9 easy ways to improve your business website

When you’re looking to improve your website, a good way to start is by scrutinising what is already on it. Audit your current website to determine what is and isn’t working. Ask yourself things like: 

• Which pages are getting good traffic? 
• What type of content are people engaging with?  
• Which pages aren’t seeing a lot of traffic? 
• How can I improve the ones that aren’t? 
• How long are people spending on my website? 
• Is the information on my site up to date and accurate? 

You should be able to find this information through services like Google Analytics or through back-end systems attached to your website.  

User friendly navigation is key to building a successful website. Not only is it a major ranking factor for Google’s algorithm, but it is also an integral part of how users will perceive your website.   

It takes about 50 milliseconds (that’s 0.05 seconds) for users to form an opinion about your website that determines whether they like your site, and whether they will stay on it or leave. 

Clunky navigation and confusing jargon will have a hugely detrimental affect on users interacting with your website. It is extremely unlikely that prospective customers will invest time and effort wading through a website looking for the information they need – a good website will make it obvious for them.  

Sometimes less is more. Make sure your website is concise, easy to navigate, doesn’t use overcomplicated jargon and limits the number of clicks it takes a user to reach their desired destination.  

Calls to action play an essential role on your website. They act as signposts letting users know what steps to take next.  

A great call to action should:   

• Offer the user a clear and relevant value proposition  
  
• Encourage them to act urgently 
  
• Be short and to the point 
  
• Include actionable language like ‘sign up’, ‘buy now’, ‘try out’ or ‘learn more’ 
  
• Stand out on the page

Getting your calls to action right is important, so regularly check the click-through rates of each one on your website. If something isn’t working, ask yourself why and work on improving it. There is no harm in changing and adapting CTAs until you’re getting the results you want.  

Like everything on your website, a lot of thought should go into the images you’ve chosen to display. Pages with images have been found to receive more than those without. Images massively impact user experience on your website and help enhance brand perception.  

The image you use should be of a high quality and relevant to the content they are displayed with. It’s also important to use images that are in line with your brand.  

Where possible, try to use your own original photography. If you can’t, you can use free stock images from sites like Unsplash, Pexels and Pixabay.

Load time can be the make or break when it comes to your business’s website. 47% of people expect a web page to load in two seconds or less. If it takes more than three seconds 40% of people will simply leave the site, and chances are, they won’t come back.  

This means slow website loading can disastrously affect conversion rates once users land on your website, but not keeping up the pace will also make it harder for them to even find you.

Website speed affects your search ranking on Google. If your website takes longer than two seconds to load, Google will reduce the amount of web crawlers it sends to your site, meaning less visibility. 

There are lots of different factors that affect the speed of your website, from the server hosting it to the size of the elements it displays.  

The best way to improve the speed of your website is to test it. PageSpeed Insights is a free to use tool from Google that analyses your website’s overall speed in a matter of seconds. If you want more granular insights, you can use services like Uptrends or Pingdom, which will examine the speed of your website and give you actionable advice on ways to make it faster.  

If search engines can easily understand the content on your webpages, they will rank your website higher in search results.

A great way to make things easier for the search engines (and your potential customers) is to add page titles and meta descriptions to your pages.  

Page titles and meta descriptions are bits of HTML code in the header of a webpage and are what appears in a search result.  

Google likes page titles (the ones you see in the results page) to be different from the page’s H1 title (the one you see once you click-through).  

A meta description is the text you see displayed underneath the page title. A well written meta description should tell users what they will find on the page and compel them to click. 

Sharing is caring, and it’s great for your business.

Give your website users the ability to share your website content by including social media sharing buttons on each page. This will increase your brand exposure and hopefully bring new customers into your business.  

A lead magnet is something of value that you give to your customer for free in order to collect their contact details.

This could be: 

• A free trial  
• Samples or testers of your product  
• A newsletter 
• A useful checklist or template 

There are tons of options when it comes to creating lead magnets. You can create new content or repurpose something you already have.

Lead magnets enhance user experience and provide you with that all-important data to help you turn leads into sales.  

You could have the best website in the world, but if it isn’t mobile responsive, you’ve got a big problem.  

Mobile now accounts for approximately half of all global web traffic and 85% of users expect a business’s website to be as good, if not better when viewed on mobile compared to desktop.  

It has never been more important for your website to be functional on a mobile. Google’s free Mobile-Friendly Test will tell you how easily users can view your page on a mobile device.