A website is a marketing tool that generates leads for businesses and sales for eCommerce businesses.

But do you know? It is not limited to a good design only.

I would like to list 5 things that are very important for a website to become successful but usually ignored by most of the web development agencies.

1. Performance

In order to improve the loading speed of a website, it is important to optimize the assets that are loaded when a web page opens. These include images, fonts, css & javascript files. A non-optimized website loads these assets one by one that takes lots of time. We can improve this through following methods:

  • Compression and Minification –  Through code compression and minification techniques, the size of a file is reduced so that it can be delivered to a browser faster.
  • Merging & Caching – During runtime, multiple files of the same kind are merged and sent to the browser as a single file. This reduces number of requests, thereby speeding up website.
  • Image Optimization – When we take a picture with our digital camera and store it on our computer, along with the image itself, other information is also stored with it. This information includes time of capture, location and other details about the image. We call this data metadata. Also, the resolution of images set on websites tends to be much larger than required. We strip out metadata from images and resize them to fit within the website’s desired dimensions so that they can be downloaded faster but still maintain a high quality image.
  • Serving through CDN – A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a special kind of server that is set up to serve the supporting files for a website. AWS CloudFlare offers CDN services to speed up webpages by distributing content throughout the world using multiple servers.

2. Schema Markup

Schema markup is the language used to describe the content of web pages and the structure of that content. It’s what search engines read when they crawl your site to figure out what it’s about and how best to present that information to users. Here are a few examples from Google searches:

3. Security

A website can be compromised at multiple levels, such as the server level, code level or browser level. A bad coded website allows hackers to input malicious code within the website. Raw forms could lead to email spamming. A loose server could bring down the whole website. We take care of all these aspects through following ways:

  • All forms that submit data into the website are parsed and sanitized before being processed.
  • We enable firewalls and keep the servers’ configurations secured.
  • Forms and webpages are equipped with Google ReCaptcha to overcome email spamming.
  • We follow best practices for keeping websites secure.

4. SEO

SEO is the process of keeping your website optimized for search engines. Search engines do not see your website as we humans do. They read the code of the webpage, so if it’s not done according to best practices, search engines won’t understand your website properly and will keep your website at the back of search results. Thus, it’s really difficult (or even impossible) to rank on search engines with an off-site SEO tactic like this.

5. Integrations

When developing a website, it’s important to submit the site to Google through Search Console. This provides crucial data about the site’s organic traffic. Further, integration of Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and other scripts are important as they help in digital marketing. I take care of all these factors when we develop the website for our clients.

If you have a project in mind, contact me for a free consultation through WhatsApp at +971 5859 22 123.