Tag Archives: Web Development

How to Improve Your Website Page Speed

March 19, 2019

Website page speed is the measurement of exactly how fast the content on your page loads. This means how long it takes to fully display the content of your page. One of the best ways to evaluate your page speed is to use the free tool Google PageSpeed Insights. In one of our most recent posts we went into great depth on how important having good results on Google PageSpeed Insights really is. In that post we made the point that page speed is a very important factor for SEO as it is known that Google uses page speed as one of it’s many signals used by its algorithm when ranking pages. As well as being important to Google, page speed is very important to user experience also which plays a part in how your website ranks. There are many ways to improve your website’s page speed such as: Fully Switching over to https: Ensuring that your website has an SSL Cert not only shows that your website is safe to browse on and to purchase products/services safely with your credit card but it will also help with your SEO as Google looks favorably on websites who have an SSL Cert over those who have none. Where this affects page speed is when the http version of your website is cached and redirects to your https version. By ensuring that your website automatically redirects to the https version you can greatly enhance the page speed. Rectifying Image Related Issues: Images tend to be a common issue that cause an unfavorable page speed. Images can cause issues unnecessarily as they can be a huge size and of too high of an image quality than required or needed. To rectify these two issues it’s recommended to take a look at all your images and to both compress and resize them as necessary. By resizing them to a more appropriate size and by compressing them to a more appropriate image quality you will reduce your page load time which will in turn improve your page speed. Browser Caching: By implementing browser caching on your website you are telling visitors to your website exactly how long their browsers should retain information/memory of your website for. This means that a message would be sent to the users browser that images on the website should be cached (remembered) for three weeks so that when this specific user visits the website again within this three week period your website will load more quickly as the resources to remember the images are being pulled from their device instead of your website. This takes some of the workload away from your website and in turn this will improve your page speed also. Improving your page speed is a never-ending goal and something that should be continuously worked on to improve it as much as possible as it is so important not only to SEO and User experience but the overall success of your website. If you would like to inquire about improving your website’s page speed please contact 2Cubed and get your business the traffic and success it deserves. You can call us on 01-9058114 or 051-440425, email hello@2cubed.ie or else get in touch using the live chat on our website! Please feel free to follow and interact with us on the following profiles.

The Importance of Ecommerce for Retail Businesses

Category: Tips and Tricks

March 15, 2019

Ecommerce has grown dramatically in its importance and its ability to be the deciding factor between whether a business is a success or not. This was more clearer than ever from the findings in the 2019 PwC Irish Retail & Consumer Report which provides a vast array of interesting insights about consumers and the current state of the retail sector in 2019. One of the prevailing recurring themes of the report was the need for retail businesses in this day and age to not only have a website but an Ecommerce website where customers can purchase products online. Two key insights found in the report in relation to Ecommerce was that 20% of Irish consumers shop online weekly or more often via their mobile devices and also 30% of consumers purchased online weekly or more often in 2018, compared to 24% in 2017. There are many reasons why you should consider having an Ecommerce website for your business if you haven’t already. Here are 3 great reasons why you should have an Ecommerce website: Better Customer Experience By having an Ecommerce website it is extremely convenient and easy for customers to browse your online store and purchase a product whenever they wish. By having an online store you remove the need for the customer to make the journey to your bricks and mortar location and purchase their product of choice. By giving them the convenience to do this at home they will be more at eased and relaxed. A happy customer is a buying customer. Reach a Broader Global Market By bringing your retail business into the digital market you will open yourself up to a whole new market that can potentially have a global reach. When you are a bricks and mortar business your customers will be generally just those in the immediate area as it would be inconvenient for others from further afield to travel just to shop at your store. By restricting yourself to only the local populace you have not only greatly reduced your target market but also reduced your potential earnings. By having an Ecommerce website you remove this restriction and your market is virtually endless in its reach. Passive Earnings By having an online store you are always open for business 24/7! This is a great advantage over a traditional shop which is open for a certain amount of hours and usually only on certain days also. When your store is online and always open for business people can purchase off you any day at any time. By giving them this convenient option you have endless opportunities to earn money as you are no longer restricted by traditional business hours. While there is and will always still be a place for traditional physical retail businesses it cannot be denied that those choosing to shop online are increasing and will continue to do so into the future. By not having an Ecommerce website you’re not only restricting your potential earnings but you are ignoring an ever growing and important part of the retail market. If you would like more information or would like to inquire about getting an Ecommerce website created and developed please contact 2Cubed and get your business the traffic and success it deserves. You can call us on 01-9058114 or 051-440425, email hello@2cubed.ie or else get in touch using the live chat on our website! Please feel free to follow and interact with us on the following profiles.

