For businesses of all shapes, sizes, industries, and budgets, your website is the gateway to online success. Accessing a website is often the first way prospective customers and clients will engage with your enterprise and its offering.
This means that whether you’re a large corporation with decades of experience in your field, or an individual freelancer just starting out, having a high quality, optimised website could prove the difference between long-term failure and success.
Many already understand the importance of their online presence, yet are still left wondering: “How can I improve my website?” The answer is multifaceted and not always plain to see. Follow our 12-step guide on how to improve your website to learn a range of techniques you can employ today for a better website tomorrow.
How to know when your website needs improving
First things first, do you actually need to improve your website? Your site may, for example, already look complete. Maybe it echoes similar successful design features exhibited by competitors in your field, or perhaps your site publishes quality niche content with provable authority.
The truth is that without a holistic, comprehensive approach to website optimisation, you’re likely still missing some key ingredients in the creation of a winning website. The ‘busy bees’ at WebHummel are experts in web design and optimisation. The advice we always give to business owners hoping to create a ‘buzz’ around their website is to first conduct a website audit.
Here’s a few of the things you should be looking out for as signs that your website needs improving.
- Slow load speeds: In our fast-paced digital age, patience is at a premium. Slow load speeds across your website—even just on the odd page here and there—can frustrate visitors, leading to higher ‘bounce rates’ and less return custom.
- Low time-on-site: An audit of your website should also reveal the average time visitors spend on the site as a whole, often broken down page by page. The less time customers spend on your site, the less likely they are to convert, and the clearer it is you’ve some work to do.
- High bounce rate: ‘Bounce rate’ is the rate at which visitors to your site leave without clicking through to your other pages. Some degree of ‘bounce’ is to be expected on any website, but a bounce rate above around 45% is usually a sign that something’s going wrong. For example, the average bounce rate for eCommerce sites in 2022 was 43%, and the optimal bounce rate for this industry is estimated at between 10 and 45%.
- Low conversion or click rate: Another couple of metrics to make note of during your audit is your conversion rate and click-through rate. In other words, what percentage of visitors ‘convert’ to customers (via a sale, business enquiry, newsletter sign-up, or similar), and how many clicks does the average site visitor make? Low conversion- or click-rates can illuminate aspects of your site which need improving.
- Website errors: A final major issue to keep an eye out for encompasses a range of ‘website errors’ which prohibit your website from working effectively. These include broken links, 404 error messages, server issues, corrupted requests, missing metadata and more. You can search for these using Google’s free GSC tool.
Why spend time and resources improving your website?
Improving your website doesn’t necessarily have to cost much, but it will require time and resources in order to be effective. For small businesses with limited access to time and resources, it may seem wasteful to exert effort improving a site, instead of focusing on something more tangibly profitable like lead generation.
Take a look at the list below to discover some of the key benefits to website improvement—benefits which can deliver serious ROI.
- Improve SERPs rankings: The better your website, its UX, and the content published on it, the higher Quality Score search engines like Google awards it. Combined with SEO, a high Quality Score helps you to rank higher on SERPs (Search Engine Page Results). A higher SERPs ranking puts your website in front of a larger number of high-intent internet users.
- Deliver a memorable UX: A high quality website has a high quality, memorable UX (‘User Experience’). User Experience is as it sounds—it describes the type of journey each user experiences when they interact with your website. The rest is simple: the better a user’s experience, the more likely they are to stick around, come back later, and recommend your site to others.
- Drive higher conversions, sales, and leads: Higher quality websites are intentionally designed to steer visitors through an engaging experience, from the first page they land on to pages which solve their problems and meet their needs in an accessible and efficient way. Those who do this best—for example, eCommerce businesses using their websites as online selling platforms—are able to encourage higher conversion rates and, ultimately, increase sales. In short, a better website can make you more money.
- Build customer engagement and loyalty: Think about your own experience as a prospective customer shopping around online for a product or service. How does a badly designed website affect your perception of a brand? Well, the opposite is also true! Improving your website’s functionality, design, and overall UX leaves visitors with a more positive impression of your brand, in turn driving customer loyalty.
- Cement your brand: Lastly, it’s important to think of your website online as akin to a bricks-and-mortar business offline, or to a physical ad campaign. Your website is your opportunity to showcase and truly cement your branding in a way which sticks in visitors’ minds. With consistently strong branding across your website, you can improve brand awareness and reputation throughout your target audience.
How to improve your website: 12 steps to success
We’ve discussed how to assess the quality of your website with an audit and learned how a better website can benefit your business. Now let’s explore WebHummel’s 12 simple top tips for an improved site. Follow these steps, and make the website of your dreams a reality!
