Sometimes a website becomes stale. Whether it is because of a page slowdown, a change in the backend, or a flattening search ranking, even the most popular websites can eventually find themselves in obscurity. Regardless of the reason, now is the time to freshen up your website.
Google’s First Impressions study revealed that people judge a website based on appearance in 1/50th of a second. So, while having a fast website is key, here are all five ways to ensure people judge your website the right way.
Are You Falling Down on SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) rules changes all the time. Not every little change requires a complete website redesign, but if you haven’t addressed this in a while now is a good time to look at your SEO.
What many webmasters discover when they look into improving website SEO is that their page load times are slow. You need to compress images, remove extraneous content, and focus on how your website looks and loads on mobile devices. There are plenty of tools that help you stay on top of your SEO.
Get a Content Management System
A Content Management System (CMS) is an administration dashboard for making changes to your website. WordPress, for example, powers 66% of all English websites because of its ease-of-use and the fact you need no technical experience to take full advantage of it.
If you are relying on your website designer to make changes, you’re way behind the times. You can’t make the fast changes needed to keep up with the demands of your audience, and the chances are you’re paying a lot of money for it.
Either use a tried-and-tested CMS and site builder, such as WordPress, or have your designer build a custom CMS you can use without returning to them every time you need to make a tweak.
Mobile Should Come First
Mobilegeddon is a term used for Google’s penalization of non-mobile friendly websites in the search engine rankings. These days you don’t just need to optimize for mobile devices. You must actively cater to them before desktop users. This is because each year, the number of consumers who have smartphones increases as well as the amount of time that they spend browsing the web from their phone.
Optimizing for mobile is easy because many common website themes do it automatically. If you are using an older theme, you have two options.
- Opt for a total redesign by incorporating a new mobile-friendly theme into your business.
- Go through the process of keeping your old theme but having a website designer work on it in order to make it responsive.
The fact is if a mobile user stumbles upon a website designed for a desktop, they will move away from it, assuming the slow load times don’t make them leave before they even see the page.
This trend is only going to continue. Eventually desktop users are going to disappear altogether. Responsive mobile design ensures that your site will adjust based on the size of the screen the person happens to be using.
Capture Visitor Information Instantly
Let’s not forget that the purpose of your website is to lead customers into making a sale. The most powerful tool you have is your email list. It’s the prime tool used to contact users directly.
Swap is one site that benefitted heavily from capturing user information right away, “We began promoting our list with a lightbox on our homepage. It increased signups by nearly 75%. The resulting email list allowed us to capitalize and enhance our revenue numbers by 35% in the past 12 months.”
Incorporating Social Media
Social media is a huge part of your marketing campaign. If you need to freshen up your website, think about its relationship with social media. Is it easy to share new content from your website on social media? Content marketing is still big, and there is no reason why you shouldn’t have social media buttons available on all of your pages so your visitors can easily share your content.
Nevertheless, freshening up your website with social media works both ways. You have to actively promote your website via social media at the same time.
This is the number one method of driving traffic because it reflects the true popularity of something. It’s raw popularity not influenced by technical factors. If people like what you are saying, they will come. This is what makes it such a strong tool for boosting businesses of all sizes.
You can’t ignore the impact of social media. It should be at the top of your list of considerations.
Conclusion
Freshening up your website requires a deep understanding of your target audience. Look at what your audience wants from your website via your marketing research and make changes accordingly.
What is your top tip for freshening up your website?