Google PageSpeed Insights and why it’s so important!

Category: Tips and Tricks

March 6, 2019

Google PageSpeed Insights is a free tool offered by Google which is designed to report and make an informed determination of the performance of a specific web pages performance on both Desktop and Mobile devices. Google PageSpeed Insights also provide suggestions on how that specific web page can be improved. The report that is provided by Google PageSpeed Insights provides you with information such as field data and lab data about your submitted web page. Lab data is a type of data that can be used to aid with debugging performance issues whereas field data’s main use is that it captures real-time user experience metrics which can be helpful. As mentioned previously since PageSpeed Insights are a free tool offered by Google anyone can simply search “Google PageSpeed Insights” and enter their website URL to get a live up to date results for their PageSpeed on Desktop and Mobile devices. Entering a URL and hitting “Analyze” will quickly get you a detailed report of what’s slowing that web page based on two parameters and this report will also come with recommendations on how to fix it. When you enter your url your website will be analyzed and within a few seconds you will receive a score for both desktop and mobile which will be a percentage out of 100. 0%-49% is considered slow, 50%-89% is average whereas 90%-100% is considered fast by industry standards. The reason these scores are important is because they play a factor alongside general SEO optimisation when it comes to google’s algorithm of ranking websites. Basically the better your Google PageSpeed Insights score is the more likely you will be to rank higher than others provided your general SEO optimisation is done efficiently as well of course. Google recently changed how PageSpeed Insights judge websites and since Google have made this change a lot of websites are finding that their once higher score has now fallen and they are struggling to get it back to it’s once former glory. When your website is analyzed by Google PageSpeed Insights as part of their analysis summary they will provide diagnostics and opportunities for improvement. By following these suggestions you can improve your overall score again. Google PageSpeed Insights true to their name provide a great insight in to the health and strength of your website by giving you accurate reports on it’s page speed. As it’s a free tool there is no excuse to not avail of it and use it’s useful information.

IMPROVE YOUR GOOGLE PAGESPEED INSIGHTS SCORE

To inquire about improving your score on Google PageSpeed Insights please contact 2Cubed and get your business the traffic and success it deserves. You can also call us on 01-9058114 or 051-440425, email hello@2cubed.ie or else get in touch using the live chat on our website! Please feel free to follow and interact with us on the following profiles.

The Importance of Good Content for SEO Value

Website Content & SEO Value - 2Cubed Web Design

Category: Tips and Tricks

February 25, 2019

Content and SEO are two important elements of a website that when both done well can elevate a website to new levels of success. However when neither are done well or even just one done well then the website will without a doubt suffer. The reason for this and the reason that content and SEO accommodate each other so well is because strong content that is seen by google to have SEO value will rank more highly than others who are deemed not to be of such value so basically when your content has value to search engines the SEO work that you will have done on this page already will cause your page to rank highly on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). So what is SEO value exactly you may find yourself asking? To explain what SEO value is one should first be clear on how Google as a search engine works. Google uses algorithms when people input a search to generate results which based on Google’s algorithms are what they believe to be the best and most relevant to the term/search query inputted by the user. The results that Google will display to the user are generated from content that is available throughout the web and content which is then ranked in order of its usefulness to the user’s search. So to ensure that your content is shown here in the relevant results you need to ensure it has SEO value and to ensure that it does have SEO value your content simply put needs to be beneficial to searchers, it needs to provide answers or at least information that will aid the user. To ensure that your content provides the right beneficial information and that it has SEO value be sure to ask yourself these questions when creating your content:

Does my content provide useful information?
Is my content easy and engaging to read and interact with?
Does my content have a professional and credible tone?
Is my content more beneficial than competitor’s content?

If you can honestly answer yes to these questions then your content has the correct elements in place that are required to achieve the true potential of the SEO value of your content. If your answer to these questions is no then it’s time to go back to the drawing board and rewrite your content to achieve some true SEO value. Please contact 2Cubed and get your business the traffic and success it deserves. You can call us on 01-9058114 or 051-440425, email hello@2cubed.ie or else get in touch using the live chat on our website! Please feel free to follow and interact with us on the following profiles.

Web Designers Wexford

Category: Tips and Tricks Website Design Wexford

February 21, 2019

Website Design is one of the most important components of a website alongside functionality. The design and look of your website can be the deciding factor on whether your website is a success or not. This is of course because the design of your website provides the first impression to users. If the impression is good users may proceed and navigate further throughout your website whereas if the impression is bad they may bounce straightaway from your website which will be a potential conversion lost forever.

