Technical Elements Any New Website Needs

Every website offers a degree of user-friendliness and practicality, incorporating text and images within a basic navigation structure. However, the internet’s evolution demands an increasingly sophisticated framework for platforms to be successful here in 2019. With 90% of website traffic arriving from search engines, it’s hard to overstate the importance of maximizing a site’s appeal to web crawlers, which now expect more than body copy and JPGs…
These are some of the technical elements all websites need to realize their full potential, while simultaneously winning the trust of increasingly data-aware and security-conscious consumers:

1. HTTPS accreditation.

Installing an SSL certificate can be frustratingly complex for less technically-minded administrators, but it’s crucial for optimizing SEO. Google and Bing actively downgrade HTTP sites in favor of encrypted HTTPS domains, and some web browsers flag up warnings to discourage people from visiting insecure sites. Since many consumers will obey these warnings and navigate away, a high proportion of potential traffic could be lost at the source.

2. A mobile-optimized framework.

It’s a well-known fact that significant levels of web traffic is now coming through mobile devices, rather than desktop or laptop computers. Consequently, website design should major on mobile screens. Technical elements involved in mobile optimization include horizontal menu bars which automatically condense into hamburger dropdowns, and text forming itself around compressed images that resize depending on output screen resolution.

3. SEO.

Many technical elements fall into this category, such as page and image meta descriptions, photo captions, header tags, and page titles. SEO also means clear URLs – so websitename.com/aboutus, rather than websitename.com/s7Tywf4, for example. Regular SEO updates are advisable in order to reach the highest percentage of search engine users at any given time. Web page content should also be (a) original, (b) engaging and (c) regularly updated with specifically-chosen keywords. If a content management system needs to be set up, make sure this is delegated to someone with CMS experience.

4. Visitor tracking.

Building on the previous point, an understanding of where traffic originates is crucial for targeting specific audiences. It enables areas of relative weakness to be bolstered with targeted advertising, it supports A/B testing of email marketing campaigns or blog posts, and it ensures a website is fulfilling its primary objectives – generating leads, driving sales, etc.

5. Streamlined coding.

This covers HTML as well as related elements like Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and WordPress plugins. Every line of code has to be downloaded by web browsers, increasing page loading times, with longer load times having a detrimental effect on SEO rankings. Unnecessary technical elements in page code might include duplicated instructions or multiple HTTP requests, while plugins frequently stop working or duplicate functionality.

6. Efficient hosting.

Even streamlined and dynamic websites will struggle to attract customers if their host servers are regularly down, or consistently run slowly under high traffic loads. It’s far better to entrust website hosting to specialists like WestHost, with our cutting-edge data centers and generous disk space allowances. Even our affordable Personal web hosting packages provide ten subdomains and 1TB of bandwidth.