Ten essential tips on how to improve your website, written by a real life web professional and definitely not AI.
I have been a web developer since 1995, these are my go-to’s every time I am asked to improve a website. These tips will work for most websites, no matter the tech behind it or market it serves. I am focussing on improving existing websites to make better from a user perspective with the end result of increasing conversions.
1. Monitor how people are using your website
You have a website, you think it’s great, but can your visitors use it correctly? There are tools such as Mouseflow that will record how your users are navigating around your website. Watch their mouse as it moves around the screen, a mouse will give away a users feelings as they browse a website. Are they finding your navigation ok, do they see your CTA’s for example?
Mouse tracking analytics is my number one tool for analysing the effectiveness of a website.
2. Make your website lightening fast
Your website needs to load fast for two main reasons. Firstly, your visitors will leave the site if it is slow to load. Secondly, search engines rank fast to load websites above slow loading websites.
There are lots of ways to speed up a website. The website code if written well will be super fast, use as few third party plugins as possible, employ caching, utilise optimisation tools such as image reduction, compressing and combining of files.
3. Improve Navigation
Website navigation is key, it is how most users go from page to page. But many sites have poor navigation, either being hidden from view or being hard to understand.
Employ simple and effective navigation, and users stay longer.
4. Work on all Devices, Desktop, Tablet and Mobile
Lots of our customers have more visitors from a mobile phone than from a desktop computer. There are many ways people access the internet these days, make sure your website works perfectly across all devices.
5. Strengthen Security
Websites that are secure give users confidence in the site and are more likely to purchase or want to contact your company. A secure website also protects you against hacking, along with search engines ranking secure websites above non secure websites.
6. Design Refresh
Most would put a design refresh at the top of the list, but if you haven’t got the other points, people won’t even see the majority of your website design as they will have already pressed that back button.
Your website design needs to instil confidence in the user and allow them to browse it easily, finding what they want without issue. An old looking website will leave a user feeling that the site has been abandoned, an over complicated design will see people leaving quickly.
7. Call to Actions
This extends point three concerning navigation. Repeating important navigation is a good idea, for example having a clear Contact Us button in various places.
Your CTA’s are highly obvious buttons directing users to your main website areas. Sign Up, Browse our Shop, Contact Us, Buy Now, whatever your website purpose, make these links loud and proud.
8. Integrate your Social Media
Pulling through your social media posts to your website not only promotes new followers to your accounts, but keeps a web page fresh with new content as it auto updates.
Using the social media widgets won’t cut it here, they look out of place and give you no SEO benefit. Instead, take advantage of their API to let you pull the posts directly to your website. This way, you have full control over how it looks and gives a huge SEO boost.
9. Accessibility
When we design and build a website, accessibility is extremely important to ensure all users can access your website regardless of ability of technology. So why is it so low down on my list of how to improve a website? This list is focussing mostly on gaining more traffic and incr
10. A-B Testing
Using the above, you have found out what is working, what isn’t and have made some great improvements. You have perfect CTA’s, in the optimum location, but I bet you could do even better.
A-B testing is where you deliver slightly different content to different audiences. You may slightly change your CTA wording, 50% of users are given a CTA of ‘Sign up NOW’ whereas the other 50% are given ‘Sign up for FREE’. Which wording gave the best conversions?
For a clothing company, do you latest lines on the homepage drive the most clicks, or are you better with displaying your sale items?
A-B testing allows you to fine tune your content, increasing conversions and revenue.
11. Bonus – Quality Content
It is worth looking at your website content every 6 months or so. Is it relevant, does it provide information the user will need, is it legible? We built a website for a manufacturer of technical parts a few years ago. The content they provided for each part meant nothing to everyone except themselves. Rewriting the product descriptions into something people would search google for not only drastically increased page iew, but also conversions to sale.
That’s it, these are the top 10 (and an extra) items I look at when someone asks us to ‘improve my website’. Of course, different websites require different improvements, but ticking off this list should result in a well performing website.