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Website Development Checklist

To make sure you don’t miss anything and do work on time, grab this checklist: You should always keep in mind that website development project doesn’t start with coding and doesn’t end after the day you finally launch your website. The phase of preparation affects all subsequent stages, defining how productive the development process will be. A profound and deep discovery of such aspects like age, sex, and interests of your end-user may become the key to success. The post-launch period is rather significant. Your project should be agile and flexible enough to have a possibility to change your website according to users’ feedback or spirit of the time. Keeping in mind that there’s no such thing as insignificant website development phase will prevent you from unexpected troubles and give you confidence that everything flows as it should, and you have full control over the project.

website-development-checklist


How important is a fast loading Website

Did you know that the 14 top mobile retail sites in the industry average only a 4.73 second response time? Not only that but Amazon leads them all with a response time of just 2.85 seconds! OK, your website response time might not ever rival Amazon’s but there are a few tricks you can learn for accelerating your website speed.

MAKING A GOOD FIRST IMPRESSION

It’s a proven fact that your website speed is the very first impression that you make when a consumer visits your site. In fact, 40 percent of visitors could end up simply abandoning your website if it takes too long to load. You should be aiming for a three-to-five second load time to keep them from letting their fingers do the walking and just walk away. To where? Well, probably right on over to your competitor’s site.

END VISITOR FRUSTRATION

There’s really nothing that can frustrate and even infuriate a visitor to your site like slow speed. It’s not just bad for your visitors but very bad for you as a website owner as well. These days, websites are used not only for doing online business but also for sharing useful information with the rest of the world. Whether you’re a retail website owner, a service provider, a photographer showcasing your work, an artist striving to get your voice heard by others, a teacher or provider of DIY tutorials wanting to share your knowledge, or even a stay-at-home mom starting a blog, it’s seriously important that you have an effective website. And, one of the main factors needed for making any website effective is, of course, speed.

MAKE SPEED A TOP PRIORITY

Let’s face it, the speed of your website can literally make or break it. Speed affects not only your traffic, but also your conversions, page views, sales, and your entire reputation. When you make it faster, you’re improving your business and helping it grow. In fact, recent studies show that a whopping 47 percent of users are actually expecting websites to load in two seconds or less. That’s even faster than Amazon! That’s exactly why website speeds play such an important role in the success of your online business and needs to become a top priority if your goal is standing out from your competition. Speeding it up will not only bring positive results when it comes to your conversions and page views, but you’ll also be providing a much better user experience for your visitors. And, the bottom line is that happy visitors become returning visitors.

SLOW SITES KILL CONVERSIONS

Everybody in business knows that you can’t build your brand and a solid customer base without conversions. And, the sad fact is that a slow website can kill those conversions. Not only do you not get effective SEO via better rankings but you build up a gang of visitors who are angry, dissatisfied, and ultimately only good customers for your competition. Don’t help your competition by having slow loading pages when theres are surely going to be faster. The big names in business have already found out how important speed is for their sites. Shouldn’t you do so, too?

For example:

~ Both retail giants Amazon and Walmart have actually reported a one percent revenue loss from just 100ms of site loading delays.
~ Walmart saw a two percent increase in conversions for every one second improvement in load time.
~ Mozilla reported a 2.2 second page speed increase from speeding up its page load.
~ Recent download figures for Firefox went up by 15.4 percent, which equals $10 million a year.
~ Shopzilla reported a 50 percent operational budget reduction by diminishing the load time of its website pages.

LOAD SPEEDS AFFECT YOUR SEARCH RANK

Do you know how important your site speed is for your SEO? Websites that load quickly, get a higher search engine ranking. That’s is because Google actually tends to prefer faster websites. It prefers them so much that it rewards the fast ones with a higher ranking in the search engine results. In addition, user experiences are another factor included in the ranking algorithm at Google. Therefore, when you boost your website speed and improve the user experience, you’ll eventually be improving your SEO ranking.

This results in higher traffic and attracting a great deal more in the area of quality leads. Those leads can convert to visitors and then to customers. You can expect to increase your overall sales exponentially, generate more revenue, and increase your bottom line.

HTTP REQUESTS

Your website could be slow due to an over-abundance of HTTP requests. When a user visits your site, they’ll be requesting certain files by having their web browser request the specific files from your server via the HTTP protocol. Those files can include CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files. If you have too many of them, there will be a great number of HTTP requests causing your website to slow down. That’s the reason for minimizing HTTP requests by combining the CSS, HTML, and JS scripts, using CSS in place of images (if possible), reducing the number of elements per web page, installing a cache plugin and reducing redirects that are responsible for creating more HTTP requests and increasing the page load time.

SPEED UP TODAY!

If you’re ready for seriously optimizing your website speeds, automatically minifying, compressing and caching your static data (including CSS, HTML, Images, and Javascript), then why not try Togglebox Web Accelerator? It’s not just FREE but requires no setup so you can spend your valuable time focusing on the development of your website. Why waste a ton of time working through lengthy service configuration when you can do it hands-free by turning it on? And, your newly accelerated website will be not only faster loading but also secured via Let’s Encrypt SSL. So, find out how much more effective your site can be when your images, scripts, and web pages become automatically compressed, optimized, and distributed worldwide. Get your accelerated cloud today!

