Does your website have an SSL certificate?
Are you aware of the changes to the way non-secure sites are viewed in Google?
If you answered no to both of the above questions, then you need to get ready for changes being implemented by Google in 2017.
If your current website does not utilise an SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificate, you may not be aware that Google is moving towards making visitors of websites not running SSL certificates aware that the site is ‘non-secure’.
Users browsing the web using Google Chrome from January 2017 initially will begin seeing warnings when accessing any site that doesn’t contain an SSL certificate.
How does this affect me you might ask! – well potential customers could be less likely to view your site if they believe that the information that they are entering relating to personal information is not secure.
Do you want to run the risk of losing a potential customer to a competitor who has already made the change? Contact Enigma to discuss how we can help you with this transition.
Are there any other changes I can make to improve my search engine rankings?
The simple answer to this is ‘yes’
Other key aspects of your site that can have an affect on your search engine rankings and general site usability are;
1. Website Speed and the effects on SEO
If you publish a website, be it a blog, ecommerce store or other business site, it’s no surprise that nothing frustrates your customers more than a slow site. Not only will it put off potential buyers, but as Google improves its search algorithms you’re likely to see a negative impact on your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) if things aren’t optimised to run as efficiently as possible.
The search giant provides plenty of tools to help webmasters along the way to a happy SEO lifestyle, however understanding these tools can still be a minefield even for advanced users. At Enigma Creative we have first-hand experience, not only creating efficient websites across a multitude of business sectors, but ensuring each and every one runs as efficiently as possible and in line with the current best practice standards.
So what’s important in creating a lightning fast website to keep your customers coming back time and time again? Let’s take a look at some of the most important factors below.
i. Good hosting
Choosing a good host is probably the most important single thing when it comes to website speed. If your host is over-selling space on their servers, sometimes 1,000s per server, this means less resources (RAM, CPU etc.) for everyone and ultimately slow response times. If you’re serious about your website working for your business, do not be tempted by cheap or budget ‘shared’ hosting accounts. Enigma Creative can not only host your sites on up to date modern servers but we have the in-house knowledge to ensure your website is running on the platform as quickly as possible.
ii. Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network)
A CDN is a system whereby your website is cached on multiple servers, usually in different locations around the world. If you have visitors to your website from all over the world, generally due to latency, the further away the user is from your server, the slower your website will be for them. A CDN may have a server located nearer the user therefore decreasing the time taken to load your website.
iii. Optimise your Images
Long gone are the days of text only websites. Sites carry a vast amount of data and in the modern era need to visually appeal to your end users. Images can take up a small amount of room for something like a social icon, but for a slideshow or a photograph on a portfolio website, the images can be huge!
Having unnecessarily large images not only slows the loading time of your website down and frustrates potential customers, it can also very quickly eat up the bandwidth allowance and use up vital server resources. Optimising your images for the web can drastically reduce the size of the image without any noticeable quality drop, so why wouldn’t you do this?
2. Design for Mobile
There is a lot of talk in the industry regarding mobile first design. The concept is simple – start with the mobile platform and build up to the full capacity of a desktop solution, but why? In simple terms, although your smartphone is more powerful than that of the computers used to land Apollo 11 on the moon, it still harnesses less power than of your current desktop. So if we create a site that loads fast on the mobile, as well as one that loads fast on the desktop, we have a better chance of retaining our users and an improved chance of seeing them back time after time.
Above are just a few ways in which we help or clients improve their web presence, improving their customer retention and lead generation.
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