How to Share a Website Fast on a WordPress Blog – 5 Steps
A few years ago, sharing websites would just mean sharing a link to the website you’re currently on. But now that we have SEO (search engine optimization) and content creators utilizing platforms like WordPress to build amazing online stores, sharing websites means much more than just linking to an external site.
When Google debuted their own app store, the Google Play Store, they made it clear that mobile websites would be rewarded more than iOS and Android apps. Why? Because people are accessing the web from anywhere at any time, and if your site isn’t mobile-friendly, they might leave without clicking through to your full site.
Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly
According to Google, mobile-friendliness is the key to getting a good ranking in the search engines. If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, then it’s like telling Google that you don’t care about your site being accessible on mobile devices. Sure, you might get the occasional user on a desktop computer, but for the most part, people are going to want to access your content on their mobile phones.
There are a few things you can do to make your site more mobile-friendly. The first step is to test your site on different devices. Does everything look the same on a large screen as it does on a small screen? Does the ordering process work well on mobile as it does on a desktop computer?
Optimize Your Site for Search Engines
If your site isn’t mobile-friendly and you want to be found online, then you need to start optimizing it for search engines. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a process of tweaking your site’s content and structuring to get the best possible search engine results. There are free tools like Google’s Search Console that can help you identify the elements of your site that work and don’t work when it comes to SEO. For instance,
If you think that videos help your SEO, then you should try recording video tutorials on your site and using keywords in the video titles and descriptions.
Try To Use As Few Clicks As Possible
If someone is accessing your site from a handheld device (e.g., mobile phone or tablet), then you need to make sure that they can easily find what they’re looking for with as few clicks as possible. Sometimes, a click can mean the difference between a visitor leaving your site or staying on it and making a purchase or taking up another offer. The fewer clicks a user has to make to get what they want, the more likely they are to stay on your site.
To reduce the number of clicks needed to get something done on your site, you can use JavaScript-enabled tools like Google’s Search Box.
Reduce The Number Of HTTP Requests
If you have a lot of JavaScript-enabled content on your site (e.g., video backgrounds, charts, or social media feeds), then you’re usually going to have a lot of HTTP requests. Every time someone clicks on a link or visits a page with an active element like a video or social media share, they’re going to leave a request in the sand. While you don’t want to eliminate all animation and active content from your site, you can reduce the number of requests by caching the content. For example, videos that are embedded on a page can be cached at the server level so that when a user requests that video, it will already be delivered from cache instead of being downloaded from the web server.
In addition to reducing HTTP requests, you can also reduce the number of cookies that people have to leave on their devices. For example, instead of people having to leave a google.com cookie when they’re on your site, you can set that cookie so that it only applies to the specific page they’re reading or viewing. This can be a privacy issue if you have a lot of pages on your site with active elements, but it’s also a performance issue if your site gets a lot of traffic and the extra cookies weigh it down.
Evaluate Your Site’s Performance
Once you start getting serious about SEO, you’ll want to track the results of your efforts. One of the best tools for doing this is Google Analytics. With Google Analytics, you can track all the traffic coming to your site and get detailed reports on how people are finding your content and whether or not they’re interacting with it. For example, did someone visit your site and immediately leave without making a purchase? Did someone click on an ad on your site and make a purchase? If so, you might want to reevaluate your strategy for getting in touch with potential customers.
Make Changes Based On What You Learn
After you launch your new SEO-optimized site, you’ll want to continue making changes and evaluating the results. Sometimes, simply making a few changes and rerunning the analysis can help you find the cause of poor results and help you fix it. Sometimes, you might even find that certain changes work better than others and need to be kept in place regardless of the outcome of your analysis. For example, if someone visits your site and takes up half your bandwidth without making a purchase, you might want to reduce the amount of content that they can view (e.g., by limiting the number of articles that they can read per page or hiding content behind a login screen).
With a little bit of effort, you can easily make your site mobile-friendly, optimize it for search engines, and avoid as many requests and cookies as possible. But like all things, it takes time to see results and you have to be patient.