Building an effective website is essential for running any type of business; no matter what field you are in. Your company’s website is where customers interact with you most frequently: either through email correspondence or direct contact with the company itself via social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. 

While you may want to prioritize website attractiveness and functionality, it’s critical to also take into account SEO factors that contribute to your site’s visibility on search engine result pages (SERPs). After all, a beautiful website won’t benefit your business if your target customers are unable to find it.  

If you’re embarking on a new web development project, read on to learn 6 web development tips you should know to ensure an end-product that is effective and profitable.  

Get High-Quality Hosting 

Choosing a quality web host is an important decision which could affect the success or failure of your website. The hosting provider you choose plays a great role in ensuring a fast, reliable, and secure online storefront. Outages in this context can include slow page loading times or connection disruptions due to maintenance or server overloads. 

Choose a high-quality managed service provider that provides scalable hosting services that ensures availability and security. Some of the best web hosting providers in 2022 include BlueHost, SiteGround, Hostinger, and WPEngine.  

For businesses that expect a significant amount of traffic at any moment, it would be wise to avoid shared hosting setups as server resources such as processor and memory are divided among users this way, causing slow and buggy websites.  

Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) 

A Content Delivery Network or CDN consists of several servers distributed in different locations worldwide. Its function is to shorten the physical distance by serving the content from the nearest server to the user, improving the time it takes to complete requests made through a website.  

A few of the most trusted CDNs out today include Azure, Cloudflare, Fastly and Google Cloud. CDN service providers may vary in pricing, so it’s best to take a look at your budget and requirements before choosing one. More servers mean better performance but also higher pricing. If you’re on a budget, or if this is your first time implementing a CDN, you can opt for a service provider with less servers but have good coverage in locations where your customers are mostly located.  

Minimize HTTP Requests 

The fewer HTTP requests a website has to make, the faster the site can load. HTTP requests are made for elements such as embedded videos, external links, ads, and images. It is best to keep HTTP request density in mind when designing your website as too much of it can cause delays and ultimately turn visitors away. 

If you already have a website in place, you can use Google Chrome's Network Panel to check how many HTTP requests each of your website pages make, and what files are taking the longest to load. 

Optimize File Sizes 

A large volume of unoptimized images is usually the most common reason behind poor website performance. Files are not limited to images – other elements contributing to slow page speeds may include heavy JavaScript, CSS, and HTML code density.  

Optimizing file sizes makes sure all devices can access your content while using less memory on their systems or internet browsers. Keeping your files small improves page load times and makes your website more stable. In addition to reducing server load, minifying also makes development easier since you don’t need to watch for technical issues with large scripts. 

To ensure your website files are optimized, compress your files before you upload them to your website. You can also hop into your page builder and scale down images to adjust to modern screen resolutions. By combining compression with resizing, you can reduce image file sizes drastically and speed up your website simultaneously. 

Minify JavaScript, CSS, and HTML Files 

Minification is the process of minimizing code and markup in your web pages and script files. It’s one of the main methods used to reduce load times and bandwidth usage on websites. Minification dramatically improves site accessibility, directly translating into a better user experience.  

To minify JS, CSS and HTML files, comments and extra spaces need to be removed, as well as crunch variable names to minimize code and reduce file size. The minified file version provides the same functionality while reducing the bandwidth of network requests. 

Regularly Monitor Website Speed 

Page speed is arguably the SEO factor businesses should pay most attention to, because addressing loading times improves your rankings, the user experience you deliver, and ultimately, your conversion rate. A poor conversion rate usually translates to a website that needs improvement in many aspects. 

There are various online tools that your business can leverage to see how your website stacks up to SEO standards. While some of them are free, you may also want to invest in paid tools to monitor other factors and stay on top of Google’s ever-changing algorithm.  

One free tool to do this is Google PageSpeed Insights, which helps you find and fix issues slowing down your web application. It aggregates your website performance score based on various factors, and the scores are categorized into Good, Needs Improvement, or Poor. You can toggle between the desktop and mobile versions of the report, which is helpful when optimizing the user experience. Any score above 90 is considered good. However, it shouldn’t be the only performance testing tool in your repertoire. 

 
Wrapping Up 

NFT is an outsourcing service provider that can help businesses build a website and keep it updated and running. NFT has the expertise to design, develop and maintain websites using the latest technologies and best practices. 

If you have an idea to launch a website and you want to get a web design or web development project started, NFT can help. With NFT, you can get the help of experienced developers and designers right away and approach the web development process correctly.