A website’s performance is made up of a mixture of elements, not just from the technical side but also what you can do, appearance-wise, to make sure it stands out and continues to serve its purpose of showcasing your brand and bringing in traffic, which should hopefully bring in more viewers. With that being said, there’s a lot that you can do as a business to help improve your website’s performance. So take a look at the below guide to see what you’re perhaps currently doing and what you might not be doing.
Get A New Web Design
Firstly, every website needs a bit of an overhaul when it comes to its design every few years. The reason for this is that it can very quickly become outdated thanks to the technology and the fact that your brand changes slightly over time. That means that the colors used on the website, might not reflect what is now the color schemes for the business branding. House fonts might change, and you might want to have something more visually appealing like moving imagery and just an overall, better layout.
There are website designs that you can buy, but when it comes to running a business, you want to have a website design that’s unique to itself, and so it’s worth paying someone to design it from scratch. That way, you have the ability to work with the designer on your ideas and inspiration to make it a collaboration between yourself and the website designer. Be committed to investing a decent budget to this new web design as it’s something you’ll probably only do every 3-5 years depending on how updated it looks after a few years. Remember that you have new customers passing through your website and so first impressions really count.
Compress Any Large Images
It’s definitely apparent that a lot of us find visuals much much more engaging than text, and that’s likely due to the fact that we’re constantly scrolling and hoping from one website to the next. By having more images on your site, you’re likely to retain the reader’s attention for a lot longer but that does come with it’s problems. If you’re simply uploading your big image files to the website, each one is going to contribute to the slowing down of your site. It’s important that your website is functioning at a good enough speed that it’s loading within a few seconds. If it’s taking longer to load, you’ve got the risk of customers switching off and looking elsewhere. To help improve the performance of your website through it’s speed, start compressing any large images. You can get this through plugins on WordPress if that’s where your website is hosted, but there’s also plenty of online and software programs that you can run your images through in order to compress them.
Outsource To Market And Promote The Website
Outsourcing can be a fantastic way to help with any improvements you want to make to your website in terms of your marketing and promoting it. A website can look great and function properly, but if you don’t have traffic coming to your site, it’s a lot of work on your part that’s done in vain. With that in mind, it’s worth finding companies who can market and promote your site in order to get it out to the wider audience. An industrial marketing agency can be a good place to start and they can help with making sure your website is getting the most exposure that it can do. Sometimes it can be hard to keep up with what’s currently trending or what’s popular. And when it comes to your business, it’s crucial to make sure that you’re finding all the ways to make your brand stand out in the digital world. The process of outsourcing is easy to do, and it means you’re not committing yourself to anything full-time. You choose the individuals or company that you want to work with, pick the hours, and pay you’re willing to provide.
Fix Broken Links
Broken links are essentially as they’re described, broken. It’s important to fix these on your website as often as possible, especially when you might have a lot of blog content and, therefore a lot of links that might expire or become faulty in some way.
Broken links happen when the originator of the link moves the webpage or just takes it down completely. Imagine being a new customer exploring your website, landing on a certain page, and clicking on a link that leads them to an error page. That first impression that was mentioned as being important at the beginning of this article is valid in this point too. It’s going to be frustrating to that customer, so try and stay on top of it as often as you can.
Create Engaging Content
Content is king nowadays, and even in this current situation, where so many of us are working from our homes, the online world is still our playground. It’s also become a place that we’re on for pretty much most of the day too seeing as there’s not much else you can do unless you’re able to work from home successfully. And therefore, creating lots of engaging content is important to continuing the performance of the website. Think about your customers and who your target audience are. That will dictate the type of content you write about and even perhaps the tone of which you write it in. Every business has a tone of talking, whether it’s more formal or conversational. It could sound as though it’s an educational professional talking to you or a best friend. Consider all these factors when it comes to your content because the more direct you are with hitting your target audience, the better your website performs overall.
Use Call-To-Actions
Call-to-actions are something that can generate key areas of performance, depending on what you’re trying to achieve. Whether you’re looking at getting traffic to a certain webpage or to click on specific links, a call-to-action can make this happen. It can be in the form of a pop-up, or perhaps it’s written at the end of a post as a question. It’s essentially asking your reader to do something, whether that’s following a social media handle of yours or writing a review. If you’re providing more engagement and conversation with your audience, they’re going to stay on the website for longer and come back for more on a regular occasion. Don’t underestimate the power that you can have with your readers by being personable and attentive to them. That feeling of community is something many readers enjoy when they come onto the website, and no doubt is it going to improve the performance of your site as a result.
Interlink Your Content
And finally, you want to make sure that you’re interlinking your content and web pages in general. The bounce rate of your site can affect the performance of the website because it tells you how much of a percentage clicks off after a short period of time. You want that percentage to be as low as possible. The way you can do that is by interlinking content from one page to another, so it keeps your readers on the site for longer. That, in turn, helps Google recognize your site as something that’s high-quality, which bumps you further up the search engine.
With these tips, you should hopefully see a beneficial and positive change in your website’s performance.