1) Page speed
Slow-loading pages leave visitors impatient, frustrated, and likely to leave (with a poor impression of your brand) before they ever have a chance to convert. Moreover, when visitors ‘bounce’ from your site straight back to the Google results page, Google will take note and, over time, start moving your site further down the rankings. That’s why we think it is imperative you know how to improve website page speed.
You can measure your site’s page speed for free using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.
Page speed can be improved by focusing on elements of web design such as its structure, the CMS you’re using (more on this later), the size of the images, embedded videos, and audio you include on each page, and the number of plugins you have installed. To make your website load faster, focus on removing unnecessary plugins and widgets, reducing the file size of the media you publish, and making the structure of your site as concise as possible.
2) Original, accessible content
The look, feel, speed and UX of your website are all crucial to its success, but just as foundational is the content you publish.
Google likes content—be that blog posts, web pages, or product descriptions—to be original, informative, accurate and accessible. Carbon copies of the same blog posts which do well for your competitors will not rank highly on SERPs, just like misleading or ill-written copy is a surefire way to make Google ignore your site.
When improving your website, take time to review the content already published on your site. Look for ways in which it can be improved as well as gaps in your content strategy which could be filled with the creation of new content in future. Here’s a short list of ways your content could be improved:
- Optimise the keyword content of your posts and pages for search engines
- Restructure your content to make it easier to read, including using plenty of white space, clear headers and headings
- Add relevant—ideally original—images to your content
- Consider adding other media, such as video, audio and/or infographics to boost the originality and accessibility of your content, as well
- Identify thematic gaps, both in your current content and in the wider context of the content published by your competitors—then create a publishing schedule to fill these gaps
- Make sure your content is equipped with relevant, search-engine-optimised metadata
- Improve the authority of your content by regularly reviewing and updating it, adding high-quality backlinks, and encouraging other authoritative sites to link to it
3) CTAs
CTA stands for ‘call to action’. Internet users are used to following calls to action wherever they are presented in clear and useful settings. A CTA can be as simple as a button telling a user to ‘Subscribe’ to your offering—e.g., a free newsletter or paid subscription.
When wondering how to improve your website, you should look to optimise your CTAs by making them as inviting and accessible as possible. That means thinking about the colours you use for the buttons (different colours evoke different emotions), the language you use (attractive CTAs use concise, actionable language like ‘Sign-Up Now’), and where you place the call.
4) Formatting, headings, and website structure
A great deal of what makes a website enjoyable to navigate comes down to the way the website is structured and the way its content is formatted.
One of the first things you can look to improve regarding the format of your website is its layout. Consider how you wish visitors to your site to use it, and organise your pages into easily accessible sections—for example, you could nest individual services you offer under an umbrella ‘Services’ page.
On the other hand, if you run an eCommerce site and have lots of products to categorise—or a blog with numerous posts—you could consider adding filters, search or subcategories to help users browse your content. Improving the structure of a website is accomplished via pagination SEO – i.e., the process of breaking down your website content into separate pages that can link to each other.
Similarly, it is important to format your content with UX in mind. Once a user has found a page they want to explore—having navigated your paginated site structure—you want to provide them an equally valuable experience on the page. This requires a neat and organised use of headings (also called H1 tags), and other useful visual cues which make digesting the page that much more rewarding for the end user—such as bullet points, lists, and content links.
5) Consistent branding
As we touched on earlier, improving your website gives you an opportunity to strengthen your branding. A quality website should feel like a single cohesive unit, representative of your brand—your offering, your company goals and ethics.
Be sure to use the same branded colour palette, language, tone of voice (TOV), font and so on when redesigning your site. Visitors who leave your site—having converted or not—should come away with a strong understanding of who you are and what you do, as well as a clear memory of your brand’s look. This will help keep your brand in visitors’ minds, improving brand awareness and encouraging them to return to your offering in future.
6) Optimised hyperlinks and internal linking
Much of what we’re discussing in this how to improve your website guide relates back to Google. As the world’s most popular search engine, Google’s algorithmic web trawler often gets to dictate what makes a website worth visiting or not. Improving your website, therefore, often means meeting Google’s criteria for an authoritative, trustworthy and quality site.
The hyperlinks you use to third-party sites, the internal links you plant within your own content, and the backlinks to your website which other sites publish all play a part in telling Google how valuable and relevant your site is.
Hyperlinks
Make sure that the hyperlinks you use are differentiated from the rest of the text on the page. A classic example of hyperlink differentiation is to underline your links and colour them blue.
This makes hyperlinks easier to spot and more attractive to click on.
Internal links
Internal links can be used to redirect users from one page to another, and are usually employed to expand on a point in greater detail elsewhere, or to help a user easily navigate to other relevant parts of your site—thus improving UX. Just be sure that your links all work: 404 ‘Not Found’ pages popping up at the end of a dead link are likely to annoy visitors to your site.
