The work of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is never done. Good SEO requires constant monitoring – and tinkering – of pages. This is because search engines – and especially, of course, Google – regularly alter the algorithms which rank pages. Paying attention to these changes is the secret to SEO success.
Incorporating into your pages those elements which search engine algorithms reward is, then, an ongoing task – and you need to keep your eyes on the future as well as the day-to-day. By preparing your site for changes coming down the pipe, you won’t fall behind each time an update occurs.
That’s why today we’re talking about Core Web Vitals. Due in 2021, this new algorithm change will make new demands on your site – but offers some significant opportunities, too. As the name suggests, this is Google’s attempt to centre some very basic fundamentals in their decisions on what experience pages should offer.
Google says they are all to do with “real-world user experience”: loading speed, interactivity, site stability. In other words, things that make a site easier and more pleasant to use.
Sites that load more quickly, crash less often, and offer useful and engaging interaction points will score better on Google. Sites that fail in those core aspects will – well, they’ll tumble down the rankings. You don’t need us to tell you that this would be bad.
The first thing is: assess your site’s compliance, way ahead of the launch next year. Measuring how well you’re doing on these key metrics now will give you the time you need to put good fixes in place.
First and foremost, this means accessing the Google Search Console. This invaluable utility will measure your site against the Core Web Vitals, offering a traffic light rating across a range of criteria. This is where to start: assess your site’s compliance and then start putting in place the changes necessary to do better.
For example, take a look at your most content-heavy pages and assess their render times. If these are too slow, start looking at ways to make them quicker: reduce your reliance on images, utilise some cache-ing, find some CCS or Javascript solutions to the issue.
Likewise, locate the failure points in your pages – most often, these will be bad scripts or ill-defined layouts. Close these loops, so your pages crash less. And investigate your interaction points: do you have enough? Does your site respond quickly enough to each click? If not, introduce more and better code.
This painstaking protest of testing, measuring, fixing and repeating is how all SEO is done – and big updates like this one require a lot of work. The key? The reward is worth the effort – your page ranking literally depends on your doing this right. How Important Are Core Web Vitals for SEO? Very. So get working.
Obviously don’t change anything in the code yourself unless you are well versed! Contact your developer or get in touch with our team.
Search is critical to the modern web – the larger it has become, the more essential search engines like Google and Bing have made themselves to users.
The same is true for individual sites: the more content a particular website boasts, the more important it becomes that its users can find the content they need quickly and easily. This means great search functionality.
Imagine a brochure site with a lot of copy, or an ecommerce site with a lot of products. How does a user find what they need with a minimum fuss, rather than through maximum clicking? Internet users are impatient – they have come to expect ease.
The harder it is to find content on your site, the higher your bounce rate will be – that’s the metric which measures how quickly users leave you site. The higher your bounce rate, the lower your conversion rate. In other words, search sells.
So here are our five top tips for achieving great search – and therefore good returns – on your site:
And that’s it: add search functionality, and design it in such a way that it’s easy to access and even easier to use. Your site’s visitors will reward you.
If you need web design or development, then speak to our friendly experts. Our web developers are based in Coventry, Warwickshire and are always ready to help. Please feel free to contact us and speak to one of our website design specialists.
Contact us on 024 7683 4780 or send us an email at info@image-plus.co.uk.
We all have our limits. When it comes to making choices, we can reach them surprisingly quickly.
Each of us makes countless decisions every day, often subconsciously. Online, the choices facing us are innumerable: which sites to visit, which buttons to click, which pages to read, which forms to submit. Every single site we browse demands we make decisions – and often many of them.
This can result very quickly in what designers call ‘decision fatigue’. Simply put, this is the feeling in a user that they are having to make too many choices to justify the benefit they are deriving from engaging with a site. Once decision fatigue sets in, they are likely simply to move on.
In other words, decision fatigue affects conversion rates. It increases your ‘bounce rate’ – the number of people leaving your site too quickly – and it results in users disengaging from your onboarding process before it’s complete. This means that you don’t get their contact details, or don’t make a sale.
The good news is that there are choices you can make to reduce the likelihood that your site will cause decision fatigue in its users. There are a set of pretty easy design techniques available that make sites much easier to use – and ensures that far few active decisions are required on the part of those who visit it.
In other words, reducing decision fatigue is about enhancing and streamlining content delivery. Make information and products easier and quicker to find – and the means of doing so as intuitive as possible. That will reduce the choices your users have to make – and increase the likelihood that the choices they do make will be positive for you.
If you need web design or development, then speak to our friendly experts. Our web developers are based in Coventry, Warwickshire and are always ready to help. Please feel free to contact us and speak to one of our website design specialists.
Contact us on 024 7683 4780 or send us an email at info@image-plus.co.uk.
It can be easy to ignore the importance of navigation design. The other aspects of websites are so much more obvious and exciting: colours and shapes, fonts and photography. But without good navigation design, your website might look great but be way too frustrating to use.
