We’ll answer your questions, highlighting why optimising your website is recommended.

 

Why optimising your website is always a good idea

Have you ever visited a company’s website only to find fault with its sluggish speed or less-than-enviable user experience? Many websites fail to factor in accessibility, too. However, these areas, SEO and other technical aspects, can be improved by consulting a knowledgeable full-service design agency such as thefingerprint.

Guiding you through various ways to optimise your business, charity or organisation’s website, this blog will explore the changes that can improve not only your own prospects, but the user experience of your customers or clients.

Performance optimisation

Looking for higher engagement rates and lower bounce rates? Optimising your website’s overall speed and loading time can help Google prioritise your site among a sea of similar websites. The search engine will then make your site more visible by presenting it higher up in its search engine result pages. The reasoning here is that Google wants to maintain its reputation for presenting the most relevant and visitor-friendly results.

Examples of optimising your website’s performance include:

• Enabling browser caching
• Compressing image sizes
• Removing any unrequired plugins.

Why is this needed?

Still wondering if optimising your website is worth it? We hear you.

It has been shown that “82% of consumers say slow page speeds impact their purchasing decisions” (Blogging Wizard). Therefore, introducing these changes with incurred costs could bring a satisfying financial ROI due to removing customer frustrations.

SEO optimisation

Falling into three categories, we cannot recommend optimising your website for search engines highly enough. Indeed, ‘SEO’ stands for search engine optimisation and covers:

• Technical SEO
• On-page SEO
• Content-related SEO.

Here are some of the strategies which your business can rely on to optimise its SEO.

Technical SEO

The behind-the-scenes elements of SEO are included in this category. Often unseen heroes, a website developer can:

• Refine your website’s architecture
• Update broken links and fix crawl errors
• Submit an XML sitemap.

On-Page SEO

More noticeable than its technical equivalent, the following three examples of on-page SEO will strengthen the benefits experienced with your search engine optimisation:

• Structure written content in headings (H1, H2, H3)
• Include keywords in said content
• Add/improve title tags and meta descriptions.

Content-based SEO

Content SEO improvements influence what written words and topics will appear on a webpage or blog article. It shapes what prospective customers will read at the planning stage. You can equally refresh old blog posts by adding more recent studies, statistics and quotes from high authority websites.

These high-impact tasks include:

• Writing to target popular keywords
• Creating content around topic clusters
• Making older blog posts more relevant.

Why is this needed?

Not only will ‘appeasing the SEO gods’ boost your online visibility, as more people discover you (combining with our performance optimisation suggestion above) but this often translates into more organic traffic (people visiting your site without clicking on an ad). This builds awareness of your brand and means that more potential customers or clients will be reading about your services/products. Overall, it has the potential to increase your current volume of enquiries, leads and sales.

Accessibility optimisation

The United Kingdom has introduced well-received laws that insist that companies accommodate disabled people, for example, when entering offices and shops, under the Equality Act 2010. Yet despite this raised awareness, accessibility issues still exist in digital premises (such as an online e-commerce store).

A 2025 article from Names.co.uk noted that 80% of 150,000 UK websites studied had a digital access issue. These can include insufficient colour contrasts and missing alt-text descriptions of images, which screen readers use to describe on-page images to blind and visually impaired users.

Here are examples of how your website can become more universally accessible:

• Introduce an H1-H3 etc heading structure
• Always include alt text for all images
• Switch on keyboard navigation.

Why is this needed?

As well as being fairer to prospective website visitors and customers, you can attract higher volumes of traffic (those accessing your site) through SEO. Google has rewarded accessible websites for years, as Scanluma highlights:

“In 2021, Google made Core Web Vitals a ranking factor, and the accessibility community paid attention. Why? Because many accessibility improvements directly impact these performance metrics”.

In short, you can ensure that everyone is able to navigate and read your site while growing your audience, presenting valuable information and building trust.

User experience (UX) optimisation

Often abbreviated as UX, your website could benefit from optimising its user experience to make customer and client online visits more enjoyable. Not only enjoyable, but the following measures have also been effective and championed by the UX industry for keeping website users engaged:

• Mobile-friendly optimisation, navigation and layouts
• Intuitive sitemaps, menus and the process of reaching essential pages
• More white space around brief paragraphs and bullet-pointed formatting
• Clear font and background contrasts for easy readability.

Why is this needed?

Compare the experience of scrolling through two sites in your chosen industry.

Site A has a wall of black text in a scroll font against a grey background, lacks a clear path to a ‘Contact Us’ page and cannot be easily explored on your mobile device. This would cause you to switch to a computer device – that is, if you could easily read the text against a similar coloured background. The chances are you would abandon the site and return to Google to find a competitor. This means the company has lost your trust in seconds, alienated thousands of consumers, as well as missing out on a sale or email.

You then visit ‘Site B’ and have a more enjoyable experience. This second website has plenty of negative space around each paragraph, includes bullet points for easy scrolling when you are short of time, and presents a clear journey from the page you land on to any additional pages and information you require.

This comparison reveals why we should always have customers in mind when commissioning website optimisation services or a WordPress website (re)design.

Optimise your website for results with thefingerprint

As shown above, there is more than one method of optimising your website for success. From performance to SEO, accessibility to user experience optimisation techniques, many of these areas overlap. Therefore, it is prudent to optimise all at once.

At thefingerprint, we understand what makes web design and development tick. Contact us or call +44 (0)7740348521 to see how we can help your website be its very best.

 

If you found this helpful, then you should also read these articles: Do websites matter in the age of social media?, How to optimise your website for local search in 2025, and 10 Website copywriting terms explained for your business.