Often, when business owners approach web designers for help with their websites, the outcome is not always a completely new website being created. It is common for a web designer to be impressed with the existing website and, instead of recommending a new one, advise that changes and improvements be made to the existing design.
This is especially so when the main problem that a business owner has is that their website is doing very little to contribute sales and profits to their business. It might not be an eCommerce website where sales are made directly, but a website designed to promote the business and generate leads. If neither of these is happening, it is usually due to a compromised website design, so changes to it are essential.
Realistically, we could list dozens of possible improvements that might be required for a poorly performing website, but experience tells us that just a few occur regularly. As such, below, we have detailed five standard website design improvements proven to bolster a website’s performance.
Web Design Improvement #1 – Revamp The Written Content
One of the most significant errors business owners make is they completely underestimate the importance that the written content on their website has, often hiring the cheapest possible writers and taking no care as to how accurate or how well written the content is that they publish on their website. The first step in improving a website is to check and edit the existing content and ensure that any new content posted there is of the highest quality.
Web Design Improvement #2 – Add More Images And Videos
To augment the diversity of the content on your website and primarily to provide visitors with the sorts of content that we know are the most popular, you must publish content types such as images and videos. These will add great appeal to any page a visitor lands on and often those visitors will be far more interested in watching a 5-minute video, for example, than they would be reading 2,000 words of text relaying the same message.
Web Design Improvement #3 – Reduce Page Load Times
Page load speeds influence several essential aspects of a website including its rankings on Google, and the levels to which visitors enjoy being on that website. If slow, then rankings can suffer and visitors leave almost immediately. Speeding pages up by reducing file sizes and removing unnecessary coding and apps can boost rankings and improve the user experience.
Web Design Improvement #4 – Continually Measure And Enhance Calls To Action
Every business’s website should have some means of moving visitors and prospects along that business’s sales funnel. This is best achieved with calls to action buttons such as “Enter Your Email Address Here”, or “Click to Buy”. To get optimal results, you should measure each call to action’s conversion rate and seek to improve them by editing or changing them altogether.
Web Design Improvement #5 – Improve The Navigation
A confused visitor or one who cannot get to the page or information they are looking for will quickly leave your website. For that reason, your website must have navigation that makes it as easy as possible to move from page to page, and crucially, has a menu system that visitors will find easy to use.