5 Easy Things You Can Do Today To Improve Your Business Website

Here’s a question we hear often:

“What can I do to improve my website?”

Sometimes, if enough things need improvement, then our answer is a complete redesign. But other times the answer is as simple as making a few quick changes to maximize the impact that their current site can have on their business.

Here are 5 easy things that we frequently recommend:

1. Create Stronger Calls to Action

Your website’s purpose is to sell your products and/or services to your audience. It does this by providing your customers with all of the information they’ll need to feel convinced that your company’s products and/or services are the right choice for them. However, simply providing them with all of this information (no matter how great the presentation of it might be!) is not enough. Numerous usability studies have shown that your website visitors want (and need) to be told what to do once they finish perusing your content. This is where the call to action comes into play. Your site’s call to action needs to be the hook that prompts your website visitor to take the next steps. An effective call to action sometimes includes a special offer that provokes a sense of urgency in your visitor. Or sometimes it can simply spell out one or more of the benefits of your product/service in a creative way. Either way, the stronger you can make this call to action, the higher likelihood that your website visitors will do what you’re asking them to do. After all, if you don’t ask them to do something, they’ll do nothing.

2. Install Google Analytics

We’ve detailed the benefits of using Google Analytics many many times on this blog, so I won’t go into details again in this entry. The bottom line is that Google Analytics is a completely free service that gives you incredible insights about how people are finding and using your company’s website. A good analogy would be to equate it to driving your car at night without headlights. Without it, you’re not quite sure if your website is working for you. But with it installed, you can get a clear picture of what’s working well and what may need improvement.

3. Make Sure All Fonts Are Legible

The next quick fix is a simple visual one that gets missed way too often. Over the last few years, we’ve noticed that many poorly-designed sites have text that is either too small, or doesn’t provide enough contrast from the background for your visitors to easily read it. Also keep in mind that in today’s world of mobile devices, your website visitors may be viewing your site on a small screen. Lastly, it is important to take into account that you may have website visitors with vision impairments (color blindness, poor vision, etc.) and special care should be taken to make the site accessible for them.

4. Run a Performance/Speed Check

Ironically, one of the fastest ways to lose website visitors is to have a slow site. As people’s attention spans become shorter and shorter, expectations of website load times increase. We recommend periodically performance testing your site to make sure that visitors are able to get the information they need quickly. Here are a couple of our favorite (and free) website performance test sites:

• Google PageSpeed Insights
• Pingdom Website Speed Test

5. Make Your Content More Interesting and Engaging

This last quick fix might take a little more time and effort than the others to perform, but it can result in a much more engaging website. Too many times, we encounter websites that have dull or uninspiring content, despite the fact that the product or service that they’re offering is quite compelling. Here are a few ways you can do this:

• Every company and brand has its own distinct voice. Let your brand’s unique voice come out in your website’s content.
• Know your audience. Make sure that your website’s content is worded appropriately for your audience. Avoid using industry jargon if your website’s visitors won’t know what any of it means. Also, avoid using buzz words that lack any real meaning.
• Don’t forget to use interesting and relevant imagery or video content to help make your point
• Don’t be afraid to use interesting formatting to break up the monotony of your content. Add subheadings to make scanning easier, add bold for important words, and lists are a great way to list key points that you want to make (this list is a great example of this!)

So there you have it: 5 easy things that you can do today to improve your website. If you need assistance with making any of these improvements to your website, contact us and we’ll be glad to provide a free estimate.