CRO and good website design

Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is the latest buzz word in the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) industry. It is hailed as the best advance seen in recent years. We will discuss CRO in the following paragraphs.

Conversion Rate Optimisation aims to collect better conversion rates from visitor traffic to a particular website. It tests landing pages in order to ferret out the optimum design and message mix that will attract paying customers to a particular website.

The first step to conversion is arguably page speed. There is an adage: love at first sight. This applies to websites too. If the visitor cannot view your website due to slow loading of the site, then there is no chance of conversions. To impress the visitor, a faster loading website is required.

You must fix the problem of slow loading of the website in a systematic manner. Find out the problem of website speed with the Yslow or Google Page Speed extension. To do this, type in the URL and obtain a snapshot of the speed inhibitors in your web infrastructure. Many issues may come into focus.

Many website owners add Word Press. This can drastically slow the website speed. You can fasten downloads by minimizing HTTP requests. A content delivery network can be used to speed up the site. It is best to stay away from an empty href or src. You can add a Cache Control Header and Gzip Components. To hasten website loading, it is advisable to put style sheets at the top and scripts at the bottom. CSS Expressions should be avoided. CSS and JavaScript should be made external. DNS Lookups should be reduced. Redirects should be steered clear of. Duplicate Scripts should be removed. ETags should be configured. Ajax should be made cacheable. It is advisable to employ GET for AJAX requests. The number of DOM Elements should be minimized. There should be a reduction in Cookie size. Cookie free domains for components are to be preferred. Filters should be avoided. Images in HTML should not be scaled. In a sentence, strip away the non-essentials. Remember that anything you add consumes precious bandwidth. The website will load faster if there is a reduction in calls to the SQL database.

Use the Content Delivery Network (CDN) to increase site downloading speeds. The Content Delivery Network cache and send the content when required. The content is kept in multiple locations for quicker delivery.

A good conversion rate is synonymous with good web design. A good web designer creates a site employing best practices in accordance with W3C standards. This criteria includes website development with correct CSS and xhtml. For a client interested in SEO optimisation, the easiest and the most convenient way is to include the designer in the project in the very initial stage. Wireframes should be developed for the site. The principal benefit of a wireframe is that it ensures that every requirement is there in the page and in the proper position.