CMS Based Website – A website is the face of your business and makes the first impression about your business. It is important to understand that there’s no second chance when it comes to user experience. Low website speed or an unoptimized website is one of the most irritating things that make visitors abandon the website.
Well-optimized website= higher ranking in SERPs, lower bounce rates, higher return visits, higher conversions, better engagement, and refined user experience.
Do you know?
- 1 in 4 visitors abandons a website that takes longer than 4 seconds to load.
- 46% of users don’t revisit unoptimized, poorly performing websites.
- 1 second delay curtails customer satisfaction by 16%.
A well-optimized website is more sustainable and generally more competent with happier users who can get what they are looking for easily and instantly. In this article, we share how to optimize a CMS-based website to ensure it runs smoothly and efficiently.
Creating a website used to be difficult and confusing. You needed skills and experience to write the code, and another set of vital skills to create compelling, quality content.
Then came CMS- “Content Management System”— and completely changed the way we manage and publish content online.
Let’s start with the basics.
Basics: What Is A Content Management System?
A CMS, or content management system (CMS) is an application for creating and managing digital content. Using a CMS helps:
- Allow users to personalize the design and content of a website without any prior knowledge or experience about programming.
- Develop and manage different features at scale with fewer resources.
- Since CMS features differ across platforms, it’s critical to find one that fits your company’s needs and end goals.
The basic features of a CMS include:
- Content creation- plan, create and format content
- Content storage- store content consistently in one place
- Publishing- organize and put content online
- Workflow management- assign responsibilities and rights to admins, editors and authors
Because of CMS, making a website is now much easier and quicker— all you need is to create an account, put together some modules through the drag-and-drop editor, and Viola!
Most CMS enables you create a stunning, functioning website even without knowing how to write a single line of code. It has put magical powers in the people’s hand— enabling them to be the designers of their online kingdom!
Why do You Need to Optimize a Website?
Optimize your CMS based website for SEO and conversions is pivotal for your website’s success.
It makes sure your site is performing exactly the way it is intended to be.
A well-optimized, SEO-friendly website can attract more traffic and get more prospects and leads that convert to customers.
And a CMS-based website optimized for SEO and conversions usually has improved metrics, such as increased time on page and lower bounce rate. It means that Google might rank it higher in the SERPs.
7 Ways: How to Optimize a CMS Based Website?
Better performance is all about delivering an optimum experience for end-users. Attaining better performance is all about getting to the bottom of your site’s bottlenecks.
Here are 7 ways to optimize a CMS based website that can drive results for your business—
1. Optimize Images
In general, larger files require longer to process than smaller files. The overall size of original content being loaded from hosting servers to the requesting browser determines web page loading time, also known as Page Load Time. The biggest contributors to web page size are high-quality large images, which slow down page speed and frustrate visitors who are desperately looking for the page to load.
On average, images account for 66% of the total weight of a webpage. Here are a few best practices for image optimization that helps to curtail the negative impact of images on the website’s speed:
Fewer Images: Limit the number of images you use to a minimal level.
Compression: Image compression should be a carefully considered trade-off between image quality and size. Compression of 60-70 percent yields a decent balance in JPGs. Increase the image size of (JPGs) by 150-200 percent for retina displays, resize it by 30-40 percent, and reduce it down to the required sizes and dimensions.
Appropriate Sizing: Save useful bytes of picture payload by sizing your images to fit the parameters (width) of your Website design. Set fixed width and auto-height instruction to render images responsive using browser resizing features.
Format Selection: When image quality is important and no image revisions are needed before uploading, use JPGs or WEBPs. JPGs can only handle limited processing and fine-tuning before the picture quality starts to deteriorate. Use the PNG format for images that include icons, logos, graphs, signs, illustrations, and text. Avoid BMPs and TIFFs and only use GIFs for simple or small images.
