Creating a website alone is not enough. It must be well-optimized, user-friendly, performance-optimized, and of good quality. Web developers when creating a website must follow certain development practices to get the best results. As a web development company, we’ve listed the web development best practices that you can follow and implement when creating a website.
What is Web Development?
Web development is the process of creating, building, and maintaining websites and web applications. It involves various aspects including front-end development, back-end development, and full-stack development. The process of web development involves various tasks and skills required to build web pages or web applications that can be accessed over the internet.
Top Web Development Best Practices
Planning and Designing
Planning and designing are the most essential best practices of web development. A well-defined plan can give an idea to web developers and help them in developing a website as required. They should never begin coding before getting a clear-cut idea of the website they are to develop. It is very important to understand the project requirements and goals. Effective planning helps in understanding the target audience, client goals, challenges, and proper understanding of the project so that it can be developed and delivered properly.
Prioritize User Experience
User experience has to be prioritized in the web development process. A website must be accessible to the users and must have a good user experience. Ensure that the website is mobile-friendly, performance-optimized, good page speed, and user-friendly.
Ensure Great UX
Ensure that the design of the website is user-friendly. Thus, it will make the development process much more easier. While designing your website, make sure that you keep the user in mind. The users must be satisfied with the way the website is designed, or else they won’t be spending time on the website.
SEO – Friendly Development
Make sure to develop websites that are SEO-friendly. Use proper URL structure, highly flexible website structure, and meta tags. Also, ensure that the website is mobile-friendly with good page speed.
Ensure the Security of the Website
Security implementation is very important to safeguard your website against common web vulnerabilities. Implement proper authentication and authorization for the security of the website. Developers should adopt the best security practices for the protection of the website from cyber attacks.
Regular Testing and Debugging
Regularly test your website to identify bugs and errors. Use automated testing tools and also user testing methods to ensure a smooth user experience.
Documentation
Document your code including important functions, modules, and APIs for easy maintenance of the website in the future. It also helps with debugging and collaboration.
Continuous Learning
Continuous learning and staying updated with the latest trends and technologies can improve your skills in web development. It also helps in a better development process.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website to make it rank on search engines. SEO is one of the important methods used to promote websites and make them reach people across the globe. It helps businesses reach more people and become popular among consumers. Creating a website alone is not enough! Two very important factors to be considered along with website development are consumer and search engines. It is for the consumers, you are developing websites. However, the medium consumers use to reach the websites are search engines. Your website will be visible on search engines only if your website is SEO-friendly. Businesses selling products and services through websites, must for sure have an SEO-friendly website so that the traffic will increase, which further increases the conversion rate.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO), is the process of optimizing a website to increase its ranking and visibility on search engine results pages (SERP). SEO helps bring more traffic to the website through organic search (non-paid). There are 3 main types of SEO – On Page SEO, Off Page SEO, and Technical SEO.
Types of SEO
On-Page SEO :
On-page SEO is the process of optimizing web pages and improving their ranking on search engine result pages (SERPs). The main focus of on-page SEO is on the content and HTML source code of the web page. On-page SEO involves optimizing individual web pages to improve their ranking and visibility on search engines. This type of SEO focuses on the content and HTML source code of the page itself. SEO-rich keywords are added to the website content. Meta tags and headings are also added to the web page along with the keywords. Pages within the websites are also linked to each other for the search engines to understand the structure of your content. This is called internal linking.
Off-Page SEO :
Off-page SEO involves activities that take place outside the website. It mainly focuses on creating backlinks. It is the process of creating high-quality backlinks from authoritative websites. This helps in signaling trustworthiness to search engines. Writing articles for other websites, engaging on social media platforms, collaborating with influencers, and building brand awareness are some other off-page techniques used.
Technical SEO :
Technical SEO is the process of optimizing the technical aspects of the website. It involves various processes like improving site speed, ensuring mobile-friendliness of the website, ensuring crawl ability, implementing a secure connection, etc.
Why is SEO Important in Web Development?
