Your website is the heart and center of your digital presence. Just think about it. From email marketing and social media pages, to SMS campaigns and Google Ads, everything leads back to it… and it deserves some love.
So, to celebrate the upcoming Valentine’s Day, we’ve put together a little guide (a love potion, if you will) to give your website some TLC and make it irresistible to users. After all, who doesn’t want people to fall in love with their website?
Pour some wine, light up a candle, and let’s get started!
Make it fast
Slow websites are one of the most frustrating things for users and can cause you to lose potential customers who simply don’t want to wait around for things to load. Having a website that loads quickly is one of the best things you can do for your site. Seriously, it’s worth the time and effort.
A few small tips that makes a huge difference:
Always upload images that are sized properly and with the smallest file size that works for what you need it. Most website images work just fine as JPEGs (or JPGs) if they don’t have transparent backgrounds.
If you use stock images, make sure you’re not uploading gigantic photos, but use Photoshop or similar photo editing programs to resize them properly. You can ask your website admin for the best sizes or find online guides.
For good measure, we also like using image compression plugins or websites (such as this one) to try to reduce the file size as much as we can.
Avoid lots of URL redirects and opt for replacing the link at the source instead, whenever possible.
If using WordPress, delete plugins you don’t use. Note: Backup your site first and only do this if you know what you’re doing!
Make sure your hosting plan matches your website’ daily traffic needs.
Make it responsive
Guys, you don’t need me to tell you that now-a-days most of people use their mobile devices to access the Internet and browse websites. This alone is reason enough to make sure your website works well on mobile screens, including tablets. If you have a fairly new website that was built by a reputable professional, chances are that you’re all set. However, if you haven’t updated your website in several years, this might be a real problem.
Even if you do have a “mobile” site, do you know that you can still have issues with it?
Hot Tip Alert: Grab your cellphone and actually click around your website, browse different types of pages, test buttons, read content. Is your text font large enough to read easily on a small screen? Are links or buttons too close together and too small so that you keep pressing the wrong one? Is your phone number clickable so that it opens up your phone’s dialing app? If you click on your address, does it open the Maps app on your phone? All of these things matter and add up to giving the user a painless or painful experience.
To raise the stakes even more, Google switched to a “mobile-first” model for ranking websites in their search results page, so that if your site doesn’t pass their mobile-friendly experience test, you can (and will) get penalized.
KEEP IT SIMPLE
Unless you’re part of a very specific set of creative or tech industries, getting too creative with your website structure and appearance is not the best idea. Keep things simple and easy to find. Put the menu in one of the places where you know people will expect it to be. Same with your contact page, phone number, address, hours, etc.
Don’t crowd your navigation with tons of pages and use plenty of white-space throughout your site. The simpler the structure and general layout of your site, the easier it’ll be to use. Well, there’s a sweet spot there, since you also want to provide relevant information, but finding the balance between gorgeous design and effective functionality is literally what we do for a living and it would be very hard to explain in just one blog post. So if you’re struggling with that, just let us know and we can help you figure it out.
Use consistent and thoughtful design
Okay. This is why we apply all of our design knowledge to even the simplest of website projects. How things look matters. Leverage white space, choose and stick with a color palette, and use consistent page design throughout your site. All the pages and visual content of your site have to work together.
We like to think of it this way: we create websites with harmonious designs so that you feel at peace when you’re on one of our websites. Yes, we want you to be excited, interested, and motivated too, so we make sure to not make it boring or blah, but we also don’t want to overwhelm you or hate every second of your experience. Loud and uncoordinated designs can do that. Think of some of your favorite websites to visit for fun, not because of work or because you have to. Chances are that they have very thoughtful designs and color palettes.
Quick tips:
Choose a color palette that complements your brand and use it throughout your site. Include one neutral color and one brighter color, for when you need to capture attention—but stay away from anything resembling highlighters!
Use the same background color for every page.
Try to keep the style of your images consistent.
Use modern and legible fonts and don’t use more than two or three. Stay away from Comic Sans or Times New Roman!
Make CTAs easy to find
Whether you’re an online store trying to take web visitors to your Online Shop page or a service provider aiming to collect free quote requests, your CTA, or Call to Action, is what will drive people to take the action you want them to take. Examples: Follow us on Instagram! Shop Now! Get Your Free Quote! Subscribe to Our Newsletter!
We recommend creating attractive buttons or links and placing them somewhere on your site where they’re always visible and easy to find for when the user is ready to take that next step.
Publish focused and useful content
Provide web visitors with the information they need to make an informed decision and get their questions answered. Apart from pages explaining your services or products, creating a FAQ page and a blog are great ways to answer customer’s questions and show that you really know your sh…stuff.
make it easy to reach you
This one is easy! The amount of websites that bury their contact information somewhere hard to find is alarmingly large. Get ahead of them by making is super easy for visitors to contact you in as many different ways as possible. You might even want to consider adding a Live Chat function to your site.
Always have a Contact Us page with your phone number, address, and a contact form. Sometimes people are iffy about contact forms so we sometimes include the email address too. Do you have a storefront? Don’t forget your business hours. If you want to be really cool and effective, add that info to the footer too. That way it will always be handy.
highlight popular content
Use Google Analytics (here’s a little guide to help you set Google Analytics up, if you haven’t already) or a similar platform to find out what’s the most popular content on your website and then see how you can make it more accessible so that visitors can get to it quicker. The faster they get to what they’re looking for, the more likely they are to convert, providing that they like what they find.
You can add those popular links to your home page or create a secondary side menu that can quickly take visitors to them.
Audit your site regularly
Your relationship with your website is just like a real life relationship. You have to nurture it, give it attention and care, and grow it over time. The best way to do this is by checking on it regularly.
Check for broken links, outdated content, things that might not be working properly, etc. You can also use Google Analytics again so that you can find content that just isn’t performing well and fix it. Doing this will help you keep it fresh and user-friendly so that people love spending time on it and come back over and over again.
In most cases your websites is your first and last chance to impress a potential customer that finds you online. Sweep them off their feet and make them fall head-over-heels in love with your site!
Do you need some help creating a website everyone will love? We can take a look at your current site and perform a site audit or build you a new one. Just send us a message and let’s chat!