19 Simple Website Improvement Tips Any Business Can Use

This post was initially published on PixoLabo .

A successful online presence can be essential to gaining new customers, keeping existing customers, and sharing your mission with a public audience. Since best practices and trends in digital marketing change quickly, updating your website can be one way to do this.

Improving a company's website can also help with increased online security and brand recognition. In this article, I explain why improving a website is beneficial and provide 19 essential website improvement tips to help you get the most from your online presence.

Why Make Improvements to Your Website?

Your business website may seem to function effectively enough, and you may even get a decent amount of conversions from the web traffic you manage to bring in. However, odds are, you can still improve your website.

Making improvements to your website can help you reach your audience more effectively. With a well-designed website, you can better leverage online marketing strategies, for example. You can also increase brand awareness through increased web traffic.

Improving your website can help you reach your short and long-term business objectives. You might even increase revenues and profitability when you improve your website, depending on the context and type of improvements you make.

19 Tips to Improve Your Website

If you want to improve your business website, here are some tips that might help:

Understand Your Users

Understanding your users' wants and needs can be the first step toward improving your website. When you do, you can tailor the online experience to meet or exceed their expectations.

Different populations might also interact with your website differently, so it might be helpful to do market research to better understand your customer base. Consider working with a team and collaborating to identify objectives based on your online audience.

Develop a Plan

Developing an intentional plan for your website's growth can help ensure you meet your objectives effectively and efficiently. Consider brainstorming online strategies with your team or creating a task force to identify meaningful goals for your online presence. Try to match evidence-based best practices with your plans to maximize your website's measurable outcomes.?

Stay Organized

Stay organized when developing improvements to your website, and keep your website itself organized, too. An internal perspective, a clear and organized development cycle can support frequent site reviews and updates.

From a user point of view, a well-organized website can make it easier to find the information you need, engage with site content and make purchases. Consider examining your site's navigation tools, such as menus and sidebars, and evaluating their ease of use. Try using drop-down or nested navigation to help the mobile version of your site resemble the desktop version.

Be Consistent

Replicating your website's primary organization on each page can make it easier for your users to navigate your site and perform actions like engaging with content and making purchases.

Try to follow a predictable pattern in each page's layout. Using consistent design elements, such as fonts, shapes, and colors can help your users easily find and access parts of your website. This idea is also valuable when creating a mobile-first design because consistent elements can smooth the transition between mobile and desktop use.

Do a Little Spring Cleaning?

Go through your website and remove elements that could be hindering its performance. For example, get rid of complicated animations that could slow down your load times, remove poor quality stock images, and ensure the content on your site isn't too long.?

Most visitors don't have the patience to slog through pages of text. Therefore, you may want to use bullets, headers, or images to break up your content.

Optimize Your Homepage

Making your homepage easy to navigate can help users find the information they are looking for and take action, such as signing up for an email list or making a purchase. Try dividing your homepage into approximately three to five sections that correspond with essential parts of your site.

Be sure your company message and user benefits are clear immediately because site visitors often decide whether to continue engaging with a website based on their homepage appearance and navigation.

Eliminate Distractions

Another improvement to consider is simplifying your website to help readers focus on the most critical information. Consider omitting features such as complicated animations, additional images, and colors outside your brand profile. You may wish to use a focus group or internal task force to review your website and see if simplification is the right strategy for your organization.

Simplify Website Navigation

If it's difficult for visitors to go through your website and find what they are looking for, then they don't spend very long on it. Ensure the navigation bar is near the top of the page where visitors can easily find it.?

Include links to your homepage, blog, online store, about page, and contact page. It would be best if you also had a search bar and a sitemap to make things even more user-friendly.

Generate High-Quality Content

High-quality content is another factor that can impact your website's success. The content details will depend on your industry and focus; however, the most effective websites follow some of the same patterns. For example, keeping material easy to read can help engage busy readers who might want to scan your content.

Effective headings can also attract readers' attention and help them find the necessary information. Finally, integrate SEO keywords to help increase your site's chances of appearing higher in search engine results.

Use Appropriate Images and Graphics

?Images, icons, and graphics can help enhance your web presence by creating a pleasant visual experience and communicating important information to your site visitors. If you use stock photos, locate quality images that reflect your brand and desired customer impact.

Realistic imagery that complements your content is often the most successful choice. Compress images to increase site speed and keep your layout simple when possible.

