How to Improve Your Website

How to Improve Your Website

20 Steps to Website Nirvana

Your website has been around for some time, and you notice a reduction in traffic or conversion. Or maybe the site looks a bit jaded to your eyes? Or perhaps some pages are not relevant anymore. It’s time to do a design and improvement tweak on your website. So how or where do you get started? First, identify why you need to do an improvement exercise on your website. It will help you decide which areas you need to work on. And as a leading web development team in Perth, we can help you with it. So, let’s see which are the 20 essential ways that can improve your website.

Speed

The average load time a user expects is 3 seconds or better. Anything more than that, you will be losing visitors and potential customers. So, speed is a crucial factor in user experience and search engine results making it the first and foremost thing to improve your website performance.

There are several ways you can increase the speed of your site.

1. Hosting capabilities

Ensure that your host is providing you with good accessibility. Dedicated servers, though a bit costlier than shared ones, provide better speed and accessibility. At Codesquad, we provide a  fully managed web hosting solution that turbo charges your online performance.

2. Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Use a Content Delivery Network like Cloudflare. A CDN stores files like CSS, JavaScript, images on local servers, reducing their access time. This enables your visitors to have a faster load time.

3. Optimize the Homepage

Your homepage should clearly state your purpose and who you are without stuffing a lot of images and posts. Give maximum information with minimum scrolling.

4. Image optimization

Images, especially high-resolution images, take up a lot of load time. Manually resize the images before uploading on to your site. Use JPEG or PNG formats as they take up lesser memory and load faster than other formats.

5. Reduce Redirects

Use Redirects as less as possible. Use HTTP redirects instead of JavaScript to reduce redirect times.

6. Check plugin usage

While plugins are good for customization, too many of them can make your site slow as they take a lot of load time. Install a plugin only if it serves a purpose, and not just because it is the hottest new one.

7. Update framework and themes

If your site has been around for some time, chances are that the coding has become outdated. Some WordPress themes can also cause your site to slow down. Check the themes and ensure that you are using current coding practices. See how you can choose the best WordPress theme  for your site.

Navigation

8. Simplify navigation

Simple and easy navigation is essential to keep users on your site. If visitors find it difficult to move around on your site, they are going to leave your site and move onto the next one. Moving from one point to another on the site should be ideally within 3 seconds.

9. Clean up your structure

Navigation is not just about easy movement. A clean and organized structure lets search engines crawl your site better. This is done by using the sitemap and breadcrumbs. Ensure you have a sitemap, and it is neatly organized. Let’s say you provide a service Z. The breadcrumb should look like this:

Home > Services > Service Z

And not like this:

Home > Service Z

Design

As we mentioned in the first point, your site may need a total design makeover, especially if it has been around for some time. There are a lot of platforms that have pre-loaded themes and designs so that you can create a website on your own. However, you may want to get professionals do it for you to ensure that all aspects are according to current and updated practices. You may want to keep in mind the following points to improve your website design to the finest one.

10. Mobile friendly

As mobiles increasingly become the device of choice to access the internet, it is necessary to ensure that you site is mobile friendly. In simple words, your site should load fast and have easy navigation on mobile devices.

11. Responsive design

Though the terms responsive design and mobile-friendly are often used together, they are in principle different. Responsive design means that your site adjusts to the screen size of any device or browser.

12. Browser compatibility

Browsers get updated frequently and can cause your website to slow down or otherwise not work properly. You must test and ensure that your website code is updated at regular intervals to be compatible with all popular browsers.

Clean Up Content

13. Check content

There can be content on your site that is not really needed or has outlived its purpose and intent. Sometimes, you need a few pages that you don’t want the search engines to crawl, like your policy pages. Set such pages as not to be indexed. If you think you need a major overhaul of content, get a professional including a developer and copywriter, to help you.

14. Delete unnecessary and stocky images

Images and videos are fine to make your site visually appealing, but too many of them can cause visitors to lose interest. Use relevant images to make your content attractive and appealing.

15. White Space

The argument on white space refuses to die down. While some clients complain that white space is a waste of real estate, others feel that white space makes the site look clearer. Find the right balance, experiment with white space. White space gives content more clarity, while too much of it is does take up space.

16. SEO compatible

This one is a no-brainer. Most of the points on this list are SEO strategies geared to make a website more user-friendly and rank higher. However, SEO is more than that; it is a constant process that is ever-changing with frequent new ranking factors. It is advisable to get professional SEO technicians to maintain your site. The Computing Australia Group’s SEO will get your business onto page one of Google and keep you there.

17. Add More Calls to Action

Call-to-Action (CTAs) should be attractive, engaging and, non-pushy. If you are unfamiliar with them, CTAs are what you use to ask visitors to take an action. It can be a button, a pop-up, a banner, or a landing page. Use a combination of CTAs like social follows, sign for an e-newsletter, sign-up for a webinar, see more information or to place an order. Spend some time, and craft strong CTAs that give a solution to the pain points that your buyer personas face.

18. Security

Invest in a good security software, and ensure that it is regularly updated. SSL is an important ranking factor, so it’s a good idea to have all the pages secured. You do not want to create a negative image for your site with frequent security-related downtime.

19. Check and fix errors

You may have broken links or 404 errors that you are probably not even aware of, depending on your website age and size. Go to your Google Search Console, check the errors, and get them fixed. A website without errors means that it is active and regularly updated and maintained, which is definitely a high ranking factor with search engines.

20. Social Share and Follow buttons

Last but not the least point to note to improve your website is social share and follow buttons. The world is increasingly becoming ‘social’, and you must take advantage of this. You will already have social share buttons on your site. Still, in the unlikely case that you are unfamiliar with them, social buttons are icons of different social media channels, mostly at the bottom of a post or page; they let you share the post to the social media platform of your choice. Take advantage of The Computing Australia Group’s Social Media Services to take your brand to the world.

These are just some of the ways that you can improve your website. Of course, you don’t need to do all of them right away, but these can help you get started. Need help with redesigning or improving your site? Our proficient web designers and web hosting team in Perth are here to assist you to get your own customized website. Contact us today or email at sales@computingaustralia.group.

Jargon Buster

CDN: A content delivery network is a set of interconnected servers that speed up web content delivery.
404: A 404 error is an HTTP status code that conveys that the page you were trying to access wasn’t available on the server.