Backlinks
Backlinks are not always easy to acquire, and tend to require a mixture of networking, collaboration, and sheer luck. The most important thing is that you want, where possible, to encourage backlinking from other high-quality authoritative sites. These tell Google that your website is also worth ranking.
7) Compatibility
In an age of technology, it is crucial that your website loads, runs, and can be navigated both quickly and easily across a range of platforms. When improving your site, make sure to optimise it not just for computer access, but also for smartphones and tablets.
Mobile friendliness, or mobile-first indexing, is the practice of adapting your web design for smartphone functionality. Being as smartphones have a small, vertical screen (versus a large, horizontal PC screen), you may need to choose a new theme via your CMS if your current theme can’t be adapted.
Other mobile-first optimizations can include customizing your website’s CSS to establish ‘responsive break points’ in your pages. Responsive break points ensure that mobile devices aren’t forced to try and load all a page’s media at once, but rather load as the user scrolls further down the page.
Handily, there’s another free Google tool you can use to test the mobile-friendliness of your website.
8) Concise messaging
A great website should clearly demonstrate to visitors what your brand’s about and what you have to offer them. A really great website should do this at a glance. To avoid those high bounce rates, you want to grab a visitor’s attention straight off the bat.
Make sure that your messaging is concise, punchy, and well-placed, so that visitors to your site are sold on your brand—and, most importantly, on how your brand can help them—in an instant.
9) Social proof and relatability
Studies have shown that consumers trust each others’ opinions far more than they do the opinions of businesses or even, in some instances, experts in your field. 88% of consumers say they trust the word of someone they know, or who they relate to, above all else.
You can really improve the impact and trustworthiness of you and your website by leveraging this trust through what’s known as ‘social proof’. When we are unsure how to act, think, or feel about something, we tend to look to others for guidance—copying what they do in order to fit in and feel safe. This is the psychology behind social proof.
When you apply this same psychology to website improvement, you can hope to influence visitors’ impression of and trust in your brand by showing them the positive things others have said. You can let others’ words do the talking by clearly showcasing some of the positive reviews you’ve received over the years on the homepage of your website.
10) ‘Thank You’ pages
Our guide to improving your website is non-exhaustive. Whilst we’ve detailed here the most important changes you can make, there is an almost limitless number of things you can do to make your customers’ website experience—and your ranking on Google—even better.
One such small thing is to create and optimise a ‘Thank You’ page which greets end users once they’ve made a conversion (i.e., purchased something or signed up to your newsletter). The ‘Thank You’ page is an opportunity for you to communicate directly with a customer, deepening your relationship with them and strengthening their loyalty.
But the ‘Thank You’ page can also be a space to try and double down on customer conversions. For example, you could include links or CTAs on the page to other relevant services and products which, based on their purchasing patterns, you think they might also enjoy.
11) Choose the right CMS
CMS stands for ‘content management system’, and in web design refers to the platform you use to host and build your site. Popular CMSs include:
- WordPress
- Shopify
- Squarespace
- Adobe Commerce
- GoDaddy
Each of these, amidst a host of other CMSs, offer a variety of pros and cons which are worth weighing up before you settle on the best CMS for your business.
Your content management system can have a big impact on how efficiently your site runs, how easy it is to edit, manage, and improve, as well as determining the tools you have at your disposal for things like eCommerce and customer communication.
12) Beef-up your security
Finally, we’d be remiss to end our list of top tips on how to improve your website without touching on website security. After all, what’s the use in putting all that hard work into optimising your website just for your domain to be stolen, or your site to be hacked?
It’s important, for example, to remember to renew domain ownership on a regular basis so as it cannot be purchased by a competitor. Similarly, you should regularly change and update your login details, and ensure only those with proper clearance have access to them.
Speaking with your host or developer about security for their professional insights, too. They might recommend you consider installing a firewall to block malicious visitors, or implementing other security measures to secure your site’s files and database access, whilst protecting it against common security threats.
There are myriad ways you can enhance site security, these are just the basics. What’s most important is that you come away from our guide with an appreciation for the role security plays in the quality of your website.
Drive traffic to your newly improved website with digital marketing
Your website is the gateway to your brand, your offering, and ultimately, your success. Knowing when, why, and how to improve your website is crucial for even the youngest and smallest of enterprises or entrepreneurs.
The ‘busy bees’ at beefound.agency have gathered here some of the most useful tips for improving your website from our many years of helping clients build the best quality online ‘hives’.
But once you’ve optimised your website, what’s next? An improved website helps you rank higher in SERPs and encourages better conversion rates. But did you know that you can encourage even more traffic to your website with digital marketing?
Get in touch today to see how we could help you build a winning website, backed by a budget-friendly digital marketing campaign, to which customers, clients and leads will flock!
