also give your site’s Schema markup a check with our Structured Data Helper to see if it needs a deep-tissue cleanse before your next date.
Nothing melts hearts like being able to say: “My website actually ranks #1 on Google searches!” What’s even more impressive, is appearing with a rich snippet containing a snazzy photo or video. Best of all, shoot for ruling the results page as the featured snippet card right at the very top.
In order to make a big splash on the SERPs, start by making sure that your website is properly indexable. Then follow our guide for standing out with rich snippets and implement structured data to win the featured snippet spot. Irresistible!
The number one ingredient for a long-term relationship? Trust! Earn it by always providing a secure connection. Keep it by maintaining a recognizable, stable look for your site, for instance by adding a coherent favicon to all pages.
Speaking of a stable look, customers are irritated when your site changes visual appearance during browsing, for instance via transform animations that rearrange paragraph flow. Google also measures this Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and will dock your search rank for a higher than 0.1-point shift in visual stability.
So always act like yourself, and never lead your partners astray into a 404 page. They might never come back…
Now, do you really need all these changes to make your site more desirable? Or will a few well-appointed fixes help you boost that search ranking and make browsing your site an unforgettable experience?
There’s only one way to find out!
Let’s start with a good, solid look in the mirror, asking: How attractive is my website? That’s what a Ryte website analysis is for! Even better, run the new Ryte Web Vitals report to measure six essential metrics (including three Core Web Vitals) based on performance scores from Lighthouse. These free reports offer a great foundation to start optimizing for Valentine’s Day. There’s still time!
Optimize your website with a free Ryte trial
Published on 02/14/2022 by Izzi Smith.
Izzi is Product Marketing Team Lead at Ryte, as well as a passionate WUX advocate that loves to support everyone in creating better websites for their visitors. Izzi regularly presents at Ryte’s webinars and industry conferences, where she enjoys sharing her expertise and memes. When she's not optimizing, you can find Izzi at one of Munich's beer gardens or playing video games.