Getting a website set up is easy. Getting a good website set up is another story. There are plenty of awful websites on the web right now. Putting a little more effort into your site can make a huge impact on how effective your site is. Here we’ll go over some of the basics and discuss the easier mistakes to fix.

Too Crowded

You may want to stuff as much information on your site as you can, but when your site is too crowded it makes things more difficult to read and more difficult for your customer to find what they’re looking for. When a customer comes to your website and sees a wall of text, they aren’t going to read it.

Images

Your images can make or break your website. Poor images won’t capture your customers attention, large images can significantly slow down your site. Images can also help people remember something better or direct their attention to whatever you want them to focus on.

Images are fantastic ways to convey emotion, information, and direct attention. When you’re picking the images for your site, avoid stock images when possible. Use images of your actual business and products, but be sure that they are high quality. If you aren’t able to get high quality images of your business yourself, you could hire a photographer to do it for you. A professional will be able to take and edit high quality photos that can make a huge difference in your online performance. You can read more about that here.

Content

You may have heard the phrase “Content is king” that’s true. When you’re writing the content for your site, it needs to be clear and consistent. Good content will increase your SEO, keep customers engaged, solve problems, and bring in new leads.

When your website rank in search results is being determined, Google will go through your website and try to figure out what it’s all about. Google wants to deliver the most relevant and useful results to its users that it can. This means you need your content to be useful, clearly communicate what your business is about and unique to you. If you want to rank higher in search results, your content needs to provide more value than your competitors can. Don’t have generic text up just to take up space, communicate why you’re different and worth working with or buying from. The placement of your content is important as well. Don’t drone on forever about your mission on your homepage, save that for your “About” page.

Good content will keep your customer engaged and on your site. It directs them to do what you want them to do. Are you an auto mechanic business trying to bring in more customers? Highlight why you can solve your customers problems better than your competitors. Are you a cleaning service? Highlight how you can get the job done better.

Contact

If a customer wants to get in touch with you or is having an issue with your site or your services, you will want them to be able to get in touch with you. One of the most frustrating things can be spending a large amount of time trying to get in contact with you. This easiest way of course would be to have a contact page on your website or a contact section on your homepage.

Give them a couple ways to get in touch, like a form to fill out, an email and/or a phone number. Don’t make an already upset customer even more upset because they can’t figure out how to contact you and don’t lose leads because a potential customer can’t get in touch.

Responsive Design

There are multiple ways a customer will access the internet. A computer, a tablet, a smart phone. If your website isn’t displaying properly or designed to look good on multiple devices, you’ll be losing out on a lot of business. Today, about half of all people on the internet are accessing your site through their phone. The mobile version of your website needs to be properly designed to be easily used on the smallest of smartphone screens. Google is also using the mobile version of your site to determine your ranking in search results. If you have a good desktop site but a poor mobile version, you’ll rank much lower than if you had a great mobile site and an okay desktop site.

Website Speed

Your site speed is going to be one of the first things a customer will recognize. If your website takes 4 seconds or more to load, your online sales will be cut in half. People don’t like slow websites. One of the biggest reasons for slow websites is image size. Make sure your image is the proper size and properly optimized. Even changing the format of the image can drastically change the load speed. JPGs and PNGs will look about the same on your site, but a JPGs loads far faster than a PNGs. 

This is only a rough overview of some of the basic mistakes you need to avoid on your site. There are a lot of things you can do to improve your site. Sometimes doing something as simple as swapping out an image can improve your performance. Sometimes you have to do more technical things to improve your site. If you want to make significant improvements it will take time. You can either do it yourself or hire someone to do it for you, either way, don’t just throw up a simple website just to have something up. Make something that people will actually use and get you results.