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As a business, you’re going to need to have a website as a representation of the products and services that your company offers. It can also ensure that you remain one of the leaders in your niche because it provides you with a platform to publish information for people to read, positioning your company as a thought leader.
With that being said, not all websites are created equal, which means there are some steps you can take to make it better. Before you republish your website, check out some of the things we have to say below that will help you to ensure your website is performing at the level you expect it to.
Create a Checklist
Creating a checklist is one of the best ways to know what to do when bettering your website. Before you can write a website update checklist, you need to perform a website assessment. This assessment will observe how the website runs and how well it performs.
This should be a report that a member of your team pulls regularly to ensure your company is doing what it takes to continue meeting the needs of your consumers. It also will help you determine if there are things that you can be doing that are better.
Keep Content Fresh
The next thing all businesses should be looking to do when bettering their websites is keeping content fresh. Consumers don’t want to see you recycle the same content repeatedly because that’s boring.
Instead, they want to see you leading your industry as a thought leader who shares need-to-know updated information with its customer base. Take some time to review what content you’ve created in the past.
From there, you can research to determine the top topics in your industry currently. Once you have a list of topics that are at the forefront of consumers’ minds, you can move forward with creating a content calendar that will keep you on the right track as far as when and what content to deliver.
Make Navigation As Easy As Can Be
When someone visits your website, the last thing they want to do is get confused about where to find information. Instead of continuing the hunt, people are more likely to leave the website and search for answers elsewhere.
When bettering your website, keep the page navigation as easy as possible. This means including a search bar that has easy-to-read tabs.
It also means featuring the correct information on each page. When placing contact information on a page, ensure that it’s comprehensive and accurate.
Also, if you’re going to put words on any one of your websites, ensure you’re using buzzwords that engage the reader and assist them in moving to the next step of the process, whatever that may be.
You want to get customers from the main peg to the checkout page in as few clicks as possible because, after all, you want to ensure you don’t lose the sale.
Focus On Page Speed
When you click on a website in the search engine, you expect the page and all its content to load within a few seconds. If your page takes too long to load, people that have clicked on it will assume there’s something wrong with their browser.
If they assume that is the case, they are likely going to close the page and not try opening it again. There are several reasons your website might not be loading quickly, such as having too many elements present on each page.
When you overload a page with too many words or oversized images and fonts, it’s going to take some time for the page to load. Instead, create a strategy that will help you choose a website design that matches the brand of your company.
Choose a few colors and one to two fonts that can be used universally throughout your website and the content you produce. Once this is done and all pages have been updated, you can run tests to determine if your website is functioning at maximum loading speed.
Fix Links That Are Broken
Remember above when we stated that you need to ensure all information on your website is accurate and updated? This goes for broken links, too, especially if they are embedded in your content.
Imagine this a consumer clicks on a link in one of your social media posts that’s supposed to take them to your website. Instead of leading them to the site, it shows that the link is broken.
Not only does this increase the chances of you losing potential customers, but it also shows the customer that you didn’t take enough time to care that one of your links was broken. All links, whether on your website or within your content, should be checked regularly.
This is to ensure that they are working; if they aren’t, it gives you the chance to go through and update them with relevant links. If you don’t want to routinely check links to ensure they aren’t broken, you might consider embedding less of them throughout the website.
Use Call To Actions
At the end of each page of your website and the content you create, there should be a featured call to action. Without this call to action, how are people going to know what they should do next?
The call to action should come after the summary of everything you’ve shared with the reader. For instance, if you want people to sign up for your newsletter, your call to action would read something like,” Don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter to stay up to date on all the latest information.” It would be helpful if this sentence was a link or if there was a button close by where people could enter their email for the newsletter and then press enter.
When you want to better your website, there are several things to do. We recommend fixing broken links and remembering to keep the content you create fresh.
For more on website mainenance and related information, check out some of our other must-read blogs.
