14 simple ways to improve your website

In a world where we’re more reliant on technology and e-commerce than ever before, making sure your website serves its main purpose is very important. Therefore, consistently developing your website and improving its components is the best way to ensure your website is the best it can be.

No matter what industry you are in, your website is a key part of fulfilling your business’s overall objectives; whether that’s selling products, generating leads, increasing brand awareness, or looking to educate users, you cannot escape the fact that the future is digital. Investing time and money into your web development/design is essential and in this blog, I will break down 14 simple ways to improve your website.

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14 simple ways to improve your website

1. Consider your audience

• Your target audience should always be at the forefront of your mind when it comes to developing your website. Understanding what your audience will resonate with on your site is vital. Make any design/developmental decisions with your target audience in mind; by appealing to your audience you will improve the user experience. You should also consider the average age of the readership when picking the font types and sizes.

2. Make sure your website logo is visible 

• Your website should contain a company logo. Brand assets like logos 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. Logos form a strong visual identity for a brand and are a great way to increase brand awareness, trust and loyalty.

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 is useful and helps from an indexing point of view.

4. Mobile users

• The mobile experience is often an area people forget to take into consideration but it is highly likely your audience might view your website on a mobile at some point, so it’s time to start thinking about mobile design. Making tweaks to the mobile version of your website, if it doesn’t work well, can help to offer the best user experience for those users not using a desktop. However mobile users often expect a faster page loading time (read point 13 which covers loading times).

5. Consider disabled users

• Accessibility in web design is a key component of a successful website, so you must be aware of how you can make your site more accessible. A number of all visitors coming to any website will be disabled, so helping this audience get the most out of the site is important. 

6. Utilise CTA buttons

• Using ‘Call to Action’ buttons on your website can help drive visitors to product pages, category pages, or whichever page makes the most sense from a commercial perspective to link to. By simplifying the user journey and making it easy for users to complete a conversion, you are more likely to see an increase in conversions.

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 an XML sitemap is an 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

• Visually appealing 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 images 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 function. Images should follow 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 you use short URLs is a 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 are the types of links that lead to nowhere or error pages. 

13. Improve your website loading time

• There a many tools available that can help you check your website’s page speed issues but some common areas that could be improved upon are often compressing your website’s images, moving to a better host, reducing web page file size and deleting 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 do 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.

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