Improve your website – that could have been one of your new year’s resolution. Something that you wanted to do for the longest time but never really got around to do.
Now it is already mid-February and you haven’t done anything. It might feel like an enormous hurdle to take.
Surely, improving your website must be very difficult, you might think. In reality, it is much easier to improve your website than you think!
Here’s the deal, taking on jobs like improving your website can indeed feel intimidating. The trick is to break those jobs down in bite-size pizes that are way easier to tick off.
Without further ado, here are 3 things you can easily do to improve your website.
Improving your website is much easier than you think!
Number one: If you are a musician, record label, management or tour agent. Let’s say anyone who has to display tour-dates on their website.
Then you probably came across the common problem of how to display the tour-dates in a cool and easy way. The best, of course, would be if your fans could buy the tickets straight away!
Tour-dates are important to get right
Maybe you even had a programmer some years ago that programmed that trick somewhat magically into the website. But now you’ve lost contact with the programmer and the tour-dates field is half broken and looks a bit scruffy.
One easy way to fix that problem could be to simply use a third-party tool that helps you display all important tour-dates on your website. How is this done? Just sign up with Songkick’s ‘Tourbox‘ (not sponsored).
Then you can edit a little snippet of code that you can simply insert into your site. Now, all you need to do is to fill in all your dates into the Tourbox website.
What is even better than that, Songkick partners with companies like Spotify, SoundCloud and Facebook to display your tour-dates on these platforms as well.
That means, you only have to fill in your tour-dates once and have them synced to all important places immediately. You can also insert ticket links and pre-schedule release beforehand.
Pictures are the window to the soul, and to slow websites
Number two: Everyone is keen on having amazing pictures on their websites. You just really want to display those new pictures you’ve got from your new band on your record label website.
Or you are a DIY-band and invested some hard earn money into promotional shots. And now they better sell well on your website.
Even if you are only a humble blogger and want to spice up your blog posts, you probably need some pictures to underpin your argumentation. Well, what can I say?
I’m a hundred per cent with you. However, please use the pictures wisely. What does that mean?
Don’t upload pictures simply with their full size. With modern digital photography on demand whenever we need it, pictures tend to have huge sizes.
If you simply upload an enormous picture to your website, it will significantly slow the whole thing down. Now: there is an easy cure for that problem.
Ask your photographer to run the pictures one last time through photoshop and save them for web-usage. Photoshop will reduce the size of the pictures without you even noticing a thing.
If it was a DIY-shot there is still nothing to fear. Use tools like tinypng.com (there is even a WordPress plugin for it).
You simply upload a huge picture and it will quickly get minified. Then re-download the pic. Now it’s safe to upload to your website!
If you want to learn more about WordPress read on here!
Regularly update existing content to improve your website
Number three: Coming up with new content on a regular basis can be a chore. What nobody thinks about however is to update existing content.
Surely, you’ve optimized your content to your heart’s content when you wrote it. You used all available tools and knowledge and now it must be fine as it is.
But here’s the kicker. Search engine optimization is not a static situation. Moreso, it is ever-evolving.
Google and co. are constantly working on improving search engines. That means that the ‘rules’ for good content are also changing.
What was very trendy in 2018 can be an absolute no go in 2020. Years ago you could run a decent blog with posts that were 300 words long.
Now, Google is hungry for long-read blog posts with more than 1000 words. You see, there are many things to think about when it comes to content.
Again, there is a handy tool to the rescue. You are presumably already using the Yoast-SEO plugin.
It is one of the most popular WordPress plugins with more than 5 million installations. The good thing about Yoast is, it updates fairly regularly.
This gives you a brilliant chance! Just go through your old content still using Yoast, just try to update it to the new recommendations the plugin is showing you.
And voilá! So easy is content updating.
Improve your website – it does not take long
Major improvements like implementing a new WordPress theme can come with some troubles. However, you now learned three easy ways on how to make your website better without breaking out in a sweat.
No matter if you simply take your tour-date strategy to the next level, sort out your pictures or go over the old content. There are many surprisingly easy ways on how to improve your website!