Maximizing Your Website's Potential
At home, I have to know and manage the schedules for everyone. My oldest daughter is a competitive dancer, my husband coaches little league, and before going anywhere I need to know the state my 2-year-old is in and how long she’ll be able to handle wherever we’re going. In order to keep my household running efficiently, I put some systems in place that save us all a lot of time and energy.
Your website needs some tricks to work at peak efficiency, too. In this episode I’ll give you some tips about:
- SEO and keywords
- Mobile optimization
- Compressing your photos so that your pages load faster
It doesn’t have to be a complicated process to get your website running faster.
To learn more about elevating your brand, read our blog at http://blog.morethanabrand.co
Connect on IG @fierceified.agency
For more tips, connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fierceified-creative-consulting/
Learn more about Fierceified Creative and Consulting at https://fierceified.agency/
Music credit: Trust The Vibes by Vincent Tone
A Podcast Launch Bestie production
Transcript
Hello, hello, hello and welcome to episode 10 of More Than Brand Podcast.
Speaker:I am excited y'all.
Speaker:We got two more episodes and this season is over.
Speaker:I couldn't be more excited.
Speaker:The time is flying by.
Speaker:Bye so much.
Speaker:And I was sitting here thinking the other day about.
Speaker:How I've shifted and how I've changed and how I started doing
Speaker:things that's more efficient.
Speaker:So if I got any moms out there listening, you know that there just,
Speaker:there just isn't enough hours in a day.
Speaker:It is not, it's almost like the world wants you to be able to do all the things.
Speaker:Love on your man, take care of your kids, work a job, have a side hustle, build
Speaker:generational wealth, clean your house, cook the dinner like it is, 10,000 things
Speaker:on your to-do list that never ends.
Speaker:And let's not forget laundry.
Speaker:Hate doing laundry, but as a mom, you have to find those places.
Speaker:In your life that makes things more efficient.
Speaker:Now for me, I have, and if you don't know, I have a 13 year old
Speaker:and a soon to be two year old.
Speaker:She'll be two on April 13th, 2023.
Speaker:So depend on when you listening.
Speaker:She's probably already two.
Speaker:But with that age gap in his two girls, Kennedy and Carter Kennedy is.
Speaker:Fledged dancer and she's competing and we're in full swing of
Speaker:competition season and she gotta get back and forth to practices.
Speaker:Carter, although she's not active as an extracurricular activity, she's active.
Speaker:Okay, Carter's my firecracker baby.
Speaker:She don't wanna sit down.
Speaker:I have to be very strategic about where I take her when I take her, what
Speaker:she's done before I get her there.
Speaker:Like, has she had a nap?
Speaker:Has she already ate?
Speaker:How long is she gonna last in this particular setting?
Speaker:Oh, maybe she don't need to be in this setting cuz we gonna be there too long.
Speaker:and I had to come up with a way that made our lives easier
Speaker:and made things more efficient.
Speaker:And on top of that, my husband is a little league football coach.
Speaker:So as dance season is winding down, football season is winding up and it's
Speaker:just everybody's schedules are everywhere.
Speaker:And.
Speaker:To make sure that we hit all the marks and everybody gets all their mom time.
Speaker:Time with me, and everybody gets to the places that they need to be on time.
Speaker:We had to come up with something that was efficient and works for our family.
Speaker:So I came up with this idea to put a whiteboard.
Speaker:in our foyer.
Speaker:So when you walk in our living room, there's a foyer, it's a whiteboard,
Speaker:and it's a calendar whiteboard.
Speaker:And each month I go through and I write down all the big events, all
Speaker:the practices, all the appointments.
Speaker:All the vacations or the business trips, everything for the
Speaker:month is written on that board.
Speaker:Because what wasn't working is people telling me stuff.
Speaker:Like my husband would be like, we have film.
Speaker:Study tonight instead of practice.
Speaker:So, although it's not a normal night that I would have practice,
Speaker:we had film study or Kennedy telling me, well, it's competition
Speaker:week so we have an extra practice.
Speaker:So instead of being picked up at eight 30, I'd be picked up at nine 30.
Speaker:They would tell me stuff, I can't remember all this stuff y'all.
Speaker:So what I did is I had Garland, my husband put up the whiteboard.
Speaker:Pulled out some dry erase markers.
Speaker:Everybody got their own particular color.
Speaker:this is me.
Speaker:This is me letting you know exactly what kind of person I am.
Speaker:So everybody has their own color, so I can easily tell who needs to be
Speaker:where at what time, and who needs to be picked up If I need to grab Carter,
Speaker:if he will be able to grab Carter, or is this gonna be a cook dinner day?
Speaker:What is the best way to be able to tackle all the things that need to be tackled?
Speaker:And then from there, because you know, I said in the beginning, as a mom, you have
Speaker:all these things on top of each other that you, I found ways to make our lives
Speaker:more efficient, aside from the calendar.
Speaker:So the calendar gives me my visual, but I can't make more time.
Speaker:So, I started using HelloFresh, so we know at least once a month that
Speaker:week of meals, that's what we got.
Speaker:I started using cleaning service, so every other week I have somebody come
Speaker:through, they clean my house and I don't feel like I am living in such chaos,
Speaker:but it also gives me my time back.
Speaker:One week they'll do just a regular cleaning.
Speaker:The next week, two weeks after, they would do a deep cleaning.
Speaker:So I don't have to spend hours deep cleaning my house because it needs it.
Speaker:And we have to deep cleaning cuz honey, these kids got allergies.
Speaker:These kids and his husband, they got all the allergies.
Speaker:So this house gotta be clean.
Speaker:especially in the spring, pollen be getting in.
Speaker:Everybody's snotting and sneezing and I'm just like, somebody, gotta fix this.
Speaker:So I don't have enough hours.
