Building a Joomla Site? 6 Key Things to Think About
So, you’re building a Joomla site? That’s great! Joomla is an excellent choice for creating a website.
Joomla offers a flexible system that is easy to extend and customize. It also comes optimized for search engines out of the box. Furthermore, it was developed with site security in mind and has an excellent track record.
Although Joomla is a great site-building resource, there are some things you’re going to want to keep in mind while building your site to ensure you get the best response possible from your target audience. Read on to learn what these are.
Hosting
Who is going to host your Joomla site? We recommend choosing a host that offers Joomla compatible hosting, like GreenGeeks. A Joomla compatible host will usually provide one-click installation and automatic Joomla updates, so your site is always secure.
Furthermore, the customer support personnel will be better equipped to help you resolve site issues if they offer Joomla-specific hosting.
Mobile Responsiveness
According to statista.com, 50.81% of global website traffic comes from mobile devices. This means that a significant portion of your potential site visitors will use their phones to access your site. Therefore, it’s vital that you make sure your site is mobile responsive.
To ensure your site can be viewed properly on any device, you’re going to want to check the following:
● Can your website respond to screen size changes?
● Does your site require touch support and touch icons?
● Are you using mobile-friendly Joomla extensions?
● Is your website’s loading speed optimized for mobile?
Search Engine Optimization
Organic search will play a significant role in your website’s traffic. Therefore, you need to ensure that search engine bots can find, crawl, and index your site on their search engine.
This will require you to optimize your titles and metadata with targeted keywords. They should also reflect the content of each page they represent and not be repetitive. You will also want to check for canonical URLs, any invalid link redirects and make sure your URLs are short and understandable. Lastly, all your images should have Alt tags.
Additionally, you will need a sitemap.xml file so search engines can index your site easily.
The easiest way to generate a sitemap is to use the Joomla extension, JSitemap.
Favicon
Favicons are used to distinguish your website from other sites. The favicon will be visible on search engines and in the browser tab. It’s a small thing, but you must create a unique favicon so users can easily identify your site.
Links
Links are essential to your website’s navigation, and they play a significant role in your SEO.
Therefore, you must check that all your links are working correctly.
Check to see that all your links are in different colors than the normal text. They should also be clickable and should redirect users to the correct site.
Additionally, visited links should display in a different color than unvisited links. Lastly, your website’s logo needs to be redirected to your site’s homepage.
To save you some time, you can use the application W3C Link Checker. This program will verify whether your links are good or not.
Site Backup
Backing up your site is vital. If something goes wrong, you will thank the lucky stars you have a site backup as this will allow you to return your site to normal quickly. Make sure to schedule backups regularly so the most recent version of your site is always available should something go wrong.
Summary
When building your Joomla site, you first need to decide who is going to host your website.
We recommend using a Joomla-compatible host because they are best equipped to serve a Joomla site’s needs. Next, you’re going to want to build a site that’s mobile responsive, so no matter what device users are using, your site looks and functions perfectly. You’ll also want to make sure your site is search engine optimized, has a unique favicon, and all its links
function properly. Lastly, you’ll need to ensure you have a site backup set up and you’ve scheduled regular backups. This will ensure that you can get your site back up and running quickly if something goes wrong.
