Website Optimisation 101: Let’s Get Started!

If you have ever attempted to built a website, then you know that it is not an easy thing to do. There are many key elements that you should consider while making your decisions, because the rules are changing faster that ever before. When you’re thinking about your website, try to imagine it as an online representative who can either generate new sales or confuse your customer and eventually make them leave your website.

In the following 4 weeks we’ll give you the most important tips & tricks on how to design and set up your website. Even if you’re already familiar with some of these tips, it’s always good to repeat what you know. However, for those who are just starting to learn, we are sure that our advice will be more than useful when you decide to create your website or negotiate with web developers.

This blog post will bring you fundamental knowledge for building a good website, while in the next two blog posts we’ll talk more about how you can improve your google rank without spending any money (Search engine optimization) as well as how to track your users and let them design your website.

We will guide you through 4 elements that we believe are most important to consider while building your business website, including: design, content, responsiveness of a website and website performance.

Design

Did you know that most users will base their first impression on the visual appearance of your website, and that 83% of your customers will visit your website before purchasing your product? Numerous studies have already indicated that a well built website will generate more traffic and increase conversions — which consequently means more sales for you.

Just to give a short overview, we have covered the most important web design trends for 2016 in one of our blog posts.

When we are talking about design, it’s not all about the colors. Sure, thoughtfully chosen color scheme will tell a lot about the image you are trying to build, and it is beneficial to understand the psychology of colors. Still, keep in mind that when creating a good web design you have to watch out for certain ‘stumbling blocks’ that may lower your conversion rate such as: too many steps, too much clicking and scrolling, too much text or false information, poor website structure, difficulties with navigation etc.

Photo source: Change Sciences Group (changesciences.com)

Another great way to improve your website design and content is to use images, infographic and videos instead of long paragraphs of text. While reading is slow and time-consuming, images can easily grasp your users’ attention. They will help you to tell a story and educate your user primarily because the content accompanied by an image is 10 times more likely to receive engagement.

If you’re having trouble with choosing the perfect image or photo for your website, take a look at our previous blog post „8 Amazing Sites With Best Free Stock Photos“.

Content

When you are creating content for your website, keep in mind that what you would like to tell is less important than the information your users would like to find about your business. If you are not an experienced copywriter, a great way to generate relevant content is to create several buyer personas and write for them. Buyer personas will help you to relate with your customer and develop your marketing and sales strategy. Some basic questions that you need to ask yourself when creating buyer personas are: who are your customers, what are their interests and needs and how can you help them to reach their goals. And remember, too many clicks on your website is a ‘stumbling block’! Any relevant information for your customer should be available at maximum three clicks.

Photo source: http://seopressor.com

More tips on how to create digital content can be found in our blog post „5 ways to succesfully hack awesome digital content“

Responsiveness of a website

In 2014, the number of users who were using mobile devices exceeded the number of desktop users and has been increasing ever since. Also, users spend more time browsing on mobile devices than they do on the desktop. On the other hand, desktop users are more likely to make a conversion than the users on mobile devices. So, what is more important? Desktop or mobile? The right answer is — both!

If you want to keep up with your competition and the trends in the industry, you need to give your users a multichannel experience, which means that your website has to be optimized for both mobile and desktop devices. The easiest tool to check the responsiveness of your website is Google Mobile Friendly Test. All you need to do is enter your URL and it will tell you what to improve on your website in order to optimize it for mobile devices.

Website performance

Did you know that nearly half of web users will leave your site if it isn’t loaded in less than 3 seconds? 79% of users who experience trouble with a website in terms of speed and performance won’t return to that site, while 44% of them will even share their bad experience with friends.

There is a simple tool that you can use to check your website performance. It’s called Webpagetest and it will analyse your website speed from multiple locations around the globe. It’s easy to use too! Just enter your website URL, select the test location or device, the browser you would like to test it with and that is it!

Another great tool for checking website performance test is Pingdom. It has less options that Webpagetest but it runs much faster. Both of these tools will offer you advice on how to advance your website by improving its performance.

Now that we have covered some basic elements that a good website should have, we’ll move on to more advanced techniques such as the Search Engine Optimization in our next blog post.

This article was originally published at Avalon blog.