The cooling temperatures are a good reminder that winter is right around the corner. As a business owner, it’s a good time to look ahead before the holiday rush descends. Winter can be an exciting season for businesses owners for a couple reasons. First, people tend to spend more time indoors, so if you have an online component to your business, that may translate into more traffic to your website. Second, the holidays can trigger an explosion of sales.
(Pixabay / ImageDragon)
In preparation for winter, make sure your website is ready by taking a few important steps:
Analyze Website Performance
A website that does not load well cannot expect improved sales, especially during the holiday season. Potential customers will be turned off by a web page that opens in slow motion or with blurred product pictures. As a result, they’ll quickly move on to the next site.
Analyzing your website speed and figuring out how to make it faster is good preparation for the upcoming holiday season. GTmetrix can give website owners an idea of how well their pages load and, at the same time, provide recommendations on how to optimize them. GTmetrix provides a full assessment of a website’s performance, determining if there are bottlenecks and where they are occurring.
W3C Compliance
Website can see big gains by complying with code standards set up by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international community that maintains the protocols that support growth of the Web. A website’s code, both HTML and CSS, can load quicker and more efficiently across varying devices if it complies with W3C standards.
Optimizing Images
A common problem among websites is slow-loading images, including thumbnails. Slow-loading images will have a negative impact on a website’s rankings, which can also result in hemorrhaging potential customers. The use of image optimization plugins, such as WP Smush for WordPress and a host of other plugins could solve this problem, driving up rankings and sales.