Google start penalizing websites without HTTPS

So, just yet another thing for a final countdown.

First, it was infamous GDPR (btw, does anyone hears ‘bout it after the 25th May, or is just us who hear the community silence?)

Now, Google takes its turn. And, as we all hear, the web is officially going full HTTPS only, and yes, it has been going there for many years. We’ve seen an acceleration in the progress in recent months but we still have a long way to go on our journey of securing all traffic on the internet. Despite the great progress we’re making, and all the valid reasons we should continue to do so, there are people who believe having a secure web is not the right thing to do.

Less than one month from today, on July 23, out beloved Google will start prominently labeling any site loaded in Chrome without HTTPS as “Not Secure”.

Google has announced its plans back in February, and back then, the percent of sites loaded over HTTPS clocked in at 69.7%. Just one year prior to that only 52.5% of sites were loaded using SSL/TLS—the encryption protocol behind HTTPS — tremendous progress has been made!

Unfortunately, quite a few popular sites on the web still don’t support HTTPS (or fail to redirect insecure requests) and will soon be flagged by Google.

HTTPS IS THE NEW BLACK

Just go and scan Alexa Top 1 Million, the million largest sites on the wild wide web, and measure many different metrics about their security. The growth of HTTPS is not only being maintained but it’s actually accelerating.

No matter which way you look at the data, and no matter which way you measure it, usage of HTTPS is going through a huge growth phase right now. In the 6 months up to that report, we saw a 32% growth in the use of HTTPS in the top 1 million sites.

Mozilla tracks anonymous telemetry from Firefox browser and they have seen a staggering growth in the rate of pages being loaded over HTTPS.

The data shows that 75% of page loads in Firefox now take place using HTTPS instead of HTTP.

Last but certainly not the least, the biggest browser of them all also reports the exact same thing. Chrome telemetry puts the figures pretty much right on 75% too.

This trend has been showing for a long time. In fact, there isn’t any data I can find that shows there was ever a decrease in the amount of HTTPS on the web. It has always been increasing since as far back as data goes so this is nothing new, we’re just making much better progress in recent years.

Cloudflare people spent some time scanning the top one million sites too, and here’s what they learned about the 946,039 reachable over plaintext (unencrypted) HTTP.

If you were to ask the operators of these sites why they don’t protect themselves and their visitors with HTTPS, the responses you’d get could be bucketed into the following three groups: “I don’t need it”, “it’s difficult to do”, or “It’s slow”.

And guess what? None of these are legitimate answers, but yes — they’re common misconceptions so let’s take each in turn.

MYTH #1: “HTTPS IS DIFFICULT TO DEPLOY”

This was true.. in the mid-1990s. But hey, today, in2018, we can all honestly say that things have changed for the better.

Thankfully, we’ve come a long way since then. Today, you can protect your site with HTTPS in a matter of seconds, for free, either by signing up for Cloudflare or using a CA such as Let’s Encrypt.

MYTH #2: “I DON’T NEED HTTPS”

This argument is the most puzzling, especially when spouted by people who should know better. Even if you don’t care about performance (see myth #3), surely you care about the safety and privacy of those visiting your site.

Without HTTPS, anyone in the path between your visitor’s browser and your site or API can snoop on (or modify) your content without your consent. This includes governments, employers, and even especially internet service providers.

If you care about your users receiving your content unmodified and being safe from maliciously injected advertisements or malware, you care about — and must use — HTTPS.

Besides safety, there are additional benefits such as SEO and access to new web features: increasingly, the major browser vendors such as Apple, Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft, are restricting functionality to only work over HTTPS. As for mobile apps, Google will soon block unencrypted connections by default, in their upcoming version of Android. Apple also announced (and will soon hopefully follow through on their requirement) that apps must use HTTPS.

MYTH #3: “HTTPS IS SLOW”

Lastly, the other common myth about HTTPS is that it’s “slow”. This belief is a holdover from an era when SSL/TLS could actually have a negative performance impact on a site, but that’s no longer the case today. In fact, HTTPS is required to enable and enjoy the performance benefits of HTTP/2.

Detractors typically think HTTPS is slow for two primary reasons:

1) It takes marginally more CPU power to encrypt and decrypt data; and

2) establishing a TLS session takes two network round trips between the browser and the server.

When HTTPS content is served from the edge, typically 10-20 milliseconds away from your users in the case of Cloudflare, SSL/TLS enabled sites are incredibly fast and performant. And even when they are not served from an edge provider it bears repeating that SSL/TLS is not a performance burden! There’s really no excuse not to use it.

Pro tip: Advanced users should also consider using HSTS to instruct the browser to always load your content over HTTPS, saving it a round trip (and page load time) on subsequent requests.

If you’re trying to protect your and your customers’ online privacy and security, reach out to us at AltusHost.com and we can help you with this process.