Helpful Tips to Improve Your Website
Nowadays, we all know how essential a website can be to the overall success of a business, but not everyone is capable of hiring a knowledgeable expert or web designer to help set them up for that success. Below are several key reasons why your website may be hindering your business, as well as some tips to help improve it and even the playing field.
Your Site is Too Slow
“Site speed” typically refers to how fast the content on your site loads, and regardless of what business or industry you are in, one of the main reasons that a website can lose you business is by not loading fast enough. Unless someone is determined to purchase from you, chances are that if it takes more than a reasonable amount of time, the customer is going to leave your site and find one that will load faster. Having a fast site speed is critical if you intend on running ecommerce on WP.
So what can be done to improve your site speed? First, it’s a good idea to utilize Google’s PageSpeed Insights to get an idea of your website’s “score,” both on mobile and on desktop. The results may not be familiar to you if you’re not well-versed in web design, but they give you a good starting point for things to research. In the meantime, one thing to do is make sure that all images on your site are no larger than they need to be, as this can be a big culprit in delaying load time. Pro-tip, PNG files are better for graphics, while JPEG files are better for photographs.
Mobile Compatibility
Statistics show that more and more people are conducting business on their mobile devices, which means optimizing your site for mobile users is imperative. A good web design site will allow you to preview both mobile and desktop looks before you publish, to make sure it’s user-friendly.
Utilizing SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Okay, great, but what is SEO? The definition is “the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results by a search engine.” Basically, when you search Google or Bing for a specific topic, you want to be as close to the top of the list as possible, not on page 57. This ranking is different from pay-to-play ads that appear at the very top, as SEO is organic. In order to improve your ranking, use key words for your page links that you know people will be searching for and that are relevant to your content, so search engines know what your site is about. Keep it short, but get specific. To learn more about SEO and best practices, see What is SEO?
Keep Your Content Fresh and Clean
In order to keep your site relevant, make sure to keep producing new content regularly. This lets the algorithm know you are still active. Also, be sure to make your color palette easy on the eyes because if people are straining to read, chances are pretty high that customers will leave quickly.