Optimize Your Website for Mobile Users?

Many users will access your website from a desktop and mobile device, so building your site with responsive design principles is crucial. Therefore your site should adapt to various screen sizes while making it easy to see all necessary information and graphics.

Ensure your website loads, functions, and displays correctly on a mobile device. If it doesn't, it will hurt your mobile SEO and cost you a large portion of your audience, who are most likely visiting your site on a smartphone or tablet.

Other features, such as enhanced visibility for important icons, like the shopping cart function, can make it easier for mobile users to navigate your site. You might also review your mobile site to ensure essential action items like an "order now" button is clear and available on every page they visit.?

Improve Page Speed

A website that loads and responds quickly is often relatively successful because it is easy for users to locate the information they need. An efficient website can also make it easier for users to take action, such as visiting another page or making a purchase.

To optimize your website speed, use a free online tool to investigate your current site speed. Then, take steps like compressing image files to increase your site's speed.?

Integrate Social Proof

Social proof refers to buyers' tendency to trust others' opinions about products and services. You can use social proof to improve your website by including favorable reviews to show your readers that other people have purchased your products and recommend them.

Make it easy for your readers to share the content they like on the social media platform of their choice by adding social share buttons to your content. This functionality eliminates the need for them to copy the link to your content and paste it into their social media page.?

Instead, they can instantly share with just a click of a button. It makes sharing easier for them and will also help increase your content's exposure, bringing in more traffic and potentially more leads.

You can also include links to your social media channels to leverage social proof of your example, especially if you have large numbers of followers.

Use Effective Call-to-Action

Without calls to action, your readers aren't going to know what you want them to do. Not only should you add calls-to-action to every page, but you should also spend some time figuring out precisely what you want your readers to do and how it's relevant to the page that they are on. Your calls-to-action should offer an incentive to readers, such as materials that will allow them to solve their pain points.

Clearly showing which actions a viewer should take after visiting your site can help improve the likelihood that they will do so. For example, using a prominent font and color for the "buy now" button on your e-commerce store can increase the likelihood that your site visitors will make a purchase. Other calls to action might include signing up for an email newsletter, subscribing to a service, or following your brand on social media.

Use White Space Effectively

Spacing elements effectively can provide another visual improvement for your webpage by first guiding your reader's line of sight to the most relevant information. You can use white or negative space to separate elements and use proximity, or closeness, to show which page parts are related to one another. You can also use white space to isolate and help identify call-to-action elements such as buttons and links.

Be Relatable?

Including information about your team can help humanize your operations to your users. By providing a page that includes team pictures and biographical information, for example, you might evoke a sense of trust that can encourage your visitors to take action. Consider using a landing page with team names and photos and individual team member pages for search engine optimization.

Implement an SEO strategy

Develop an SEO strategy that considers your buyer persona so you can create relevant content. Then, optimize your content using the keywords your audience would use to perform searches to make your site more visible.?

Find and Fix Broken Links

There are numerous tools out there that you can use to identify broken links and unknown 404s. Broken links can drive away visitors and hurt your search rankings, so make sure you fix them.

Test Frequently

Because best practices for web optimization change frequently, you might want to periodically revisit your website to be sure it's as up-to-date as possible. Consider using a set schedule for testing and assessing your website for appearance and functionality.

You might use a strategy called A/B testing, in which you compare the results you get from two different websites and make changes according to what you find.

Use A/B testing to determine what works best for your site, from color schemes and text placement to calls-to-action and headers. Simple elements like these can make a huge difference.

Applying These Website Improvement Tips

There are dozens of ways to improve website design at your disposal. These are just a few tips that you can use to improve your website. You should at least entertain some of them if you haven’t already.?

The 19 website improvement tips I list in this article are ones I consider to be the most important and are the best ways to improve website performance and increase sales and conversions.

Start implementing some of these immediately, and you will notice a significant change in visitor traffic and behavior. For more advice on how you can improve the performance of your business website, let’s talk!

By?Gregor Saita

I am the Co-Founder and Creative Technologist at PixoLabo. When I am not busy running our agency and building websites for our clients, I consult, teach, and write about web and user experience design, WordPress, e-commerce, and SEO. I live with my wife, an award-winning Japanese designer and photographer, and our cat Dashi in Sendai, Japan. Feel free to connect with me on?LinkedIn ?or?Twitter .