Website optimization is about continually making improvements to the performance of your site. It means taking a look at everything you have control over with your website and tweaking it for the better. Adjusting it, fixing it and constantly auditing your site to figure out where the friction points are for your user.

One of the basic things you can test your site against is Page Speed Insights. Using this tool, you can enter your website URL and see how well a page performs on the Chrome UX Report for both desktop and mobile. Page Speed Insight rules include: avoiding landing page redirects, enabling compression, improving server response time, leveraging browser caching, optimizing images, prioritizing visible content and more.

Today, Google announced on their blog that starting July 2018 page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches.

Although these things are happening behind the scenes and having an impact on search, they are also indicators that the overall user experience needs improvement as well.

With advanced analytics you can uncover areas that you may identify as friction points. These are typically things that stand in the way of your user and what they want to achieve on your site. Friction points can appear in many ways throughout the site - it could be messaging, visuals, the length of your submission form, site navigation or number of steps to complete a task. Since there are so many factors that contribute to user experience, it’s important to audit these steps often.