What you need to know to improve your news site reader experience
Learn how Content Delivery Networks (CDN), image optimisation, and the right CMS can create a remarkable experience for the reader.
Imagine people hearing COVID or tensions between two countries for the first time. Naturally, one of the first things they do is go to search engines and learn more about this topic.
They found your news site on search results, but unfortunately, readers are struggling to make it through your site because the page refuses to load beyond the first paragraph – and it looks even worse when they try to open the same page on their mobile. So they tried another page on your site, but there’s another issue – the images were not loading. So they tried once again with your homepage, hoping that the search functionality was working there, but it still failed them.
In reality, when a site takes longer to load, users simply and quickly move on to the next news publication.
With the increasing online news and articles sources, good content writing would not suffice for a pleasurable reader experience. Therefore, online news sites must first ensure that information is delivered and provide the reader’s uninterrupted experience.
Three drivers for an optimal reader experience
We have established the importance of prioritising your audience’s optimal reader experience each time they interact with your news site/ or article. So what should you be equipped with to have the best possible reader experience? Here are three essential drivers to integrate to site and content:
CDN (Content Delivery Network)
All news sites strive to attract and retain as many users as possible. A significant step toward ensuring that this goal is met is to ensure that your website loads as fast as possible no matter where the person is attempting to access it. Fast loading site improves the reader experience from the get-go, giving them one less issue to feel frustrated about and taking you one step closer to engaging them with your content.
Consider a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to speed things up. When deploying a CDN, it copies parts of your website and stores them across different data centre servers worldwide. So when someone tries to reach your website, it will automatically load the data from the server that’s geographically closest to the reader.
CDN delivers many advantages to your website performance; Aside from what we’ve already mentioned (page speed), SEO and conversion rates also improves. In addition, some CDN also includes a web application firewall, which means it also offers protection from malicious bots, hacking attempts etc. With this list of advantages, ensure your cms service provider has already implemented CDN to your news site.
Image Optimisation
One of the most frustrating experiences as a reader is for images of relevancy to not load correctly. And images are a vital contributor of text that help enhance the reader’s experience, so mitigating any potential issues is incredibly important.
Several image optimisation strategies include choosing the correct file format, caching, compressing, resizing, and ensuring an optimal delivery through CDN, which we will discuss next. In addition, labelling images correctly makes it is far easier for search engines to crawl your site and understand your content’s context. Specifically, optimising your alt text enhances your news site’s chances to be found on search results.
Content Management System (CMS)
Each website is built using databases. Instead of attempting to login to servers and make changes one field at a time, a content management system allows you to seamlessly communicate with the database in a secure and easy to use manner.
The reality is that everything that goes into any page within your website can be managed by you quickly and efficiently. Whether it’s a video you want to embed or pop-ups that you’d like to add, a CMS enables this using a flexible back-end interface, allowing you to create, optimise, and manage your site’s experience. Of course, the more efficiently optimised your solution and site is, the higher the chances of reader experience also being just as excellent and optimised.
You can leverage many valuable tools, such as elasticsearch, analytics, autoscaling front-end servers, etc. Each of these offers unique, irrefutable benefits. The first step towards achieving an optimised experience for your users is understanding what your reader wants by finding the right tools to enhance their experience.
Let’s help your news site have the best reader experience. With Bold CMS, we ensure that your site is equipped with CDN and image optimisation tools. Contact us and learn more.