SEO is an essential aspect of website development. Optimizing the website along with web development has become more important than ever. Having a website alone won’t help your business. It is necessary to make sure that it stands out and reaches your target audience to get more reach. SEO helps increase the visibility of your website and improve its performance and user experience.
Increases Organic Traffic
SEO helps bring more traffic to your website. An optimized website can get higher rankings on search engines like Google. This brings more organic traffic to your website.
Improves User Experience (UX)
Another importance of SEO in web development is it improves user experience. A better user experience drives more visitors to your website. Websites that are mobile-friendly, have relevant content and have better speed and performance are the ones that give a better user experience for the visitors.
Enhances the quality of websites
Websites with relevant content are not enough. It also must be well-optimized with relevant keywords. A website having relevant keywords, speed, quality content, better performance, and mobile-friendly websites can increase the organic traffic to the website. SEO helps in enhancing the quality of the website.
Mobile Optimization
People mostly use mobile devices for accessing the websites. Thus it is necessary to ensure that the websites are mobile friendly. SEO in web development ensures that the websites are optimized for mobile devices. This also helps in improving the ranking on search engine result pages (SERPs) and helps to reach more users.
Increases Conversion Rates
An optimized website with good user experience and performance improves conversion rates, by bringing more traffic to your website that is relevant and has chances to convert them into customers. Websites with strong call-to-action elements, and good page speed, all can increase conversion rates.
Decrease Development Errors
Optimizing the website at the time of website development can reduce the development error. Some of the common development errors include broken links, duplicate content, not SEO-friendly links, improper headings, missing meta tags, etc.
Long-Term Success
SEO is a long-term investment and can continue to rank on search engine result pages (SERPs) for years if the website is well-optimized. Paid advertising can provide immediate traffic until there is enough budget to run the ad. It is a short-term investment. Thus SEO ensures long-term success.
Open-source technologies play a crucial role in the US web development process. They offer several benefits for the developers and clients. It is better and advantageous as the code is open to the public and thus has fewer bugs as more people are monitoring it.
Benefits of Using Open-Source Technologies in Web Development
Cost Efficiency
Open-source technologies are free to use. Thus startups and small businesses can make use of these technologies without any restrictions. Most of the US developers are adopting this due to their cost-efficiency.
Customization and flexibility
Web developers have the freedom to modify and meet all their specific requirements through the customization process. Thus they prefer open-source technologies as it is harder to achieve tailored solutions with proprietary software. US web development companies use open-source technologies to build highly customized websites and applications.
Speed of Development
Open-source technologies have pre-built modules, libraries and frameworks like React, Vue.js, Django, and Laravel. This helps the developers to speed up the development process as they will not have to build features from scratch.
Security
As the code is accessible to the public, they are under continuous review and is improved constantly by the experts, This makes the open-source more secure and transparent.
Cloud and DevOps Integration
Many of the developers in the US and other countries work with cloud infrastructure and DevOps practices. These often depend on open-source tools. Open-source platforms that enable effective web application scaling and management, such as Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, and Jenkins, have emerged as key components of contemporary DevOps workflows.
Cross-Platform Compatibility
Web developers can create cross-platform applications using open-source web technologies as they are designed to work across multiple platforms.
Sustainability and Vendor Independence
Open source provides long-term sustainability. The developers can migrate or modify the software without relying on a single vendor’s proprietary system.
Conclusion
Open-source technologies play an important role in web development. Popular frameworks and tools such as React, Vue.js, Django, and Node.jsprovide cost-efficient and innovative solutions. They support the rapid development process. Companies across the US are adopting open-source frameworks and tools to stay ahead of the curve, in the web development space.
Website performance and optimizationare two significant factors of a website. The website should deliver the content to the visitors as quickly as possible. People these days are used to browsing websites easily and quickly with high-speed internet, and thus have no time to wait even for an extra second! If it has good page speed and a responsive design, it also ends up increasing the conversion rate and decreasing the bounce rate.
What is Web Performance Optimization?
Web Performance Optimization is the process of improving the website’s speed and responsiveness. By doing this, the website will load faster which can lead to a better user experience and improved search engine rankings which further increases the conversion rates. It is the website page loading speed and its performance, that makes the user visit our website more often. For your business to be successful, you first need to have a successful website with good loading speed and responsive design.
