Web Design Best Practices: How Automation Lends a Hand

Faster loading time. Layouts that are prettier, more user-friendly and of course, mobile-optimised. The demands of delivering a quality, top-notch, and interactive web design for customers and businesses only grows with each passing day. 38% of website visitors stop browsing if they think the content is boring or the layout unattractive. It’s all about appealing to the specific tastes of your target audience and feeding their eyes a feast worth scrolling for. These things can be tedious to do, especially manually, but offer an ROI that not only boosts your sales, but brand awareness and customer loyalty in one fell swoop.

When it comes to improving your brand’s web presence, it seems like an impossible race to get ahead of, and we are only human, after all. But automation can change all of that. Here are ways to automate and optimise your web design processes.

Software updates

It’s never a pleasant feeling when that little pop-up appears on the computer screen, telling us it’s time for a software and app update. Most of us (usually out of habit) tend to hit ‘remind me later’ or ‘dismiss’ until the system doesn’t give us a choice. Annoying and tedious. And forced updates tend to happen at the most inopportune moments, cutting into productivity with the multiple reboots it tends to require.

But automating your software updates means when it comes to your regular computer, apps like FileHippo and AppFresh, are key. Automated checkers like these filter and automate all necessary and available updates for your computer’s software. From this quick-access menu, you’ll be able to schedule them to occur all at once. This means you can break away from the tedium of updating each software and app individually.

Regularly updated software allows your website to run as smoothly as possible while taking advantage of the vast array of MAdTech features on the market. Utilising the most up-to-date software prevents loading speed issues, and by doing so, you cut down the loss of 7% of possible conversions.

Password reset and policy enforcement

A vast number of companies around the world already utilise this process. When someone forgets a password, they key in their recovery email and get a link to reset their password. Simple as that, yes? Most times, that is the case, but within larger-scale organisations, additional security measures and policy enforcement would prove beneficial. Enforcing a password policy that requires an update or changes every six months or so, for example, would increase the security of data and information for both employees and the business.

Educating your employees and customers alike about strong password policies helps develop a smoother customer experience and business flow. Enforcing seemingly minor issues like a maximum password age, password length, and complexity requirement may seem unnecessary, but it certainly strengthens the security behind their personal accounts and prevents issues. Data breaches across a business, for example, could set you back months of revenue and a loss of customer trust, and that’s the last thing you want. As far as cybersecurity goes, one can never be too careful.

Image optimisation

When the talk is about delivering a good website, high-resolution images is usually one of the motivators behind why customers stay. 48% of people state that web design is one of the determining factors behind the credibility of a business — of that, 47% expect a page load time of two seconds. Overburdened with large image sizes, loading a web page within two seconds may seem like a pipedream.

Even in 2019, images are still the number one cause of bloat on a website. Over 60% of data of a web page gets directed towards loading JPEGs, PNGs, and GIFs. Third-party solutions like Cloudinary, ImageOptim API, and Akamai offer a comprehensive insight into automated image optimisation solutions. Efficient image compression reduces the size of your images while preserving its visual quality, which is most ideal when you’re building a website that has to be both desktop and mobile-friendly.

Backup and versioning — hand-in-hand together

Doing one or the other isn’t enough when you’re looking at the big picture of data. These two practices go hand-in-hand to give you a full snapshot of the data you’re looking for, as well as historical changes. By doing so, you’ve got a record of all updates and improvements that your website has gone through.

Sites like HostPapa offer automated website backup services that create and store backups of your website’s files, MySQL databases, and more. You already backup your personal files and folders on your personal computer (or you should, anyway), so why not do it for your website? Automating the process, of course, cuts down the manual effort required, and allows backup and restoration to happen from several points for easy access.

Automation in the end

There are undoubtedly still things that require a human touch when it comes to handling something like web design. These are just some of the ways that automation and artificial intelligence can step in to ease the process.