Speaker:And that's the same with your website.
Speaker:You have to do things for your website.
Speaker:That makes it work more efficient.
Speaker:And I hear people complain about, well, it loads too slow, or I'm not
Speaker:getting any hits, or, people are leaving my site and it's probably because
Speaker:of the efficiency of your website.
Speaker:Now, I don't wanna go too far in the weeds on how to make it more efficient, but I do
Speaker:want to give you some surface level things that could be making your site less e.
Speaker:Now the first thing is seo.
Speaker:Seo.
Speaker:I know I spoke about it in a couple previous episodes, but
Speaker:your SEO is very important.
Speaker:Going are the days where you can just slap in some keywords in your
Speaker:dashboard for the page on WordPress.
Speaker:You actually have to be strategic about those words that you're using for your s.
Speaker:They need to be in your copy.
Speaker:They need to be in anything that will bring you views to your site.
Speaker:Now, the reason why this is important, and I want to give you
Speaker:statistic that, I have a client who.
Speaker:One, she wanted to focus on seo.
Speaker:And what we did is I went through, I made sure that the photos had, the
Speaker:names of the actual photos included those keywords And I didn't duplicate
Speaker:photos on the page, different pages.
Speaker:So let me, let me make sure this makes sense.
Speaker:you have three pages on your.
Speaker:The photos on page one won't be on page two, nor will it be on page three
Speaker:because the key words for page one won't be the same as page two, nor
Speaker:will it be the same for page three.
Speaker:And I do it that way because if you have four or five key words, It
Speaker:will take people to the part of your website that those keywords pertain to.
Speaker:So that's one way to make your website more efficient.
Speaker:Now let me put this disclaimer.
Speaker:SEO is a full-time job in and of itself, but there are things
Speaker:that you or your designer should understand to help make your seo,
Speaker:make your website more efficient.
Speaker:Another thing that people have to think about when you're making your
Speaker:website more efficient, and I will.
Speaker:Die on this hill, I will beat the dead horse till there's
Speaker:no more beating to be done.
Speaker:You have to make it mobile optimize.
Speaker:You have to, and there's some ways to do that.
Speaker:I know we've talked about condensing the size of your photos.
Speaker:a lot of times when you get those photos off those stock image sites,
Speaker:them bad boys are big, ginormous.
Speaker:There are a couple of ways to change the size of the photo.
Speaker:One way is to just put it on your WordPress site and use a plugin called
Speaker:Smush, which compresses the photos, makes 'em smaller and It makes it
Speaker:easier for your site to load and it makes your sites, load faster.
Speaker:Another option if you have a Mac, I don't know how to do it on a pc, but
Speaker:I know on a Mac when you open up a photo in your viewer, you are able to,
Speaker:it says change size, and you can just change the size I usually do about 50%.
Speaker:Especially if I pulled it off one of those stock image sites, I'll say
Speaker:Adobe stock, because Adobe provides you with those high quality images
Speaker:if you use Adobe stock photos.
Speaker:you definitely want to compress them.
Speaker:And then one of the easiest ways is to do them in the viewer on your MacBook.
Speaker:Another thing you need to do is when it comes to your mobile optimization, is look
Speaker:at both your desktop version and your, mobile version, and not just, when I say
Speaker:mobile, Look beyond just a cell phone.
Speaker:Some people out here on tablets look at it on the tablet.
Speaker:Also look at it on a tablet if they have it vertical.
Speaker:Look on a tablet if you have it horizontally.
Speaker:The good thing about a new thing that, Elementor has rolled out,
Speaker:cause you know, I love Elementor Pro.
Speaker:It pushed out a lot of, updates, and if you've been following me on social
Speaker:media, you know, I made a post about it.
Speaker:Like it was like, what?
Speaker:What's happening?
Speaker:But one thing that it did push out is it always had the tablet option to view it,
Speaker:but it didn't have the tablet option.
Speaker:To view it as if the tablet was, vertical.
Speaker:you always are able to view it horizontally.
Speaker:So that is one way to make sure that your website is efficient for whatever device
Speaker:that your visitor decides to visiting on.
Speaker:So we said make sure that your.
Speaker:Website is set up for mobile.
Speaker:You also want to check that seo, I gave you a few tools on how to fix up your seo.
Speaker:I'm always about hiring somebody, but if not in a space where you're able to hire,
Speaker:you definitely need to do some research.
Speaker:Look it up.
Speaker:There's.
Speaker:Several tools like, Yos SEO is one of the plugins that I actually like on WordPress.
Speaker:You can look at Sim Rush, that'll help you with some seo, keywords.
Speaker:There's also, Google Trends that'll help you with your seo.
Speaker:There's different things that you can look at when it comes to figuring out your seo.
Speaker:you just need enough to get you started.
Speaker:And then the other thing is I know those photos are gorgeous.
Speaker:Compress them damn photos cuz it's slowing down your sight.
Speaker:Compress them because if your website isn't working efficiently, everything's
Speaker:gonna be all over the place.
Speaker:Just like me and my family, we were all over the place
Speaker:before I put that calendar up.
Speaker:Now when I don't update the calendar, everybody's acting like everything's in.
Speaker:So get your website working efficiently.
Speaker:Figure out what tools you need, figure out where it's lacking.
Speaker:And you know, I'm always gonna bring it back to the numbers.
Speaker:If you don't have the analytics on your website and you're not looking
Speaker:at them, it's like not looking at your bank account and going shopping.
Speaker:You just out here blindly.
Speaker:The one.
Speaker:Read the data, make the changes, and fix your website.
Speaker:That's it y'all.
Speaker:That's all I have for episode 10.
Speaker:I'll be back with episode 11, y'all.
Speaker:We only have two more episodes and I cannot wait to see you guys in episode 11.
