Why You Should Care About Page-Speed

The loading speed of your website is one of the most important factors Google considers while ranking. Although this wasn’t so a couple years ago, the significance of site speed (how quickly your website loads in your browser or mobile device) has been growing rapidly with time. A slow website would mean slower crawling rate and hence the speed at which Google will index the pages of your site will also be slow. Research shows that people don’t like to read on slow sites or even buy from them. It is a faster website that enhances the user experience. Therefore, if you want to boost traffic to your website in an organic way and reach higher rankings, you will have to increase the speed of your pages load on your website. A fast site is a user friendly site.

Site Speed Tools

First thing you need to do before you increase the speed of your site is check its speed using one of the site speed tools below. Checking from different locations might give you different results, which is why all speed tools may not give you identical results. Therefore, it is better to try out a couple of the tools given below, without relying on just one of them.

Google Page Speed Insights

This tool helps you to measure the performance of your website on desktop devices as well as mobile devices. A PageSpeed score of 85 or more should tell you that your page has been performing extremely well. Since network connection affects the site speed, this tool tests only those aspects of your page that are network-independent namely the server configuration, JavaScript, CSS and the HTML structure of your page. If you have a low scoring site it will show up in red. To get in the orange color.

Pingdom Tools

Apart from providing you with the load time of your website, Pingdom also gives you a performance grade that it calculates based on various factors. It monitors your website continuously, checking its speed, uptime and performance at a nominal charge per month.

Yslow

This is a free tool that you can use to find out the performance grade of any website that you may visit. It has about twenty performance grades that it uses to rate websites. Also, you can even take advantage of some free advice on how to improve the performance and speed of your website. You will love the way this tool breaks down the details.

WebPageTest

WebPagetest gives you the load time of your website and also grades it based on its performance. There are about six different performance grades it gives based on a variety of factors. It also gives you a few suggested changes that you can work on in order to improve the speed of your website. The option to select the country from which you want to run your test makes it easier to find out how your website performs in different places of the world.

Once you test your websites on all these tools, you will be able to get a complete overview of the way in which your site performs.

Plugins for site Speed

One more way to speed up your site is to install a caching plugin. A few good ones below include:

WP Super Cache

This is an excellent plugin which does exactly what it is supposed to do – cache your site.

WP Rocket

This provides a solution to increase the speed of your site minus risks and hassles. Although this is a better plugin, you have to pay for this as against WP Super Cache that comes absolutely free.

W3 Total Cache

This is also a good plugin to cache your site and increase its speed. However, it may not work for everyone. This is the top of the line tool and has may options. To many for the less experienced but once nicely tuned in will make your site load very quickly. It is capable of improving a score from 50 a 80 or more.

Suggestions to improve Site Speed

Apart from using a site speed tool and installing a caching plugin, there are many other things that you can do to increase the speed of your website. These include:

• Moving to another hosting service (You get what you pay for)
• Minifying JavaScript and CSS(This takes some experience so be careful)
• Optimizing the images on your site (oversized images are extremely bad for load speed)
• Minimizing HTTP requests (Less files is faster)
• Enabling the option to compress your web page (Browser caching and server caching)
• Using a CDN (Cloud Flare is very easy to setup)
• Optimizing your CSS delivery (This takes some experience so be careful)

Doing a bit of research might help you come up with many other solutions to increase the speed of your website. Although this might take a bit of your time and efforts it is very much worthwhile to hire a professional.

How to Promote Your Business Prior to Launching Your Website

Competition is so tough these days that marketers are not even waiting for the website to go live before starting their marketing blitzkrieg. And we simply can’t blame the marketers given the fact that it takes really long time to design and develop a website and to make it live on the web. First we have to plan it out in plain pen and paper, and then do some wire framing, making changes in the PSD template, editing the HTML files and so on. It is a time consuming process.

So, what are you going to do? Nobody likes the idea of paying online marketers for doing nothing till the website gets live. Believe us, you don’t have to. There is something you can do to promote your business online even if the website is not ready. Just design and develop a Coming Soon page for your website.

Coming Soon page is far better than featuring a blank page or a generic template developed by your web hosting company. The good thing about this Coming Soon page is that it does not take long time to design and develop. The idea behind this is very simple – creating a buzz for the brand even before the website gets live on the web. The purpose of a Coming Soon Page is to give the users some clues as to what to expect when the final version of the website gets live. It encourages the audience to interact with your brand and to become a subscriber just to get to know what the website has in store for them.

Some websites use Coming Soon page to encourage people to be a part of its beta program but in majority of cases, companies add a ‘Subscribe’ button so that people can be notified when the final version of the website gets launched.

Now, there are few factors that you need to take into consideration before you start designing a Coming Soon page for your website. Allow us explain them to you –

Focus On Brand

Since your website is in development stage, we can assume that you have some elements of the design ready or at least are agreed upon. For example, if the logo is ready or if the designer has selected a color scheme for the final design, you can start building something around it. Use the color scheme, logo or the font type while creating the Coming Soon page. This will help you make people familiar with the brand. When the final version will go live, this familiarity will help people relate the new design with the design of the Coming Soon page. This will give your marketing campaign a huge fillip.

Curiosity

You want people to talk about your brand right? Of course you want but making people talk about your brand is a tough thing to achieve. However, this is not an impossible feat by any means. You just need to add some elements of curiosity in the design of the Coming Soon page that will make people think about it or at least talk about it. For example, if you are trying to sell a new washing machine via your website, a message like this – ‘Tired of washing cloth? We have Something Revolutionary for You. Sign up to get notified. ‘A simple and intriguing message like this is enough to make people feel curious about your brand.

Give Them Some Hints

When people land on the Coming Soon Page, you need to give them some sorts of hints about the upcoming product or the project. Just using a gorgeous background image with some random texts like – ‘This is a Coming Soon Page’ is not going to help the people understand what the page is all about. Why should they care about a page that does not give any information about the upcoming website? They will simply ignore it and you should not let this happen. However, we are not asking you to spill the beans but you need to give them some sort of information otherwise they might not feel interested about the Coming Soon page. Like for example, if you are launching a new book, you might consider adding some paras of it to generate interest of the people.

Keep Them Updated

People will not be visiting the Coming Soon page every day and that means, you need add a Subscribe button that will allow people to get updates about the product or the website. However, there are no fixed rules as to how many times you need to send emails to keep them updated. Maybe sending one or two mails before the final version of the website gets live is a good idea. Don’t push it too hard. Just keep it simple.

Don’t Forget the SEO

It is fact that Coming Soon pages are not likely to rank high as they don’t contain much information. But that should not stop you from making the Coming Soon page a bit search engine friendly. Make sure that you have included Meta data and the also make sure that you have not blocked anything via robots.txt file. Don’t stuff too many keywords in the page because search engines would consider that an attempt to inflate the ranking of the website artificially and therefore, it can get penalized.

So, these are some aspects of Coming Soon Page design that you need to remain aware of.

Distributed by PX Media

Media Contact

Company Name: PX Media
Contact Person: Douglas
Email: douglas@pxmediainc.com
Phone: (626) 390-1082
City: Pasadena
State: CA

Website: www.pxmediainc.com