2. Plugins— Less is Better!
Plugins add flexibility to a website, but at a cost- it degrades the site’s performance. Unfortunately, web designers use plenty of plugins to integrate appealing yet frequently redundant features like gravatar, website stats, profile tools, and font tools. Some developers even use up to ten different plugins for social media integration. The only advantage is that manual coding is eliminated.
Many well-known websites include more than 80 plugins. However, if the integrated plugins are well-developed to prevent complex actions and costly server processing, the number isn’t entirely a problem.
So, how can you pick the right plug-ins? Here are a few pointers—
- Can it efficiently handle complex operations?
- Can it load multiple scripts and content assets?
- Can it perform requests to external APIs?
- Can it increase the overall number of database queries to all the page requests?
If you answered yes to all of the above questions, your response to the plugin in question should be a big NO!
The biggest question is how many plugins do you really require?
Content Management System (CMS) such as WordPress without plugins is like having a website with only basic or very little functionality. Adding plugins is like adding additional functionalities and features to your website— without the requirement of knowledge or experience in coding to refine the functionality of the site.
However, installing unnecessary or outdated plugins can eventually slow down the speed of your website resulting in higher page load time. Installing 10 different plugins for basic and unique tasks is much better than adding one plugin to complete all of the difficult tasks by itself.
3. Optimize Databases
WordPress CMS gets crowded over time with many post revisions and needless content along with the garbage data. If you don’t keep your data well-optimized, WordPress can start getting slow. There are many ways to keep the database clean by disabling and/or limiting post revisions, deleting spam comments, old revisions, unapproved comments, and trashed posts or items, to name a few.
Getting rid of unwanted content and garbage data from disorderly databases, curtailing them in size and making it convenient for website hosting service to efficiently fetch content, within the least processing cycles can help optimize your database.
Don’t forget to clean up the wp_options table— it can be one of the reasons for slow query times on your website because of the autoloaded data left by any third-party themes and plugins.
4. Mobile-Friendly
An ideal website load time should not be more than 2 seconds. Quick loading websites tend to have higher user engagement and increased conversion rates. Make your CMS-based website while keeping the mobile page speed into consideration, and aptly optimize and load pages quickly in all types and sizes of user’s device.
5. Caching
Caching can help save lots of time and enhance the performance of the website. The cache stores the data temporarily. It makes the data retrieval process easier and quicker by serving repetitive requests on the same content.
Developers can deploy different types of caching techniques such as output, data and distributed caching to boost the website’s performance, and make accessing the website smoother.
6. Flash Content
Flash content consists of images, audio, animation, and video, which make the website look more expressive and interactive. Even though it has many benefits, flash content is bulky, thus slowing down the website loading speed.
Remove the flash content or try minimizing its size, or replace it with the HTML alternatives to speed up the website loading time.
7. Built-in SEO
Even the most attractive, beautifully designed website can’t convert if users can’t find it or Google can’t understand or locate it!
Google keeps updating its algorithm to deliver the best and most relevant results for users, that’s why SEO is a moving target.
If your CMS-based website is adaptable to the latest updates, your website is going to be visible.
Adding these features in your CMS can be helpful—
- Alt tags for images
- Canonical tags
- Crawlability Optimization
- CSS validation
- GZIP components
- Header tags (H1, H2, H3)
- HTML validation
- Link checker / internal links
- Minify JS & CSS
- Minimize HTTP requests
- Optimize images
- Optimized meta tags
- Platform Performance and Site Speed Optimization
- Schema’s markup
- Search Optimization
- Social tags
- XML sitemap (images, video)
Optimize a CMS Based Website Because Website Speed Matters!
In today’s digital world, millions of blogs and promotions go live every day, and a well-designed, content-driven website lets you show customers what your business is about and why your brand is unique.
From blogging to online selling, content management systems help businesses achieve their goals and expand their reach much easier. Choosing a CMS based website will assist you to do just that, enabling your website to grow with your business.
So, ready to optimize your website? At Cfactory, we have years of experience and expertise in designing and managing successful strategies for clients in a variety of industries, and we can do the same for your business.