Boom, A customer landed on your website, with only a few seconds to capture their attention. What website improvement tips can you use to keep them longer? Immediately they should be able to understand what you do, navigation should be super easy to allow potentials customers to find what they want and also, do you have pricing? How hard is it to find and understand?
It’s questions like these that a website can’t succeed without having them asked. These questions run deep into your website design, user experience and functionality. They even help your content to be seen.
So before you get started with a redesign, here are 7 top tips for improving your website design!
Using the right images for a website
This cannot be stressed enough, imagery is super important. With the various types of content you have, there is going to be a select amount of images to match with it.
One of things to watch out for when choosing the right images is the feeling it evokes. You want to avoid photos that look stocky. You know, those ones that just don’t come across as genuine and build trust with your audience.
Ideally, real photos are what you should aim for. Especially ones from real people that work on your team. These types of images really help to build trust and connection with your audience.
Mobile Optimization
If your website is not optimized for mobile device, you are definitely missing out and also helping the competition to win. Here is what Google has to say about it.
Google says 61% of users are unlikely to return to a mobile site they had trouble accessing and 40% visit a competitor’s site instead.
With that in mind, your website needs to be optimized because your customers are visiting your website on mobile. Is your content easy to digest on mobile? How difficult is it to navigate and get from page to page? Most importantly, how fast is it? Most people that use the internet on mobile are on data plans, so how does your website make use of the data wisely.
How can customers find me online?
As simple as this is, a lot of people still overlook it and don’t realise the tremendous value in it. In order for customers to find you online, you will need an SEO Strategy.
By understanding your audience, you will have an idea what keywords you want to rank for to help people to find you. With these keywords, you can integrate them into your website content such as blogs post. They can also be integrated throughout the website into the title and meta tags.
Check out this article to find out more about finding keywords to rank for here.
With this SEO Strategy, you’ll start to attract potential customers to your website. Once your keywords are targeting the correct audience, there should be an increase in conversions for your product / service.
Find broken links and 404s
There is nothing worse than going onto a website and clicking a link that leads to a 404. From there you start to loose trust with your customer. Your website as we term it is a 24/7 Sales Machine. Having a 404 is like telling a customer you don’t know the answer to their question about your own product! Having 404s also has a huge impact on your bounce rate, from there some visitors might just click off and find another solution.
One of the top industry standard tools we use for checking broken links is Scream Frog. You can check them out here.
Navigation
Think of the your navigation menu system like a map for the customer. It is super important. It has the top pages that you want to funnel your customers through.
One of things to avoid when it comes to improving your website is making the navigation confusing and disorganized. You want to ensure that your navigation makes it easy for customers to find exactly what they are looking for. Else? Well, they might just end up leaving your website and going off to a competitor.
Always make sure that your website has some hierarchy to it and that it is also responsive.
Call to Actions
Call to actions are the mother of conversions. Can you imagine reading a short piece of content about a product or solution and afterwards there was no option to learn more, sign up or even worse make a purchase?
Call to actions are a way for you to guide the visitor into making the next step. One thing to watch out for is knowing when and where to place these call to actions. Which type of content is the visitor viewing and how can we smoothly transition them to the next step? You don’t want to push them harshly into the purchase, instead, they maybe a few pages or reviews they go through before getting to the purchase step.
If you don’t implement any of the website improvement tips above, at least aim for improving your call to actions and the next website improvement tip below.
Planning My Website
Last but certainly not least, planning the website. This can sometimes be overlooked by many businesses but it is one of the top website improvement tips one can implement. One thing you don’t want to do is start to design without having a plan. Would you build a house without one? Nope, so why design and build a website without it?
To make sure you are maximising on every second your visitor gives you, you need to understand who you are selling to and map out a customer journey. You need to understand what their journey is from the time they land to when they become a customer. What content will they go through and how does that lead up to your offer they will convert on?
One of the easiest ways to do this is to look at your current customers and research how to started out from visitor to customer. One of things we like to do, is interview our customers. We have found that with interviews are customers are more flexible in expressing themselves than just through a form.
These are the 7 website improvement tips for your next website redesign. Which ones are you already implementing or do you plan on implementing?