Why Website Performance Matters?
Even though the slow-speed websitematter doesn’t seem to be a major one, it can affect your entire business. Even if you have good content, services, and products for the customers, the traffic to your website and conversion rates will get reduced along with the website ranking on search engines if your website performance is not good.
SEO
An important factor that is affected by poor page performance is SEO. The ranking of your website gets reduced if your website is not performing well and has low page speed. Even though page speed is not the main factor that affects your website’s place on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), if Google sees your website and the competitor’s website as equally relevant, then the one performing better and having more page speed will get the higher position.
User Experience
Users are usually very impatient. If the site takes a long time to load, they will leave immediately. This results in an increase in bounce rates. A website with higher performance and better page speed improves user satisfaction and this further leads to an increase in the time spent by users on the website.
Conversion and sales
Conversion rate and sales are the two most important factors affected by low website performance. Performance affects user satisfaction. They are more likely to download a content offer, sign up, or complete a purchase when they are satisfied and happy using your website.
Customer Trust
A website with good performance means the user will get a kind of good image of the brand and its reputation. A slow website may make it look unprofessional. Thus, customer loyalty can be built through a good-performance website as it helps in gaining the trust of the customers.
Web Page Performance Optimization Techniques
1. Minimize HTTP Requests
Each element on a webpage including images, scripts, stylesheets, etc requires an HTTP request which adds to the overall load time of your website. The more requests, the slower the site! Using a CDN, minifying CSS and JS files can help to limit the number of HTTP request your site makes. Also, remove the unnecessary plugins and widgets.
2. Optimize Images
Images are mostly the largest assets on a web page and if they are of high resolution, they can slow down the website. Use the right file format – JPEG for photos, PNG for graphics, and SVG for icons. Compress images and Serve images in next-gen formats like WebP. Also, implement lazy loading so that the images load only when the visitors scroll through them.
3. Leverage Browser Caching
Caching is necessary for improving the website performance. It allows a browser to store the files locally, that are accessed often. It allows browsers to pre-load some of the content of your website which further helps in faster webpage loading and delivery.
4. Enable Compression
Compressing files can reduce their size, which further increases their loading speed. One of the most reliable compression frameworks is Gzip without affecting the user experience. Other methods like Brotli compression can also be used to compress files.
5. Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
One of the best ways to optimize website performance is to reduce the size of Javascript, HTML, and CSS. This can be done by minifying them, which involves removing unnecessary code like unused functions and variables, white space characters, line breaks, comments, extra semicolons, etc. Minification can be done either manually or using a minification tool.
6. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Content Delivery Network helps to optimize content delivery. They use multiple servers to deliver content globally, delivering content from the server closest to the user. When the user visits your website, the Content Delivery Network (CDN) chooses the server that is closest to their location.
7. Reduce Server Response Time (TTFB)
Reducing the Server Response Time can increase the page loading speed. Use a faster hosting service, implement caching, and optimize your web server settings.
8. Reduce Total Redirects
More redirects on the server can increase the loading time. Redirects are used to send the users from the page they have clicked to another page. Minimize or eliminate unnecessary redirects and avoid redirect chains
9. Implement HTTP/2
Implementing HTTP/2 redirects helps in improving the website’s performance. Enable HTTP/2 on your server, which requires SSL/TLS (HTTPS).
10. Track 404 Errors
404 error pages occur when users try to access a page that no longer exists. It might have been deleted or moved. In this case, you will be losing a potential customer since they won’t be returning to your website due to this issue. Try to track down 404 errors and remove dead links.
11. Make Mobile a Priority
People these days use mobile phones to access various websites. It is their primary browsing medium. For this websites should load faster on mobile devices. Thus, focus on creating a mobile-friendly website with maximum loading speed on mobile devices.
12. Identify Poor-Performing Plugins
Identify add-ons or extensions. Keep only the necessary plugins. Always deploy the latest, fastest versions. This is important if you are running a WordPress website.
