How often do you go back and look at your website after launch? Do you have a plan of action for optimizing your website for improvement?
A website improvement strategy should be a constant part of your web maintenance strategy - consisting of ways to continuously review and implement small tactics that will help boost your user experience and conversion rates.
In this post, we’ll take a walkthrough of five areas to consider for your website improvement strategy:
- Conduct Tests and Gather Data
- Simplify Site Navigation
- Review Your Messaging
- Resolve Technical Issues
- Optimize Your Site for Users
1. Conduct Tests and Gather Data
How Does It Improve Your Website?
“A goal without a plan is just a wish.” ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
While you may understand what the goal and objectives are for your website, do you know whether or not your site is actually achieving them?
Optimal website performance comes through data-driven improvements - not based on your assumptions of what “should” work for better conversions.
High-performing websites are not “one-and-done” projects. Continually testing ways to improve your website (experimenting with ideas) and analyzing the data to determine if the test was a success or failure helps ensure your website remains a high-performing one.
What To Review:
- Review and update your buyer personas - know who you are solving a problem for so you develop a strategy to attract leads and convert them
- Review and update your customer journey map
- Analyze existing data (Google Analytics, HubSpot reports, etc)
Ideas To Implement:
- Implement a Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) plan of action
- Conduct UX research to uncover your ideal audience’s challenges and critical questions
- Conduct A/B testing to help better define areas you need to focus on
- Gather and analyze data to help drive your improvement efforts
- Never be satisfied - planning, testing, and analyzing your data is a continuous process
2. Simplify Site Navigation
How Does It Improve Your Website?
If your navigation is complex or uses ambiguous labeling, your potential leads may become frustrated trying to find the information they are seeking on your site. Simplifying your navigation and making key information easily identifiable, especially your top navigation, saves website visitors time and helps make the decision-making process easier.
Beyond just the user experience, simplifying your site navigation can help search engine bots better understand the content and value of your pages, potentially improving your organic search engine rankings.
What To Review?
- Review your navigation (both top & footer) and determine if the page intention is clear based on the menu label name
- How many clicks does it take to get to a page? Aim for a maximum of 3 clicks
- Consider how many navigation elements are in your top navigation. Are they all absolutely necessary?
Ideas To Implement:
- Limit your top navigation to a maximum of 5-7 top-level menu items
- Your top navigation should only be your primary target pages - everything else should be in your footer or accessed via internal page links
- Include a primary call-to-action in your top navigation (quick conversion tip!)
- Rename any menu items that are unclear
- Move social icon links to your footer
- If your site is large, break your navigation into smaller categories and subcategories. Conduct a brainstorming session and use the card sorting method to help create more user-friendly navigation.
3. Review Your Messaging
How Does It Improve Your Website?
Your website needs to include words that sell. Copy that is unclear and doesn’t connect with your target audience is missed opportunities affecting your revenue. Your potential lead may have already looked at multiple sites trying to find the right solution to their problem. A beautiful site may catch their attention, but it’s the words that will entice them to purchase.
What To Review?
- Are your messages clear?
- Can you tell from a quick glance what you do?
- Do you clearly identify who your serve?
- Do you clearly identify pain points your potential lead may have?
- Do you clearly identify how their life can be better with your solution?
- Pay close attention to the copy in these areas:
- Hero banners
- Page titles
- Subheadings
- Call to Action sections
- Are your call-to-action buttons clear & actionable?
- Is your copy focused on your potential lead or on “you”
- How much copy does each page have? Too much? Too little?
- Are you providing copy sections for the different buyer stages? (Awareness, Consideration, Decision)?
Ideas To Implement:
- Pages that have too little content - consider combining them into one page (don’t forget any redirects!)
- Pages that have too much content - consider breaking it up into multiple pages (don’t forget to include internal linking between the pages!)
- Review messaging to ensure your content is focused on your customer, not all about you (count how many “I” or “we” versus “you”. If your page has more “I” or “we” statements than “you” statements, you’re not focusing on your customer
- Look at your calls to action - are they “action” oriented? Buy, Download, Schedule, Request, etc
4. Resolve Technical Issues
How Does It Improve Your Website?
A poorly functioning site leaves a bad impression on your company and may cause website visitors to bounce off to find a more “reputable” company.
Your website needs to not only be “user-friendly” but “search-engine friendly” as well.
What To Review?
- Ensure your site is mobile-responsive, displays well on multiple screen sizes
- Check out Google PageSpeed Insights for a look into potential technical issues
- Make sure your images are optimized for file size (aim for under 1MB at the most)
- Confirm that “moving assets” like sliders and animations are really necessary (these can add significant load time to your page)
- Review your code for areas you can optimize (CSS, JavaScript, HTML)
- Review for broken links (404 errors)
Ideas To Implement:
- Use Google’s mobile-friendliness test to see how mobile-friendly your site is
- Page load speeds, find & fix 404 errors, responsiveness
- Use tinyjpeg to help reduce image file sizes without compromising quality
- Remove unnecessary “moving assets” that are not significantly improving user experience
- Move “heavier” elements such as maps, image galleries, etc toward the bottom of the page to help improve page load speeds
- Implement “lazy loading” to improve faster loading times
- Minify CSS, JavaScript & HTML
5. Optimize Your Site for Users
How Does It Improve Your Website?
While every tip above is optimization ideas for improving conversions the ultimate key to optimizing for conversions is to always remember who your site was built for - your ideal client.
When reviewing your site for optimization efforts, whether you're looking at the design of your site, the messaging you’re presenting or the opt-ins you’re offering, your strategy & implementation tactics should always be from the viewpoint of your ideal audience.
Deep dive into who your ideal audience really is - from demographics to psychographics. Truly understanding your audience will help you see your website from their perspective and help you identify what they truly need when visiting your website.
What To Review:
- Are your buyer personas up-to-date?
- Is your customer journey map up-to-date?
- Consider the customer journey throughout your site - is there a clear path for the information a potential lead is searching for based on their stage of the buyer’s journey?
- Look for potential “friction” points - are actions you want a visitor to take intuitive? Look for ways to reduce confusion and allow the user to better navigate your site
- How is your information organized? Is it easy to understand and consistent? How many clicks does it take to get things done on your site?
- Does your site incorporate the keywords your ideal audience is searching for?
- Is the content addressing what your ideal audience is looking in each stage of the buyer’s journey?
Ideas To Implement:
- Review & update your buyer personas
- Conduct surveys to gather more insights into your ideal customer
- Research intent-based keywords and use them throughout your site
- Add and/or update content to address each stage of the buyer’s journey
- Create opt-ins for different stages of the buyer’s journey (awareness, consideration, decision)
- Add opt-in CTAs to your blog posts (if an article is “awareness”, add an “awareness” opt-in)
- Create targeted landing pages
- Add some personalization to your website - check out the 13 best personalization software options
Key takeaways
The five tips above are just a few ideas to consider as part of your website improvement strategy. Website improvements should be considered an ongoing effort with the cycle of planning, testing, and analyzing ways to optimize your site never-ending.
Taking the time to implement even a few of these tips can bring a dramatic change that can help improve not only your website performance, but your customer experience as well, leading to higher conversion rates.
Looking for a website partner that can help you define and execute your website improvement strategy? The team at Inbound Design Partners is here to help - Schedule Your Consultation Today!
Anabeth McConnell
