How to Optimize Websites for Global Audience?

Having global perspective allows businesses to serve internationally and tap into new markets and opportunities. To serve international audience online businesses need to think through many aspects such as sales, shipping, customer support and of course making the site suitable for global availability. To make the online business appeal to people from different locations it is essential that the site should be optimized for global markets. Many businesses think that providing content in multiple languages is enough to cater to world-wide audience. What they don’t realize is global website requires much more than just translating the content into local languages. Especially for e-commerce websites, site uptime, performance and speed have to be optimized because it has direct impact on sales & conversions. When developing websites for global audience of users or customers, it is essential that these aspects should be considered by online businesses. 

Host on Local Servers

Hosting websites on local servers help them load quicker and offer faster access to the users. For instance, if the targeted traffic for the site is US, then it is better to host it on local US based servers close to potential customers rather than hosting in other country servers. Though CDNs help faster delivery of content, choosing the hosting service near the users will further speed up loading of websites. 

Have Country Specific Domain Extensions

Also having domains appropriate to the targeted region ensure the site will likely appear in local searches. For instance, if users are searching from Australian IP they will probably see the list of .au websites. So if the site is targeting traffic from Australia, it is better to make the Australian version of the website as .au extension which makes more sensible to local searches.

Identify Location and Localize Content

Optimizing websites for global access primarily requires identifying the geographical location of the user. If there is multiple website versions each for a different region, then the users can be redirected to the appropriate version by redirecting the IP address. Some international websites provide option for users to select their own version of the site. The regional selection will direct the user to the sub-site within the same domain, or it might direct the user to a different site version. No matter from which country the user is browsing the website, the content should be adjusted to the geo-location.

Optimize Website Speed

When websites are designed for global markets, speed becomes a major concern. It could be possible that users from a particular geo-location can access the website at an optimal speed whereas others might have difficulty loading the same page. That means the accessibility & performance of the site differ from one region to another. For this reason many businesses catering to international audience use content delivery networks (CDNs) to serve content with improved speed from multiple locations. CDNs are intended to reduce the distance between visitors & website server and enable faster delivery of content through global network of servers.

Use Multi-Location Monitoring for Tracking Performance

If the business is serving global customers, it is important that the site should perform well from all locations. Many times, websites experience downtime and performance issues because they are served by multiple servers placed across different regions. If the site is using monitoring service for tracking the functionality, then it is wise to opt for a web site monitoring service with multi-location monitoring. With the monitoring servers placed at different regions across the globe, the websites will have better analysis on downtime issues.