Navigation is, of course, the means by which a user gets from one page to another when using your site. The best websites will have intuitive navigation and menus that make immediate sense. Giving a clear structure to your site, and enabling your users to make their way through it, is the best means of helping your content do its thing.
There are all sorts of methods and techniques to make sense of navigation on behalf of your users – and, as with all elements of design, there are trends to take into account, too. We’re currently seeing five key approaches to menu design that can really help make a site comprehensible to first-time visitor or long-time user alike.
Sticky Navigation Bars, for example, keep the navigation menu in a fixed place on each page. This enables users to navigate the site from anywhere on the page – because the navbar follows them as they scroll through content. This is a great way of encouraging users to explore your site without risking them getting lost.
Mega Menus are increasingly popular on websites, perhaps because they are rather different from more common, and therefore a little dreary, drop-down menus. Instead of just flowing downwards along a vertical line, mega menus expand wider, usually containing multiple columns of content. This is particularly useful if your site has a lot of inter-related content.
Responsive Sub Navigation Menus are also crucial for sites with lots of pages. Designers will often hide some navigation links on mobile platforms, in order to help the menu fit better on small screens. This design trend retains the space-saving virtues of drop-down menus, but hides them by default behind a “hamburger” icon which, once clicked, expands across the content area.
All Capitalisation, meanwhile, is a rather more subtle trend but no less powerful. Here, the text of a menu item is displayed in ALL CAPS, offering a text style that feels clear, intuitive and symmetrical. We’re seeing this more and more, and, unlike other uses of all-caps online, it never feels like shouting.
Finally, single page navigation is making a lot of the above redundant. Many sites – particularly those with less content to squeeze in – are now simply a single page with anchor points: click a menu item and the page automatically scrolls to the corresponding section. As well as sticky navbars, dot navigation – a series of circular icons located on the left or right side of the screen – is a big thing here, and helps further enhance the natural sleekness of single page sites.
So there you have it: navigation is changing, and you need to stay up-to-date if your users are going to stick with you. With luck, this quick review of the top five web navigations trends for 2018 has helped you find your way, too …
If you need web design or development, then speak to our friendly experts. Our web developers are based in Coventry, Warwickshire and are always ready to help. Please feel free to contact us and speak to one of our website design specialists.
Contact us on 024 7683 4780 or send us an email at info@image-plus.co.uk.
Breadcrumbs are more useful than you think. Not only are they an essential ingredient in veggie burgers, Katsu curry and fish fingers … They can help you find your way home.
We all know the story of Hansel and Gretel, who were brave enough to explore the forest … and smart enough to lay breadcrumbs along their path. In this way, they didn’t get lost – useful when you’re running away from the evil inhabitant of a sinister gingerbread house.
In web design, his story has given a name to the tokens we leave throughout a website to enable a visitor to track back through their online journey. Often breadcrumbs appear as nested page names – Home > About > Our Company, for example – which situate a user clearly with the site’s architecture. They can take other forms, however, and always the aim is simple: to help your visitor to not get lost.
This is a good function to include, especially on a site which boasts a large number of pages. Resource-heavy websites are great, but once you’ve clicked one link you’ve clicked them all – and it can be very easy to become unmoored, lost amidst all these pages and unable to find your way ‘Home’ again.
Breadcrumbs – prominent indicators of where you are and how you can get back to where you were – greatly enhance the usability of a site. They make it easy to click on pages but also remain oriented; to find other content quickly, and to go back to content you found interesting once you’re done exploring.
In turn, this reduces the clicks or actions required to return to a given page – and this, too, enhances the user experience of your site. Making your content easy to navigate is a key means of making your site pleasant to use … And that will earn you return visits.
If you’re wondering why users can’t just click the “Back” button, you haven’t yet understood the power of the humble breadcrumb. Breadcrumbs aren’t just about going back: they’re about situating yourself within a site, and understanding how each of its pages relates to the others. You’ve worked hard on structuring your content – so, make that structure clear. The “Back” button alone doesn’t achieve that.
Sites without breadcrumbs don’t get read as much as sites which opt to use them. Being able to find your way home encourages browsers, like Hansel and Gretel, to explore a little deeper; if you don’t help your users to find their way, they’ll stick a little more closely to the ‘top-line’ content – and never make the most of what you’ve built for them.
In fact, sometimes they won’t even read your top-line content: sites without breadcrumbs suffer from higher bounce rates, meaning essentially that their visitors leave those sites much more quickly. Today’s internet users are savvy and impatient – if they can’t find what they want quickly and easily, they’ll go somewhere else. Breadcrumbs encourage them to stay.
In other words, think of breadcrumbs as a wayfinding system. Complex buildings often include coloured corridors and large maps to help visitors find their way around. Hardy fairytale explorers carry loaves of bread. And websites have the benefits of breadcrumbs.
If you need web design or development, then speak to our friendly experts. Our web developers are based in Coventry, Warwickshire and are always ready to help. Please feel free to contact us and speak to one of our website design specialists.
Contact us on 024 7683 4780 or send us an email at info@image-plus.co.uk.
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