Code Clean-up and Optimisation Services

Having clean, valid HTML code for your website's pages is an important part of the website optimisation campaign. It has its role in SEO, but first of all it's an important step in the process of improving and optimising your web presence. It affects your business image, credibility and, consequently, conversions and ROI.

Today's reality on the Web dictates that websites that don't comply with certain accepted standards are no longer considered high-quality resources. Besides, serious errors in the HTML code of the page can cause cross-browser incompatibility, prevent the search engine spiders from doing their job properly and thus affect both your rankings and the conversion rates. We will ensure your HTML complies with the current W3C standards and works well in all modern browsers.

Another purpose of the code clean-up procedures is to reduce the so-called "code bloat", that is, to make sure the page is as short as it can be in terms of HTML tags. This is necessary to minimise the download time of every page (as many people around the world still have slow Internet connections) and to make pages more spider-friendly (as spiders don't need more code than is necessary to detect main navigation blocks and separate them from the main content). It is recommended that as much JavaScript as possible is moved to external .JS files and that all styles are stored as .CSS files. In some cases your JavaScript might be holding optimisation back and should be replaced by a more elegant CSS-based solution.

The process

The process depends on our specific agreement, but we can fix one sample page or the whole site. If your content management system uses templates, we can fix the template so you can use it to create more pages - and never again worry about the validity of your navigation bars and other repeatable parts of the webpage, factors that produce the largest number of HTML errors. We will also correct your .CSS file to make sure it is written according to accepted standards.

First of all, we check the page for any JavaScript code and try moving that code to a separate file, at the same time testing the page after any modification to make sure it still works. Then we move all the styles from the HTML code of the page to your .CSS file (or create one for you if it is missing). We will also remove all the <font> tags and other deprecated elements and reproduce the exact look of the page using CSS formatting.

If your website is designed using tables, we will check the code carefully to see if unnecessary nested tables can be removed (and code bloat reduced) without breaking the look and feel of the page. As an option, we can suggest a complete redesign of your website using tableless CSS-based positioning (notice that Spider Friendly's website is coded without a single <table> tag).

Finally, we use the W3C Markup Validation Service | and the W3C CSS Validation Service | to make sure that both the HTML markup and the CSS file validate.

At all stages of the process we are willing to work in close contact with your in-house webmaster and explain each step in detail. We believe in sharing our knowledge with our clients, not treating it as black magic.