How to Improve Your Website
There's always room for improvement, and that includes within your website. The UX or user experience visitors have on your site plays a huge role in how successful it is at achieving your goals. We share 10 easy ways you can start improving it today!
Improved Websites Get Better Results
Fact: if you make something better, it works better. The same can be said for websites. If you identify the ways your website could be improved, along with the benefits doing so could bring, then it makes sense that you should do those things.
Website improvements can vary from things such as speed, design theme, mobile responsive, colours, font size and website platform. Today we're going to discuss 10 things you can do to improve your site and the benefits doing so would most likely bring.
10 Things Which Can Improve Your Website
Being the creators of New Zealand's top eCommerce website platform, our goal is to improve the user experience for each visitor to our customer's websites. Here are 10 ways in which you can achieve this for your website:
- Use white space - users of a website will scan a page to find the information they want, rather than read every word. By using white space, you are making it easier for them to find what they are looking for, which in turn encourages them to stay longer on your site.
- Check your website speed - a slow loading website will do two things: be ranked lower by search engines and visitors will click elsewhere as they don't want to wait. Make sure your website is hosted with NZ's fastest web host - us!
- Create useful content - well designed graphics help attract attention and make a website look appealing, but it's the content on the page which is often overlooked. The text you have on a page not only provides search engines with something to index (which then raises your search rankings) but also your visitors with information and entertainment.
- SEO - making sure your website is SEO friendly is a must if you are relying on search engines to send traffic to your website. By improving your site's SEO, you can potentially gain a lot of organic traffic. Take a read of our SEO Resources for help in understanding and doing your own SEO.
- Use clear hyperlinks - make sure that the text you hyperlink to other pages within and out of your website can be seen easily. This can increase traffic to other pages on your site by your visitors, as well as help search engines move around your site.
- Use bullet points - like white space, the use of bullet points makes your content easily scanned and read. This improves the user experience, meaning they are more likely to stay longer and return in the future to your website.
- Fix any broken links - it is really annoying when you click on a link to be greeted with a 404 page missing error. If you do delete a page or change its URL, make sure you redirect it to a live page. This helps with keeping people on your site longer, as well as improving your SEO.
- Menu organisation - is your menu easy to use? Does it make finding specific things on your site easier? Make sure your menu is user friendly to help people navigate throughout your site.
- Headings - not only does each page need a main heading, but sub headings throughout the page should also be used. This helps with search engine rankings, as well as ease of reading a page.
- Use clear calls to action - be specific as to what you want a page visitor to do. Use words and buttons to clearly explain what their next action should be. This increases the rates of goal meetings on your site, and helps prevent confusion among visitors.
We recommend taking a read of our article What is User Experience Design & How Can it Help Your Business for further help on improving your website.
Posted: Friday 28 February 2020