10 Ways to Improve your Website in 2023
It is 2023, and you are already starting to think about things you would like to improve this year.
As a business person and/or website owner, your digital real estate should also be on that list.
If you rely on your website as a tool to collect leads, and to drive sales, then you want to read this article.
We have 10 tips for you to make your website the best it can be for the coming year.
Design matters.
Much like fashion, there are trends in web design and updates that are important to pay attention to.
It is smart to update your website design as needed to ensure it stays relevant. secure, and a good experience.
As you may have done yourself, many customers judge the credibility of a company by the design of their website.
Spy on your competition.
Sam Walton, the monarch behind the Walmart empire, was notorious for going to his competitors and seeing what works for them.
He would then take this intelligence back to Walmart and try to implement it in his business.
Fast forward to today and Walmart is the largest retailer in the U.S. by far. Your competition very likely has features on their websites that you do not.
It is important to learn what those competitive tools are so that you can incorporate them into your own marketing.
Check out your competitors websites and see what they are doing well.
Companies that are bigger than yours should provide some nice models of what to do.
While those that are smaller may also show some things not to do. In both cases, steal what works and use it to improve your website.
Add a Chatbot.
One of the easiest wins that you can get is the ability to automate communication with your customers.
Going a little further, making this an option 24 hours a day.
On your website, this is best achieved by the use of a Chatbot.
This is an automated messenger that pops up and assists your potential customer with pre-programmed answers to questions.
They can help customers learn more about your products, assist with billing issues or provide technical customer support.
It is like having a customer service person sitting on your website that is always available and helps your customers.
One resource for this that we highly recommend for this is LiveChat.
Get on the SEO train.
If you aren’t familiar with SEO, then this is a good time for a quick lesson.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.
In a nutshell, it means making your website attractive to Google so that you rank highly in search engine results.
This means that customers searching for the things that you sell will find your website more often.
More customers seeing your products more often translates to more sales.
Employing good SEO practices is one of the most cost-effective ways to increase targeted and interested traffic to your website.
Best practices include optimizing page load times, creating original and relevant content, and linking between pages on the site.
It is also smart to fill out meta information like tags, title, and description for articles or images you post.
Google has its own robots regularly reviewing each page of a site to determine which one is relevant to the keywords people are searching for.
These tips help you to show up higher in the results.
Scale your images.
As mentioned before, page load times should be as fast as you can make them.
This helps with your SEO, but it also helps with keeping customers on your website.
People really hate to wait for a website to load. It was understandable in the 90’s, but now it’s just downright irritating.
According to one of Google’s top analysts, you should aim for a 2-3 second load time to provide the best experience for your users and your search rankings.
One way to do this is to scale your images since they are usually the largest files on the page.
This is accomplished by using web design that is responsive and renders your images to a size that is friendly to the device being used to view the website.
It also helps to have a caching feature on your site that renders the images as the user scrolls down the page.
This greatly improves page load times as resources are only used as needed.
Add a newsletter signup.
Or any type of signup for that matter!
Creating an opt-in form for your website visitors to give you their email in exchange for valuable information has been done for years. And that’s because it works!
Once you get a visitor to your site, the next goal is to get their email address to build a relationship with them.
This means you can send them an email to get them to return again and again.It also means you have more control over your own traffic.
Instead of somebody who came to your site once and may have been lost forever!
Now you have a lead that can be nurtured into a long term customer. Depending on your business, you may want to provide a newsletter or it could be something else of value.
As an example:
For an eCommerce website, it may be beneficial to offer exclusive deals or coupons that are not available to non-subscribers.
Check & optimize your mobile responsiveness.
For years and especially moving into 2020, the trend is clear.
People are using mobile devices to browse the internet more and more. And using computers less and less.
If your website is not optimized for mobile phones and tablets , it will lose you business.
Depending on your website builder or design tool, your site is not necessarily responsive by default. That could be driving away customers and hurting your search rankings.
An easy way to check for responsiveness is to look at your website on your own smartphone.
Does it render quickly? Is it easy to read? Is it simple to navigate?
If not, then you should work with a good website design company to make it so. We have a good one in mind!
Test your copy.
Words are powerful. They tell stories, convey messages, and most importantly are influential to those who read them.
Having good copy on your web pages could be correlated strongly with your business’ ability to convert visitors into sales.
Focus on customer-centric content that attracts your visitors’ attention.
Help lead them to the answers that your product or service can provide.
You want copy that enters the conversation that the prospect is already having in their own mind.
There are several ways to put your content to the test.
Your page stats will reveal how a post drives traffic, bounce rates, or conversions.
Another way is to run a survey of a small segment of your audience to find out two things.
These two things are how they feel about current content and what kind of content they would like to see in the future.
Use a heat map.
This is a tool that tracks what people are actually doing when they get to your website.
It can be optimized to improve your results.
You can see where they focused the most.
If they clicked on an area that wasn’t clickable or areas that didn’t get any attention that maybe you felt should have.
With this kind of intelligence, you can make all kinds of improvements to grow your traffic and conversion rates.
Use “Thank You” pages the smart way.
Did a customer just sign up for your email list, fill out a contact form, or buy a product?
You should have a “Thank You” page they land on afterwards, but going a step further, use that real estate wisely.
This is a great opportunity to keep them on your site to consume more content or to encourage further sales.
Do this by making exclusive offers or by linking to other posts on your site to further build the relationship.
As an afterthought, you could also use 404 pages in this way.
So what’s next?
2020 could be the year that your business website goes to the next level in traffic, leads, and sales.
Make the smart business move and hire a professional marketing team to implement these improvements for your website.
