Technical‌ ‌optimization‌ ‌website:‌ ‌secrets‌ ‌and‌ ‌tactics‌

Often, the requirements of technical optimization are already laid down in the design and creation of sites. But, since the market is dynamic, the technical expertise of the resource should be carried out regularly, and if the characteristics of the site do not meet modern requirements, the resource should be subject to optimization and refactoring. Technical optimization of the site – these are activities aimed at improving the quality characteristics of the resource, such as: download speed, page indexing quality, identifying and correcting errors in the site.

Let’s make an approximate list of tasks for the technical optimization of the site:

• Server performance analysis
• Studying page loading speed
• Website optimization for mobile devices
• Checking the quality of page indexing by search engines

Server performance analysis

The server is the engine of your resource and whether all your initiatives to promote the site will be successful or not depends on the quality of its work. Based on the current requirements for the project, the appropriate hosting should be selected for hosting the server. In case of increased requirements, the site should be hosted on a VDS (VPS) or a server deployed using cloud technologies, such as: AWS, Google Cloud or Azure from Microsoft. How do you know how fast your server meets modern requirements? Here are some criteria:

• Time to first byte received
• The dependence of the speed of work on the load
• Reliability

The time to first byte (TTFB) is the speed at which your server responds to a user request. In essence, this is the time interval between the sent HTTP request and the first received byte of the page.

You should not expect good results if you deployed a website hosted in Cape Town, and your target audience is in California. If your hosting and your target audience are located in the same location, and the speed to the first byte is still inferior to competitors, you should carefully analyze the implementation of the server part of the project. Moreover, this applies both directly to the stable and high-quality operation of the server, and to the technology stack and directly to the implementation of the back-end.

The dependence of the site speed on the load shows how much the number of active users affects the speed of your resource. If your site is sensitive to the number of users, the server part is subject to immediate and thorough analysis.

Reliability measures how often your site is unavailable to users. If your site periodically “lays down”, you should definitely review the technical characteristics of your server and, possibly, change hosting.

Studying page loading speed

Page loading speed (page rendering speed) coupled with the time to the first byte make up the speed of your site. Only if TTFB is a measure of the performance of the backend, then page load indicators are more likely to characterize the implementation of the frontend of your project. You can check how fast your site’s pages are rendering using the PageSpeed Insights service.

When analyzing page loading speed, you should first of all pay attention to code implementation, element rendering order, DOM model sizes, content format and sizes.

Website optimization for mobile devices

Considering that currently most of the traffic comes from mobile devices, mobile website optimization is a must have! And this applies both to the speed of rendering content on the screens of mobile devices, and directly to the correct display of pages.

You can check how your site meets the requirements of mobile optimization using the corresponding Google service.

Of course, your site should have an adaptive design for different device screen resolutions, and the “responsive” implementation logic should be fast and of high quality.

You should also pay attention to AMP (and Turbo pages if your target audience uses Yandex). The technology allows you to instantly display your pages on mobile devices, moreover, this is encouraged directly by search engines.

Checking the quality of page indexing by search engines

Indexed pages are those pages that are bypassed by search robots and can later be displayed in search engine results. First of all, you should check whether all landing pages are indexed and whether service pages are included in the index.

Checking the indexing of pages can be divided into several components:

• Robot Exception Analysis
• Sitemap check
• Analyzing the use of micro markup
• Search engine index analysis.

Exceptions for robots are contained in the robots.txt file, which must be located in the site’s root directory. Update the directives and entries in the file, make sure that all the “technical” sections of the site are closed from indexing, check for an up-to-date link to the sitemap.

Sitemap – a complete list of indexed pages of your resource. If robots.txt is an instruction on how to index a site, then sitemap is a list of pages that are subject to direct indexing. Check if the sitemap revision is up to date. Be sure to follow how the algorithm for adding (deleting) records to the sitemap works when creating (deleting) resource landing pages.

Micro-markup is necessary for high-quality indexing of pages. In fact, this is an instruction to the search robot, which contributes to the correct classification of page content. Make sure that the most relevant schemas are used and that the implementation is free of bugs. Analysis of the use of microdata can be carried out using the data structuring check service from Google.

The search engine index is those pages that have been indexed by search robots and are already ranked by user search queries. Make sure that the index does not contain both technical pages and duplicate landing pages of your resource. You can check the index using Search Console (or Webmaster if we are talking about Yandex).

Remember to pay attention to pages that are excluded from the index directly by search engines: study the reasons, perhaps you should reconsider the requirements for the content of your site.

Instead of a conclusion

If your site passed the test on all counts, accept my sincere congratulations, you can proceed to further internal optimization of the site. But do not forget that such a technical audit of the site should be carried out regularly.

If you are at the stage of launching your startup and are just going to create your website, I recommend putting these requirements into the resource development specification, so you will achieve maximum savings in time and money.

About the author: Mikhail Orlov, Executive Director of COO ForMe Limited. Experience: more than 10 years in the IT industry, 6 years of them in Internet commerce.