It’s no secret that websites which deliver a great user experience tend to always have a far superior conversion rate than those who don’t. While creating a brilliant website design can seem costly you need to view it as an investment in the future of the success of your website and that by not investing in a great web design now the cost may be far greater than anything monetary. 2Cubed Web Design Wexford & Dublin design and develop websites across all industries and sectors, including eCommerce websites, multilingual websites, as well as projects which include custom functionality and specific database and software integration. 2Cubed Web Design Wexford & Dublin specialises in Website Development, Web Design, App Development, eCommerce Website Design, Website Marketing and Content Management (CMS). We can work with a variety of Content Management Systems (CMS) such as WordPress and Magento, and can give your existing website a re-design making it responsive and moving it into the 21st century. Our creative web designers are ready to design, code & market your project. We provide websites nationally designed by our highly skilled web design team. To view our full portfolio of work please click here. To get your dream website designed today please feel free to contact us on 01 905 8114 or 051-440425, email hello@2cubed.ie Please feel free to follow and interact with us on the following profiles.

Website Maintenance Ireland

Category: Projects

January 18, 2019

Website Maintenance Ireland

Security

Hosting

Updates

Support

Website Maintenance

2Cubed provides website maintenance and website management for 100s of companies across Ireland, from large businesses in Dublin to smaller, regional companies in rural areas. Ensuring that you have an effective website maintenance plan in place is vital if your website is to be safe and successful. Without a website maintenance plan in place you will place your website at risk to malicious threats such as being hacked.

As part of our website maintenance plans 2Cubed will schedule changes and security updates to your website to ensure that it is protected and performing efficiently. Whatever the size or scale of your company, we can manage and maintain your website, keeping it updated and secure, leaving you to get on with the day-to-day running of your business.

To make things easier for people to outsource their website management to us, we launched our new sister site Website Maintenance which allows new customers to come on board and select the website maintenance package that is suitable for their needs.
2Cubed can help fix your website after it has been hacked, update and secure it with latest patches, install security and SSL certificates, provide web hosting, and set up or migrate email.

Our Services Include:

Website Hosting

Website Monitoring (Pingdom)

Security Monitoring

Fixing Website Hacks

Website Malware Resolution

Imporving Website Speed

Plugin Updates

CMS Updates

Dedicated Suppot Channel Between 9am – 10.30am every morning

(Support@2cubed.ie)

Why website maintenance is so important!

Category: Tips and Tricks

January 16, 2019

When most people get a website designed their main focus is the visual look and the physical content of the website. Most people will spend the majority of the development process focusing on these two things. Once they are happy with both and the website goes live many people think the job is done. This assumption would be wrong as when a website goes live it is of vital importance that they have a long-term website maintenance plan in place. A big part of any website maintenance plan is the regular enforcing and checking of security updates on your website. These updates ensure that all plugins and functions continue to run efficiently and are updated when required, these security updates also help to increase the safety of the website as it reduces malicious threats such as being hacked. While avoiding being hacked is the most obvious reason for websites to keep on top of their website maintenance and security updates there are other risks that can occur when website maintenance is neglected or treated as an afterthought. Three pitfalls that you can encounter if you fail to or simply take too long to do your security updates are as follows: Decreasing of Website Speed One of the main reasons applying updates consistently to websites is such a good thing is because each update brings with it improvements which true to their name “update” the quality and performance of the website in key factors such as speed & performance. By ignoring updates and holding on to older versions of plugins you will find your website’s speed is slower than your competitors which in turn will hurt your SEO as website speed is a ranking factor. Broken Website As mentioned above website updates not only improve key factors such as website speed and performance but also can provide additional new features so to not update consistently when possible would be a very silly thing to do. If you fail to make updates, plugins and functions can become so out of date that they are no longer supported which can cause your website to be broken and will cause a terrible user experience for your users. Rising Time & Monetary Costs When you don’t make updates and problems occur, not only will it cost you time to fix but it can also cause you a considerable amount of money. This is because it can cause a developer to have to spend much more time applying the update than originally would have been required as they now have to fix the broken issues before first updating the website. This will cost you time and money. To conclude having a long term website maintenance plan in place is something that every website should have and it should always be a priority. If you don’t you risk your site being hacked amongst a whole other plethora of pitfalls that can occur. To inquire about website maintenance and website maintenance plans please contact 2Cubed today! You can also contact us on 01 905 8114 or 051-440425, email hello@2cubed.ie Please feel free to follow and interact with us on the following profiles.

