So, you’ve got your DJ company’s website published live and looking pretty (hopefully). If you’ve been at any of my DJX seminars over the years, though, you’ve heard me discuss many times that simply having a well-designed website isn’t nearly enough.
Remember, the most important viewer you will ever have on your site is Google itself… and Google reads your website differently than a human being does. Simply put, it looks at the code in order to make a judgment on how well your site is running. Unfortunately, most small business websites don’t look pretty “under the hood,” and need to be fixed up before they even stand a chance of ranking properly.
First thing, you need to assess if your site needs a tune-up, and the best place to start that assessment is Site Speed. Here are a few tools you can use to get readings on how fast (or slow) your site pages are loading.
The results from these four tools might actually be different from source to source, as they each have their own ways of measuring site performance. Use them all, and get an overall feel as to which pages need help. There should be a general trend that you can see from using all the tools, which will give you a basis to make a decision on investing in a better performing website.
Once you decide to get an SEO Website Tune-Up done, here’s a Top-12 list on what to expect from your service provider:
- Content Delivery Network. Use one of these – it does help greatly. There are more than a few options out there, so shop around. The one we use is Cloudflare, which is quite famous, but not for the do-it-yourselfer. Whoever you hire for CDN should be top-notch; this is not the area to try and get the lowest price.
- Hosting – Note that Shared Hosting is notoriously bad (GoDaddy hosting comes to mind), with some of these shared hosting servers running up to 10,000 websites on a single server. Spending a little extra money on a better hosting provider can make all the difference in the world.
- Image Size Optimizations. People, please…. you must optimize your images for web performance before you upload them to your website. My friend Ross Akselrad from Pulse Entertainment in Philly always sends me these great hi-res photos that his photography division, Limelight & Tailor, takes at his events. But if I uploaded them as is to his website, it would just destroy his site load speed because of the sheer size of them! Make sure you reduce image sizes to no more than 1920 pixels wide, and reduce to 72dpi. Your website doesn’t need anything more than that. And, if you know what you’re doing, convert your image formats to WEBP, by all means.
- Plug-In Management. Don’t overload your website with plug-ins that you don’t need… or deactivate plug-ins on a per-page basis if they’re not needed on a particular page. Some of these plug-ins are bloated AF (yes, AF stands for what you think it stands for), and if they have to load on every page, that can really slow things down.
- Minification – This is another one where you need a pro to handle this task. Have you ever typed code into a WordPress section? You’ll most likely remember that there are a lot of empty spaces between your code lines – it’s something you would do so that you can actually read your own code properly. Well, those empty spaces still need to be read by the browser in question… and the more of them that there are, the longer it takes to load.
- Cache – When a lot of users might be using the same page at the same time, the server needs to render the page each time… which places extra load on the server. The process of caching saves a current copy of your page, so that it can load that same cached file every time… which speeds things up drastically. Note that website caching isn’t usually available on Shared Hosts – yet another reason for you to upgrade your hosting package.
- GZIP Compression. Zipping files up isn’t just for sending your DJs the latest MP3s that they’ll need for their gigs. It’s also for your website files, and can lead to faster load speeds when implemented.
- Database Optimization within the CMS. On WordPress sites, every plug-in you install adds more tables to the database, often slowing down the site speed (yet another reason to consider removing certain plug-ins). In the case of larger websites, running some database optimization processes is never a bad idea.
- Web Fonts Reduction. Although web fonts have become quite popular in the last few years, the fact is that they add extra pull requests from outside sources… which adds time for the page to load. Wherever possible, use WOFF2 fonts that are stored within your site itself, and avoid those extra http and https external requests.
- 404 Errors Find & Fix. Otherwise known as “dead links,” 404 errors are bad for a lot of reasons. Google doesn’t like them for ranking purposes, and your human users won’t like them at all… because they’re a pain in the ass! It’s not a hard thing to find links on your site that have 404s. Don’t be lazy – find and fix them ASAP.
- Redirects Reduction. Redirects are essential for notifying Google of 301s and 302s, of course, but they shouldn’t be used as a Band-Aid solution to fix bad UX/UI strategy. Redirects add time to your page load speed, plain and simple. Avoid them at all costs, unless you’re going to take an SEO penalty. Think your pageflow UX/UI out properly, and give your users a great organic experience.
- Prefetching – Basically, it’s a process of loading up a webpage in advance, before the user even clicks on the link to go to that page. Of course, this method requires anticipating what a user is actually going to do. Some logical thought will help you with that, though. For example, if a user goes to the Wedding page on your site, then it stands to reason that they might click on the button to go to either your Form page or your Contact page. Having both of these pages load up while the user is still surfing the Wedding page is worth implementing.
Whether you handle your own DJ website or have a trusted supplier handling your digital footprint, this list is worth keeping around for all of you. Make sure that the above aspects are addressed, and your site will load faster, leading to better rankings on Google, and customers that don’t get annoyed and go somewhere else!
Jordan St. Jacques is the President/Lead Digital Marketer at Digitera.Interactive in Ottawa, Ont., Canada.
