14 Simple Ways To Improve Your Website
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In a world where we’re more reliant on technology and e-commerce than ever before, improving your website to ensure it serves its main purpose is more important than ever and will continue to be for many years to come. No matter if you are a organisation, SME, charity, or an e-commerce company, your website is a key part of fulfilling your business’s overall objects whether that’s selling products, generating leads, increasing brand awareness, or looking to educate users, you cannot escape the fact that future is digital.
1. Consider your audience
When deciding on the type of users you are wanting to bring to your website then the average age of the readership should be a factor when picking the font types and sizes.
2. Website logo
Your website should contain a company logo which are often displayed within the header of the website and when clicked on, should direct the user back to the home page wherever they are on the website.
3. Use a footer
Ensure your website has a footer that contains general links to the ‘About Us’ and ‘Terms and Conditions’ pages as well as other key pages on the website as having links on all pages are useful and help from a indexing point of view.
4. Mobile users
The mobile experience is often an area people forget to take into consideration, so by making tweaks to the mobile version if it doesn’t work well on a phone or tablet can help to offer a best user experience for those users not using desktop. However mobile users often expect a faster page loading time.
5. Consider disabled users
6. Utilise buttons
Using ‘Call to Action’ buttons on the website in relevant places can help drive visitors to product pages, category pages, or whichever page that makes the most sense from a commercial perspective to link to.
7. Robots.txt file
A robots.txt file holds a list of the URLs and files that you are instructing search engines to not crawl, making it faster at indexing the current site.
8. XML sitemap
Setting up a XML sitemap is a important part of a website, as it helps with indexing the website. There are many tools available that will automatically generate XML site maps.
9. Good use of imagery
Big graphics help to engage users on the website, as text heavy pages can often result in decreased average session times and bounce rates.
10. Perform image optimisation
Ensure that any images that are uploaded to your website are properly sized and labelled appropriately as it can impact the speed of your site, as well as how the search engines functions. Images should follow to a naming convention for the file names, have ‘Alt’ tags added, and they should also be in a suitable format such as JPEG or PNG.
11. Use short URLs
Ensuring that the length of your URLs are short is good SEO practice because not only do shorter URLs rank better in search results but they are also far easier for users to type out and help improve the user experience.
12. Check all links work
Ensure that all links across your website whether they are external or internal work and direct the user to the linked page correctly without being redirected or sent to a 404 page. These types of links that lead to nowhere or to error pages aren’t following best practice from an SEO perspective.
13. Improve your websites loading time
There a many tools available that can help you check your websites page speed issues but some common areas that could be improved upon are often compressing your websites images, move to a better host, reduce web page file size and to delete unnecessary 3rd party scripts.
14. Make content easy to read
When writing content for your website, you want it to be as engaging as possible to the user for them to digest. Some ways to doing this include aiming for paragraphs of 3-4 sentences long, using sub-headers to break up your content into individual sections and utilising bullet points for stats, facts and ideas.