SEO Performance – How to tell if your SEO is working for you or against you

Category: Tips and Tricks

September 25, 2018

In the aggressive and competitive online market of today, Effective SEO has often proven to be the deciding factor for whether a website becomes successful or not. With so much knowledge nowadays about SEO virtually all websites are employing it in one shape or another as gaining high ranking positions on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) has become more competitive than ever before. However this being said not all SEO was created equal as many are not utilising it to its full potential either through laziness or simple ignorance of what is required from them to employ effective SEO optimisation throughout their respective websites. So how can someone who is doing SEO for their website know if they are doing it correctly or not you may ask? As for so many cases the proof is in the pudding! A great way to figure out if your SEO work has been effective or ineffective is to gauge it off metrics which can often be found through channels and tools such as google analytics, Moz etc. Below are four great metrics to measure your SEO success or lack thereof against: Keyword Ranking Keyword Ranking is something you should always be tracking regularly. Keyword rankings let you know how your website is performing on the SERP on google and if its appearing high for key search phrases related to your business. By improving these rankings you will have an increased flow of traffic to your website which will increase your chances of getting more conversions on your website. There is no particular trick to ranking high for keywords as google’s algorithm is ever-evolving and as such this means that there is no exact way to predict how well your website will perform in the rankings. It is a case of constantly checking and amending your strategy as needed. Organic Search Traffic Organic Search Traffic is the amount of natural traffic you get to the website. Effective use of SEO can improve your SEO performance in many ways. Three particular ways to improve your organic traffic are as follows:

By improving your ranking position on the SERP, as such you will be viewed more and have more traffic to your website.
By improving meta titles and meta descriptions users will now be more likely to click and interact with your content thus increasing your organic traffic.
Creating more content means that not only will your website have fresh content being applied to it which shows it’s an active and very alive website but also having new content gives you the opportunity to target new keywords and opportunities to earn visibility.

Online Conversion Rate What’s considered a “healthy” Online Conversion Rate tends to vary wildly depending on the industry. Conversions should always be a measurable event that can be tied to revenue. The actual conversion rate itself is comprised of the percentage of website visitors that complete a conversion. Generally speaking a conversion rate of 1.5%-3% is considered quite good. Effective SEO will help to drive traffic to your website and from there your website should be optimized to be able to convert these visitors into leads and conversions. Effective SEO is half the battle, having an optimized responsive website is the second part. If you can do both of these things effectively you should be able to see the results in your improved conversion rate. Bounce Rate Bounce Rate is the percentage of traffic that leaves your website quickly after landing on it without looking at any other pages before they leave. Bounce Rate can be a useful barometer in which to gauge how effective or not your SEO is as bounce rate can indicate how accurate the page is targeted towards visitors who are interested in that type of content or indeed in your business and if a page has a high bounce rate it can usually be a signal that something is inherently wrong with that web page whether it’s the content or the design of the page that seems to be frustrating customers so much that they bounce. Some pages can actually be expected to have high bounce rates such as pages which act more as a general reference for information such as a calendar or blog post for example. Of course bounce rates for key pages such as a homepage or services page should be lower. A bounce rate of 35%-60% is considered the industry standard average. If your page has a high bounce rate and it’s a key page for you then it’s time for you to reevaluate the SEO on that page and possibly the design also to ensure you are delivering the best user experience possible. By using these four metrics to measure your SEO success you will have a good idea of just how effective your SEO efforts have been and whether they have borne fruit or not. The information gleaned from these metrics will help you to alter your SEO strategy accordingly to meet your goals. SEO is a constant battle, by doing well in these four metrics you will definitely be in a position to win the fight! 2Cubed work with clients on a monthly basis, content writing/management and marketing are two of the many services we offer. To improve SEO ranking through effective marketing and have produced excellent results for many businesses, we help clients to get them to number one for their specific keywords. To help provide the best SEO service, 2Cubed also has an in-house web content writer who will work with you to customize and optimize your content, making it fit your brand identity and corporate voice, as well as maximizing impact on search engines. We will ensure that your content is unique and tailored for search engines so that your website has the best possible chance of reaching and expanding your audience. We provide reports and strategic plans assessing search result performance, working diligently to improve your company’s search engine optimization so that it continues to climb Google rankings on a regular basis. To find out the right move and strategy to take when it comes to effective SEO please contact 2Cubed today! Please feel free to contact us also on 01 905 8114 or 051-440425, email hello@2cubed.ie Please feel free to follow and interact with us on the following profiles.