The 10 Don’ts
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The 10 Do’s
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1. Don’t
overload your home page with all your best content.
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1. Do
aim to spread rich (heavy) media like videos and image sliders across all pages instead.
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2. Don’t
add a ‘smart reviews widget’ to your footer that needs to send off for the latest ‘reviews & ratings’ data across the web. It’s likely to blow the speed on every page.
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2. Do
add a ‘smart reviews widget’ on the main body of your contact page to drive new customer conversion, or on a dedicated ‘reviews’ page instead.
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3. Don’t
embed a Google Map on your footer. Think twice, even if you’re a destination business. It’s famously ‘heavy’ content and will negatively impact speed on every page.
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3. Do
host a Google Map on the main body of your contact page instead and add a helpful link on your website footer, so it’s easy for visitors to navigate to it.
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4. Don’t
feature rich (heavy) media like videos above-the-fold (top of the page, before you scroll down). Or you risk ‘slow loading’ pages and content ‘buffering’.
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4. Do
feature rich media like videos lower down the page instead to improve page load speed, limit annoying buffering, and limit website bounce rate
.
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5. Don’t
embed a social media feed on the footer or in fact anywhere on a page unless
it’s highly relevant, topical and engaging. It continually scans your social platform for updates in order to stream the latest content, so slows your site down.
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5. Do
add a link to all your social media channels along with Call-to-Actions (CTAs), promoting compelling reasons for customers to visit and engage with you on your social platforms instead.
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6. Don’t
fall for the ‘style over function’ trap. Auto-play videos, live feeds and content flying in from different directions may look whizzy, but all these elements can negatively impact speed.
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6. Do
try to limit the amount of ‘dynamic content’ on pages. Give your visitors the information they want as fast as possible, rather than delay that with “sexy design” features.
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7. Don’t
feature too many image sliders, image ‘feeds’ or gallery widgets on a single page or you risk pages loading slowly.
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7. Do
try to limit the overall number of images on pages. In most cases, one great picture trumps 10 average pictures for the best user experience (UX).
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8. Don’t
forget to optimise images in a web-friendly format
before
you upload them to your website, including
images on your blog posts.
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8. Do
set out to optimise any existing images on your site over 1mb in size to improve mobile speed optimisation.
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9.
Don’t
delete rich media like videos from the mobile version of your site in an effort to pass mobile speed tests. This is a negative ranking factor.
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9. Do
what Google recommends: aim to deliver the same rich user experience (UX) to mobile users as desktop users. Host videos in ‘light boxes’
to help alleviate speed issues instead.
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10. Don’t
forget to enable lazy loading
so content renders as visitors scroll down the page (instead of ‘all at once’ when they first click on the page). Many website platforms now have this functionality built-in, so it’s just a case of locating and enabling it.
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10. Do
note that if your website builder platform doesn’t have lazy loading built in, you can always download a lazy loading app like this one for WordPress
, so you don’t need to venture into the realms of coding.
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