There is no doubt that your website helps you grow a business. Behind every website that we see on the internet are some webmasters who are burning their midnight oil doing everything they need to keep a website online & growing. Their responsibility is to ensure that the website is always working perfectly.
This article will help the webmasters gain some knowledge about maintaining the website so that they may succeed in making their site owner and their targeted audience happy.
Choosing the Right Server and Hosting:
Webmaster’s responsibility is to get the best hosting. For this webmasters, must have good knowledge about servers.
They must choose the server that is fast and secured. Also for a website to run perfectly, webmasters should keep an eye on the server whether it is running or not.
The amount of a time a webmaster takes to respond to a web browser’s request is termed as server response time.
One main reason for choosing a good server is to ensure that the server response time is low which in turn will make the speed of website better.
If you worked hard on optimizing your website’s page but your server response time is high then your users will experience a slow site speed which will prove to be the main reason for increasing the bounce rate of your site i.e. users will not love to spend much time on your site.
Identifying the Website Resource Usage:
The things that are responsible for making a better display on your site add up to the website resource usage. For example, if you are using WordPress then your WordPress theme will likely to load different resources from your server. The more resources you are loading, the longer your website pages take to display. That makes your users unhappy, and it makes Google unhappy.
Follow these tips in order to reduce this server usage:
- Make use of deferred images. A deferred image is downloaded immediately after the page load. You can uses lazy loading for deferring images on your website.
- Make sure you don’t have different CSS files for each page of your website. Combine your entire website’s CSS into a single file
- If you can’t put all your CSS and JavaScript in one file then you may look forward to inline CSS and JavaScript. I would suggest you to try putting all your CSS in a single file as inline CSS is not good for SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
Choosing the Right Image Format for the Website:
Choosing the right image format is crucial when placing graphics online. The most popular image formats are:
- PNG
- SVG
- GIF
- JPG
Unfortunately, many beginner webmasters get confused between the different image formats as they have no idea which one to use and when.
PNG: PNG refers to Portable network graphics. It is mostly used for images that require transparency. You can also use it for images that require re-editing. There is a full write-up on the ideal ways to save & use PNG graphics here.
SVG: SVG refers to Scalable Vector Graphics. It is mostly used for images that are created in vector graphics. They are the best choice for responsive designs as scaling an SVG image is quite easy.
GIF: GIF refers to Graphical Interchange Format. It is used for animations and small icons. GIF consists of 256 colors. These 256 colors make the file size small which is very good in terms of speed. If you are having images with a variety of colors then I would suggest you not to choose this format as GIF is limited to 256 colors only.
JPG: This is a 16-bit format which means it has the capability of providing you a wide variety of colors. Many digital cameras have this format set as a standard format. It allows you to compress images also. Thus you can use it for still images and the images that have complex colors. Apart from choosing the right image format, make sure you have optimized the images on your site as heavy images can slow down your site.
Fixing Broken Links:
The user experience of your site goes down when a user visits a page of your website and gets a 404-page error. Google & Bing get pretty upset with 404 errors also. As such managing your broken links is crucial, however your website might not just have broken internal links. There may be some external links on your site that give 404 errors. So you must figure out such links and change them.
You can use redirects for pages on your site that are no longer available and are showing 404 errors. There are many tools that you can use to find broken links on your website. Some of them are:
If you are using WordPress then you may consider using a plug-in for finding the broken links and redirecting them, such as 404 Redirected.
Final Thoughts:
Thus to make your website valuable you must put efforts on its maintenance. Webmasters are the programmer, content writer, site administrator and troubleshooter of your website. They make great effort to make your website live on the internet.