Top 3 Things to Fix on Your Website

When the goal of a campaign is to drive traffic to (and conversions on) a website, we need to ensure that the website is optimized so our campaign can deliver optimal results.

While web optimization is a complex field with many performance metrics, here are the key ones we look for:

Page Speed

Ideally, your website should load within 3 seconds, with up to 4.5 seconds the limit of what Asher considers an acceptable speed. Slower page speeds increase the possibility that users will get impatient during load and abandon the page. Page speed is a combination of multiple factors, including site and browser caching, code combination and minification, server resources, and render blocking. Google also uses page speed as an SEO ranking signal.

Responsive

After growing steadily for years, mobile internet use surpassed desktop use in 2016, with no sign of stopping. If your website doesn’t adapt responsively for their device, mobile users will abandon it immediately. And again, Google also uses mobile-readiness as an SEO ranking signal.

SSL Certificate

An SSL changes your site from an HTTP connection to HTTPS, which encrypts user communications and adds a padlock icon to your URL address bar. Google also uses SSLs as (hey, guess what) an SEO ranking signal, and has added a “Not Secure” warning to Chrome for non-SSL sites. Asher includes SSLs standard with our website hosting and maintenance packages.

While Asher can still run campaigns for websites that don’t meet the above criteria, it is our responsibility as your agency partner to:

• Make clients aware of any major issues with their website
• Manage expectations for campaigns that drive traffic to an unoptimized website

Some fixes and performance gains can be quick and easy, but other problems can be more difficult or cost-prohibitive to resolve. If you need help with next steps, Asher’s web development team is always available to perform a more detailed audit, and either relay those results to your internal web team or dig in and fix those errors ourselves. Feel free to contact us for an estimate.