There are currently over 644 million websites on the Internet, and standing out among them is no easy task. When creating a marketing website, you need to think about designing it in a way that will grab a user’s attention immediately.
According to Nielsen, Internet users only spend 10-20 seconds on a web page before they decide to leave. There are many reasons for this (short attention spans, for one) but most of them have to do with poor website design.
If you’ve found that your business’ website isn’t attracting customers like it should, you may need some website improvement tips to reinvigorate your business.
10 Essential Website Improvement Tips
Below, you’ll find 10 key website improvement tips that will increase your website’s traffic, keep customers there, and eventually lead to sales. Some are simple fixes and some may require a reworking of your site, but all of them will help in the long run.
1. Create A Value Proposition
Because a user only visits a website for about 10-20 seconds, you need to be able to place a mission statement on your website, front, and center.
With a brief aesthetically appealing text or video, you need to establish what your business does and how it can benefit the user.
Generally, a mission statement should establish where your business is located, what service your customers receive from you, and what benefit that provides. This will hook your users in and keep them on your site.
2. The Need For Page Speed
When designing a website, you need to make sure that your page speeds are lightning fast. Internet surfers have no patience and even a 2-second delay in page load times can lead to an abandonment rate of up to 87%.
You can shorten your load times by not over-complicating your web pages with needless photo, video, and other functionalities.
Nothing is worse than trying to explore a website with a terrible navigation system. Many people overthink this step, but all a website really needs a simple navigation bar on the top of every page with links that clearly communicate what they lead to.
You want to make your nav-bar descriptions short and succinct, but descriptive enough as to not be cryptic. Let people know where they’re going and don’t complicate it with industry lingo and confusing jargon.
4. Make A Scrolling Homepage
On top of having a navigation menu, you should just have your website laid out entirely on your homepage as well. It’s a top web design trend right now, and scrolling down on a website is a navigational function every user understands, and they’ll be able to find information easier and faster.
For example, you could make the first section your value proposition, your second section an “About Us” page, then a Products page, and so on. If you’d like a more concrete example of a scrolling homepage you can view this site here.
5. Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly
Smartphones are the conduit through which many people browse the Internet now, and your website will be useless if its design can’t scale down to a smaller screen.
Not only is scanning a website that isn’t mobile-friendly frustrating, Google actually penalizes you for not being mobile-friendly when displaying search results.
Tools like Twitter’s Bootstrap can be an effective tool in designing a website for mobile screens.
6. Design With SEO In Mind
You can have the best-designed website in the world, and if isn’t optimized for Google’s search engines, it’ll never be found.
To increase your site’s SEO, there are several things you can do. You can make your site easily navigable, for one. Google likes that. You can also change the URL names of pages on your site so that they have plain-English names, and you can create blog content filled with different keywords people use in search engines.
7. Use White Space
White space, or “negative space,” is crucial in adding a degree of readability to your site.
You don’t want your homepage to look like a coupon book. You want your content to be easily differentiated from another so that one block of text doesn’t bleed into the rest.
Web pages aren’t like real paper. There isn’t a finite amount, so you don’t have to cram as much as possible into one page.
8. Implement “Click-to-Action” Buttons
Once your customers visit your website, takes in all the information, and understands what you do, you want them to act on it right?
To do this, you want to give them a call-to-action and provide a button or link to whatever it is that you want them to do. If you want them to visit your product page, embed a link to your page. If you want them to subscribe to your newsletter, provide them a way to do that.
You want to spoon feed your guests.
9. Hyperlink Differentiation
When embedding your “click-to-action” buttons, or any other links, you need to make sure that they stand out from the rest of the text by giving them a unique stylization. You can do this by increasing their font size and changing the font color or boldness.
If they can’t find your links easily, what good are they?
10. Proudly Display Your Testimonials
If you’ve created a testimonials page on your website, you can probably mine your web traffic data and find that no one visits it. This doesn’t a customer isn’t interested in finding out if other customers like your business. It usually just means that that information isn’t appealing enough to be worthy of an extra click.
To remedy this, you’ll want to disperse your testimonials throughout your website instead. You can place a short blurb from a customer in your About Us page, on your Products & Services page, or even right on your homepage. Your customers will appreciate the information even if they don’t care enough to go searching for it.
Need A Web Designer?
Knowing about these website improvement tips is one thing, and it’s another to actually implement them.
If you find that your website’s design elements are lacking, you might want to consult an expert for help. In which case, we recommend checking out our WordPress web design services.
