How To Update Your Website While Keeping It “Light”

Despite looking smart and professional, the real beauty of your DotGO website is in its speed and its versatility. As your business grows and changes over time, your website needs to be able to do the same. Luckily, your control panel gives you the ability to make stylistic, structural and content changes whenever you want!

One of the best but, often, most overlooked things about why our websites are so special is their speed. Open your site now and see how fast it loads!

That happens because of the hard work put in by our designers when they build your website, balancing style with functionality, to ensure your website is lightning-quick. Here are a few tips on how to keep that up, while making the changes you need.

Trust the Hardware

With DotGO, your website runs on our rapid servers. In fact, we have recently made significant investment behind the scenes to upgrade them, meaning that they’re faster than ever! You don’t have to do anything to get the best out of them; it’s all covered by your monthly subscription fee (more on what else that covers, right here) – just trust us to do the legwork behind the scenes and enjoy the benefits on your site.

Host Video Elsewhere

Video content is a fantastic addition to any website. You can show people what your business and services are about, rather than telling them with words. It’s more entertaining and gives a new element of personality to your site. There is a downside, however – speed. Video content is heavy and takes a lot of processing power to host on your website.

We’ve got a way round it, however. Instead of hosting the video in question directly on your website, we give you the option to embed them from YouTube. Here’s what you’ll need:

1. YouTube Brand Account (Setup info here: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9367690?hl=en-GB)

2. Video Content

Simply create the section on the page you want and implant the link to the video you want to appear. It’ll appear on the site with minimal impact on your site’s speed.

Convert Images to WebP

WebP? What does that mean? WebP is a relatively new file type that’s taking the web by storm. We could get into the technical side of things but, instead, we’ll just say that they’re super-small and load super-fast. At DotGO, we give you the cheat code when it comes to using WebP on your website – the editor converts the files automatically! Simply upload the image you want to appear (provided you’re authorised to use it, of course. (More on that here) and – voila! The image will appear on your site, loading fast and keeping page speed high.

Regular Updates

As we’ve said, a growing business necessarily means a growing website. if you’re adding new services, new staff or more products, your website needs to reflect that. Google loves a website that’s updated regularly – it shows that the business is busy, that the owners are on-the-ball and that the information on the website is up to date.

These are all things that Google considers when deciding which websites to boost up the search rankings and which not to.

Consider a Blog

As you might imagine, however, more information requires a bigger website. When we build your site, we’ll give you four main pages, plus a contact page, which is plenty for almost any business. As your business grows, however, you might need more. One option is to keep adding sections, lengthening your pages with the info you need to add. That will mean that your pages will be quite a bit larger and, therefore, slower. Another option is to add that extra info with a blog. You can add the new info you need and get another great reason to shout about your business on social media with each post you make! The info is broken up into nice, manageable chunks – easy to load and easy to read. For more reasons to start blogging (click right here)

If you ever need help making changes to your website, our friendly support team are just a phone call away! They’re always happy to help with advice and instruction, so you can update your website to look just how you want it to.