Whether you are running a business and need to impress clients or you are an amateur blogger who wants to attract more readers, your website is your digital shop window and needs to be continually improved.
Given that almost everyone on earth is connected to the internet in some regard, there is no excuse for having a poor website. Given that it is incredibly cheap and easy to create a smart-looking website from scratch in under an hour, you will come across as lazy if you don’t improve your website on a regular basis.
In an age where most brands have neat, intuitive sites, your visitors may even distrust you if your website suffers from glitches or the design looks badly dated.
Thankfully, there are many approaches you can take to improve your website, although not all of them will be worthwhile or cost-efficient.
Therefore, it is best to stick to a simple three-step plan to improve your website.
Check out what the most successful websites are doing
If you want to improve your website, the first step you should take is to find out what the most popular websites are and to analyze why they are successful.
By using a website ranking tool, you can find out how much traffic these sites have had over a certain period and then visit the site to conduct more detailed research. Inevitably, these sites will be attractive and intuitive to use and use effective marketing strategies to attract a consistent stream of traffic.
While you should not copy any other websites, you can certainly gain some inspiration for your own site by noting down interesting ideas.
Make the user experience intuitive
The second step you should take is to make your website as intuitive as possible. No one wants to visit a website that is difficult to navigate, badly designed, and frustratingly slow. If your audience finds this to be the case, they will quickly leave and visit a rival site instead.
Spend time trying to make your design as simple as possible – even at the expense of the overall aesthetics. When you make it easy to navigate the site, your users are more likely to stay on it for longer.
If you sell products on your site, this is even more important. Do not make it difficult for your customers to purchase a product, so streamline the purchasing process as much as possible.
Create consistently excellent content
Of course, if you want to attract traffic to your website in the first place, you will need to create content that engages them.
This is a deceptively difficult step to take because once you start producing content (most commonly, written content, like landing pages and blog posts), you won’t really be able to stop.
Search engines reward consistency, so it might be worth hiring a copywriter to pump out engaging content for you on a daily basis, which will drive up your traffic numbers.
A great benefit of having a back catalog of copy on your site is that it encourages users to stay for longer. Make it easy for them to click through multiple articles and even insert hyperlinks to other parts of your site.
