We’re all very busy – modern life seems to move at an ever-increasing speed. The internet is often seen as part of this trend – an information superhighway that facilitates a quicker pace of life. We access websites for convenience – and expect them to load swiftly and smoothly.
The truth is, however, that like anything else websites can slow down over time. For various reasons, load times can lag. The experience of using a slow website can be frustrating – and always contributes to a high “bounce rate” (the rate of people leaving your site after just a few seconds).
If your website is slow, it will fail to engage users, who demand a seamless experience online. If it fails to engage users, it will fail to represent your business appropriately – and convert users to buyers.
The good news is that there are several techniques that can speed up your website again and make it more enjoyable to use. Ensuring that the experience of visiting and browsing your website is pleasant and pain-free is key to making good on the investment you’ve made in building a website in the process.
So what are those tools? The first is simple: upgrade your hosting. We’ve blogged about this issue before, but essentially cheaper hosting packages store your website alongside many others – giving each less bandwidth to play with, and therefore making all more prone to slowing down. A better hosting package will give your site more headroom to handle higher traffic volumes.
Similarly, you should choose a fast Content Management System (CMS). These are “back doors” to your site which enable you to keep the text, images and other content elements of your site up-to-date. The faster this system works, the quicker your site will be able to compile all those elements – and display them to your users.
Content has other implications, too: you should optimise your images (that is, compress them for use on the web) so that they load more quickly; you should also host only the number of files you need – the more you have, the slower your website will become. Consider a Content Delivery Network (CDN) – these save images and pages to different servers around the world, meaning users will load content from the nearest server, saving significantly on loading times.
In short, you don’t have to stick with a slow website anymore than your users do. Talk to us here at Image+ about how to speed up your website.
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.
WordPress is one of the most used web design platforms in the world. As of January 2018, nearly a third of the world’s top ten million websites were WordPress-based. In a world so full of digital options, that’s a huge market share – and there’s a reason the platform is so popular.
WordPress began life as a humble blogging tool, a quick and easy means of setting up a website online that could play host to all your posts. What made it special was that it was totally open source – in other words, users could access the code that made the platform work, and alter it. Before long, WordPress had, through the contributions of its users, grown far beyond its basic beginnings.
WordPress is now a system for building websites of infinite variety: from blogs to brochures to portfolios, the platform is now incredibly versatile. Users have created innumerable themes to alter and customise the look of websites, and countless plug-ins to add functionality and features.
Most of all, it’s incredibly easy to use – once set up by your web developer, the basics of updating your pages and products is intuitive and takes seconds. Businesses have adopted WordPress readily for this reason – it takes up less staff time, and its ubiquity often means that only the lightest of training is necessary … because staff are already familiar with it!
Ecommerce websites, of course, can be different beasts. They have very specific requirements and need to inspire total confidence in their users. But the truth is that WordPress has come so far from its beginnings that it is often the smartest choice even for ecommerce.
For one, it has an extensive plug-ins marketplace. That means that your site is potentially extremely powerful – because simply installing a new plug-in can make it capable of whole new things in seconds. From security to sales, plug-ins will offer your customers all the services they need.
Secondly, that variety of themes puts thousands of different looks at your fingertips. You sell online because customers enjoy their experience on your website. WordPress themes look great and load seamlessly – that’s the best way to inspire confidence in your clients.
Thirdly, WordPress is astonishingly search engine-friendly. The system has been perfected over years to appeal to search engines, and that means your products will be found by people typing their phrases into Google, Bing and the rest. This is key to developing new business.
Fourth, WordPress sites are highly customisable. This means you’ll never be stuck with a site past its sell-by date – as you expand, or your customers’ expectations change, you can simply retool your WordPress site. Voila! You have a whole new home on the web.
And finally, don’t forget: WordPress is for blogging. Don’t ignore the system’s core functionality – reach out to your clients and create a lasting connection with them!
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.
As Coventry is named City of Culture 2021, here in the Image+ offices we’re wearing huge smiles (and possibly a couple of party hats).
We’re proud of our Coventry roots – we’ve been based here for nearly twenty years, and can’t think of anywhere we’d rather base ourselves. Our offices at Electric Wharf on the city’s regenerated canal network are everything that made Coventry a successful candidate for City of Culture 2021: vibrant, buzzing, forward-thinking but with links to an incredibly rich past.
Coventry, City of Culture 2021 (yes, we like the sound of that): it has it all. Medieval heritage in the cathedral quarter, mid-twentieth-century modernism in its remarkable architecture, passionate grassroots commitment to arts of all kinds … it’s a genuinely exciting city, and the rest of the UK is about to find out why in spades.
The win for our city is doubly sweet because we had a small part in it. A while back, we competed to become the designers of the bid team’s website and digital presence – and won. So we feel we contributed in a small way to what was, of course, a fantastic pitch. (And a winning one – did we mention that Coventry is City of Culture 2021?)
It’s the diversity of Coventry that I think helped tip the balance in its favour: it welcomes everyone and has room for everything. At Image+, we have on staff huge fans of Shakespeare and massive football nuts, petrol heads and live music goers. Coventry and its surrounding area caters to us all.
The website we built for the bid reflected this vibrancy: bright and colourful and with plenty going on, it also crafted a single identity for the bid and sought to bring together an awful lot of fizzing activity. It used events, social media, videos and bold colours and graphics to really bring home the bid’s particular character and personality. We’re pretty proud of what we contributed.
Coventry has its own particular energy, and the challenge for the bid was bottling that to present it to the panel of judges in distilled form. The website we built was a part of that process, of course, and we are made up that we helped in a small way to win this prize for our city. But the real winners are the people of Coventry themselves – and we’re pleased as punch to be a part of that crowd.
In short: here’s to Coventry, City of Culture 2021!
We’re not going to get tired of saying that.
Contact Image Plus for Website Design & Development
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 76834780 or send us an email at info@image-plus.co.uk.
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We’re all very busy – modern life seems to move at an ever-increasing speed. The internet is often seen as part of this trend – an information superhighway that facilitates... More
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