Jack of One Trade, Master of None
As your business grows and your client base increases you may have found yourself reaching for off-the-shelf solutions to help handle your backend workload. Salesforce for your CRM, Zendesk for Customer Service, Xero for your books, and maybe a special proprietary application that your developer friend built. Whatever the solution, you often find yourself drowning in various tools and APIs that all do very specific things. When you want to check reports or perform simple actions, it's a long process of logging into the app, navigating to your specific screen, adding in any additional (maybe repeatable) parameters, and then clicking a button. It doesn't sound like a lot of work but at the end of a long day with various jobs still left to do it can feel like a lot of time and effort.
They aren’t treated as such, but websites are the new brick & mortar. A physical location will never generate the same revenue potential that a website can. Like a physical location, you need to market it properly and effectively. With an effective web presence, you can expect to see significantly higher profit margins when compared to a physical location. Websites are cheaper to run, easier to update, and far more future-proof than physical locations, but just like a real store you have to know how to attract customers. It may be surprising, but most website owners miss out on millions of dollars of potential revenue every year due to a lack of IT knowledge. So to keep it simple, there are 3 things your business should focus on when maintaining a website
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Refreshed Content
- Speed & Efficiency
Focus on Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
It takes a lot of work to make sure your website is being featured at the top of Google’s search results. Google’s algorithm is deep and complex, however, before sending hundreds of dollars on ad-words and backlinks, having a well-engineered, fast, and secure website will already give you an edge. There are lots of things you can change on a website to help Google index it better; making your site load faster, adding alt tags to your images, re-writing your meta-description to be between 100-150 words, making your site A11y Compliant (AA) will automatically make your site perform better naturally, potentially saving you hundreds of dollars a year.
Refresh content every few months
In a similar vein to SEO, having content on your website that is updated frequently through the year will show Google that your site is alive and well. Think of it like this; if you owned a store that had a “We’re Open” sign on the door but all the lights and power was off, very few people would know you are actually opening without asking you personally. Google works in a similar way.
Be fast and efficient
How long do you wait for a website to load? If it’s more than 3 seconds then you make up just 10% of global website visitors. Every second of loading time (after 3 seconds) increases the bounce rate probability by 90%. Before you go rushing to increase the amount of RAM on your web server, the best way to improve performance is to get under the hood and inspecting the code. At OMNIUX, we use a combination of Next JS, WebP image formatting, Edge Computing, and Static Site Generation (SSG) to drastically reduce our costs and our performance overhead. It currently costs just $3 a month to run this website and according to Lighthouse, it takes just 0.6 seconds to load. If programming isn't your forte, there are other ways you can improve your website load times. For instance, try running all of your largest images through an image minifier like https://tinypng.com/. This tool removes all unseen colors from an image and can lead to some pretty impressive performance gains. If you have an images on your website larger than 1MB, you can shave off as much as 80%, dramatically improving your website load times.
Summary
A combination of these 3 elements can save you money and help boost conversion rates. If you still need some help reducing your website's load times or getting more organic reach on your social media posts, OMNIUX can help! Our Web Development experts can help get your site running faster than ever, get in touch and we can help you build something legendary.