10 Tips To Improve Your Website

10 Tips To Improve Your Website

Making your website stand out among the dozens, hundreds or even thousands of your direct competitors is no small feat. Internet users are guaranteed to be even more fickle and demanding than your offline customers. They will leave you in a heartbeat if they think they’ll be treated just a little bit better elsewhere. That means that you’re going to have to do your utmost to attract visitors and keep them from defecting to the competition.

Here are ten tips to do exactly that, but be aware: none of these tips are easy to implement and all of them will require a significant amount of work, either from you, from your web designer or from your SEO expert.

1. Minimize your website’s loading time.

Studies have shown that loading times have serious consequences for a website’s traffic, conversion rate and e-commerce revenues. Discuss your site’s loading time with your host and your web designer and make sure your site doesn’t load at a snail’s pace. If it does, your visitors will abandon it.

2. Make your site easier to navigate.

Think long and hard about your website’s structure. In particular, make sure that your visitors can perform the key task you want them to perform in just a few clicks from every page on your site.

3. Use alt tags for your images.

These tags contain descriptions of your images and will be displayed when the images themselves cannot be loaded. You may never see these texts yourself unless there’s some kind of network failure, but they are crucially important for visually impaired people who use screen readers to browse the web.

4. Be consistent.

Use the same color scheme and visual style for your whole website. Update at regular intervals. Maintain the same quality of writing across different pages and authors. Inconsistency in any form looks highly unprofessional, so avoid it at all costs.

5. Get rid of pop-ups and other distractions.

Keep your website as streamlined as possible. Annoying banner ads, badly designed photo galleries, pop-ups and other things that detract from your corporate message should be changed or removed without mercy.

6. Link more.

Wherever it is relevant, link to both your own content and that of others. Also include text links or buttons that direct the visitor to your company’s social media profiles.

7. Add a search bar.

While it’s possible to do searches on specific domains directly in Google, the majority of the internet population does not know about these search operators. To help those people find specific information on your website, add a simple search bar.

8. Add meta descriptions and implement other SEO concepts.

You should always be thinking of SEO when creating new content for your site. In particular, always try to create good meta descriptions and page titles.

9. Create a help, support and/or FAQ section.

If a visitor to your site has a question, complaint or problem, they are likely to just leave your site without notifying you. So you better make it very easy for people to contact you and find solutions to their problems.

10. Use visitor statistics to identify strengths and weaknesses.

Review and study your website’s statistics regularly. Use these stats to identify what your site does well, and which areas need more work. Consider adding Google Analytics code to all your pages.