When you have people come to your home, you always give it a good tidy beforehand, to make sure that you give the best first impression, right? Well, why wouldn’t you do the same for your business website? After all, when guests come over, and your home is a mess, you only make yourself look bad, but when customers visit a website that isn’t up to scratch, it makes your entire company look bad, and massively affects the amount of money that you make. There are billions of websites online, and if yours isn’t one of the good ones, customers and clients aren’t going to give it the time of day. Here are twelve things that you can do to bring your website back from the brink.
Do Your Research
Never start changing random parts of your website and hope for the best. Chances are, this is going to do more harm than good. If you want to improve your website, the first thing that you need to do is look through a few of your competitor’s websites, and see what they have that yours doesn’t. You should also be on the lookout for their faults, to help you identify any faults of your own. You can then use this information to come up with an improvement plan.
Speak To A Professional
Designing and developing a website isn’t easy, and trying to do this alone could have been a big mistake to begin with. If you’re unsure of what you’re doing and think that you’re doing more harm than good, then it’s better to stop now and contact a professional website developer. Of course, this is going to cost more than a DIY job, but will be worth it if it brings in more customers and increases your sales.
Add The Right Imagery
If you’d prefer to do things alone, then it’s time to take a proper look at your website, especially the pictures on it. If you don’t think that the images on your website properly reflect your brand or products and don’t appeal to your audience, then it’s time to change them. Luckily, there are lots of free images to choose from online. Just try to avoid any images that look too stocky, as they don’t look genuine, and will make your website look unprofessional.
Sort Your Navigation
If your customers can’t get around your website, they’ll just click on one that they can, so sorting your navigation is essential. To make your customers’ lives easier, and make your website look professional, you should have categories that your customers can click on to find what they need. There should also be a search bar, to make this process even easier. If visitors can’t find what they’re looking for easily, they’ll go to a competitor.
Optimize For Smaller Devices
Eighty percent of people that use the internet have a smartphone, so ensuring that your website is optimized for cell phones, and other small devices, like tablets, isn’t just important, it’s necessary. If visitors have trouble accessing your website on their cell, they aren’t going to wait to get home to find what they need; They’ll go to a competitor’s site instead.
Fix Broken Links
When was the last time that you had a proper look on your own website and clicked all of the links? If your answer is “a long time ago” or “I don’t remember” then you probably have a lot of links or pages on there that don’t work anymore. Your visitors aren’t going to tell you that there’s a problem, so you have to find these broken links yourself and fix them, preferably before they start affecting the number of visitors you get to your site.
Don’t Be Afraid Of Blanks
Too many business owners are scared of whitespace on their website, and so try to cram as much onto a page as they possibly can. This is a huge mistake, as the blank spaces around elements on your page are necessary to break up content and make your site much more readable. It might seem silly to purposefully add empty spaces to a site, but it will improve it visually.
Allow Social Sharing
You could have the best website on the planet, but if visitors can’t share it with their friends, your number of visitors and sales is going to increase very slowly, if at all. You need to include social sharing buttons somewhere obvious on your site so that visitors can post your content on their social media pages and get you some more attention. You should also include links to your social media pages, so that can follow you, and get updated whenever something important happens.
Increase Your SEO
Another great way to get visitors to your website is to increase your SEO or search engine optimization. To do this, you need to come up with a strategy that includes creating interesting content for your visitors, like blog posts, podcasts, and videos, and upload this content on a regular basis. You should also link to other blogs and sites, and identify and include keywords that your customers are searching for online.
Make Contact Information Clear
Your website might be great, but if you don’t include your contact information somewhere clear and obvious, your visitors might be reluctant to buy from you. This is because it looks as if you have something to hide, even if you just forgot to include your contact info. Make this information available on every single page, so that customers can come to you easily with any questions or problems.
Refresh Your About Page
The About Page that you wrote when you first designed your website might not properly reflect your business now, so it’s important to give yours a look and refresh it if necessary. When you do, you can add information on any news, new products, team members, to make sure that your customers always have access to the most up-to-date information on your company.
A website can make or break a business, so make sure that you’re is the best that it can be.
