Top 10 Technical Tips for your Website

As well as designing websites, I’ve spent a lot of time upgrading, optimising and fixing them. Below are my top technical tips for looking after your website, and making sure you don’t run into problems.

Technical Tips for your Website

1. Keep backups of your website. If your website also uses a back-end database make sure you have a copy of this as well.
2. If you are going to make ANY changes, take another backup before you do. This also applies to any updates you may carry out.
3. Page load speed is an important consideration for your website. Caching, hosting, and content delivery networks can all make a difference that can impact on page ranking.
4. Keep your website up to date. This is especially true for sites that are based on formats like WordPress, where there are important security updates to consider.
5. The KISS principle – Keep it simple stupid. This applies to design, but also be wary of complicating your website more than it needs to be. For example stuffing your site with hundreds of WordPress plugins can cause conflicts, issues with updates, and slow down your page load.
6. Choose your hosting wisely. Going back to point 3 above, hosting can have a big impact on page load speed, but also take time to consider reliability and any support offering, as well as the specification.
7. Minimise and compress the images you are using on your website. It is worth taking time to learn about resizing photographs and pictures for use on your website. Getting this right ensures you are not uploading files that are going to slow down your website.
8. Another tip on images – make sure you use titles and alt tags to describe your images.
9. Check your website across different browsers, devices, and screen sizes to ensure it works well on all platforms. Not all browsers interpret code in the same way as each other. For example, what works in Chrome might not work in Internet Explorer.
10. Use appropriate URLs wherever possible. For example, don’t use http://www.meemodigital.com/?p=123, but use http://www.meemodigital.com/top-10-tech-tips-website/

If you would like any help with your website, get in touch.