Landing Page Optimisation

Landing pages are the first page your visitor sees, research has shown that visitors generate a first impression of your website within 5 seconds which is amazing as most of the websites I visit take 5 seconds to load (bad impression). One of the main draw backs of any website is loading speed, Free SEO Training is going to identify key points of optimising your loading speed and landing pages using on-site tactics however hosting will play a vital role within loading speed, to read more about hosting click here.

Loading Speed Optimisation:

There are literally hundreds of factors you can look at in terms of improving the website speed some however are not worthwhile for instance, sacrificing a major part of your website due it loading slowly. You can use tools like Google Webmaster Tools which will tell you how your website is performing in regards to loading speed (as a rough idea). Some of the aspects you can look at in terms of reducing the loading speed are;

• Make landing page redirects cacheable,
• Minify JavaScript if used
• Avoid CSS @import
• Avoid Bad requests
• Optimise images for loading speed / size
• Specify image dimensions
• Minify CSS
• Minify HTML
• Minimize redirects if possible
• Optimise the order of styles and scripts
• Remove Query strings from static resource
• Serve resources from consistent URL
• Serve scaled images
• Specify a Vary: Accept-Encoding header
• Specify a cache Validator
• Specify a character set
• Combine images into CSS Sprites (If possible/suitable)
• Defer Parsing of Java if used.
• Enable Keep-Alive
• Enable compression
• Inline Small CSS
• Inline Small JavaScript if used
• Leverage browser caching
• Prefer Asynchronous Resources (If needed)
• Put CSS into the document head if suitable
• Removing excess white
• Removing unused code
• Removing unnecessary features on your website

Poor loading speed can very easily make or break a website, think about it, if you are using a website which is loading slower what do you do? find a faster loading equivalent? or use the back button to Google? This is more than likely the same approach your visitors will have if your website is loading slowly.

Optimising for conversions

Now that we have improved your loading speed the likelihood is your visitors will stay around, now it’s time to address the remaining aspects. You need to determine were you visitors are coming from for instance, if you are getting traffic through search for a particular keyword, is your website accommodating for such as query? For example, if a visitor searches “Dog Toys” and comes to your website and it’s about Dog Training, although as very interesting it may be won’t convert unfortunately.You need to understand the full cycle about optimising your website for conversion, to do so please read our article on improving your conversion rate here.