Around the countries are requiring that their citizens stay inside to reduce the spread of the contagious COVID-19. If you find yourself self-isolating at home, with more free time on your hands, one way to usefully spend your time is to improve your website.
When a new visitor stops by your site, you have five seconds or less to impress them. If the page loads too slowly, or your site is hard to navigate, it’s likely that your visitor will bounce right off your page and go to your competitors. To fix that issue, here are 10 ways to improve your website while quarantined.
1. Make Sure Your Website Is Responsive
People love to use their mobile phone for browsing the web. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, then you might be missing out on visitors. Google also penalizes sites if they aren’t mobile-friendly, so by fixing this mistake, you can improve your page rankings and SEO.
2. Simplify Your Navigation
You want your website to provide the best user experience possible. To do, make it easy for people to find what they are looking for. Reduce your menu items to no more than seven so people can move around quickly on your website. When writing labels, try to be as descriptive as possible and keep your navbar fixed.
3. Add A Clear Call To Action
If you don’t have a CTA already on your site, you need to add one now. It might seem crazy, but even the color of your call to action can make a big difference. A study by Hubspot found that a red CTA button was clicked on 21% more than a green button. This is a huge difference and could mean more sales for you!
4. Increase The White Space
You might be tempted to cram as much as possible into your website, but by adding a white space or empty space between pictures, icons, paragraphs, etc., on your website, it can make it easier for your visitors to focus on the material and lead to an overall better user experience.
If you have to cram in a ton of material in a small space, try to increase the margin size. Reduce the clutter on your page and the amount of text.
5. Use More Photos
Humans are naturally drawn to photos. People tend to look more at the images than they do the text. Incorporate beautiful pictures onto your website to help make your site a little more interesting. Use royalty-free images if you don’t have any of your own.
6. Increase Your Page Speed By Compressing Photos
To help increase the speed of your page loading, compress all your pictures before you upload them to your site. Image sizes being too large is often one of the biggest reasons why your site is slowing down. By ensuring that your site loads quickly, you can keep your visitors from bouncing off your page.
7. Re-write Your Headings
Your visitors are looking for specific things on your website, make sure you are delivering with your headings. Having keywords in your headings can help you attract an audience more efficiently to your website.
Search engines tend to look carefully at headers over other content, so make it stand out to give you a boost in the SEO rates. Plus, it makes it easier for a visitor to navigate your site, leading to a better experience.
8. Clean Up Your 404s
While if you have any 404 errors (page not found) on your website, you likely won’t be penalized severely for it by search engines. However, your visitors might not be as forgiving. A 404 error page tends to frustrate your visitors, which might be a reason why they leave your page. Check to see if you have 404s through Google Webmaster tools or a free 404 checker.
9. Rethink Your Color Scheme
We already talked about how important the color of the CTA button is, and the same logic applies to your overall website. Pick one consistent dominant color for your website with a few complementary colors to create an aesthetically pleasing look. You can find websites that help you pick out attractive color schemes if you aren’t sure what to pick.
10. Choose A New Website Host
When websites are first starting out, shared hosting usually works just fine. However, as your site grows and needs more resources to function properly, you might want to consider upgrading your hosting plan to a VPS hosting plan or cloud hosting plan, depending on your individual needs.
A few ways to decide if you should upgrade include:
- Your website is experiencing frequent downtime
- Increased levels of traffic
- Pages take more than 3 or more seconds to load
- “Noisy†neighbors are disrupting the security of your site
- Your website needs more space to grow, and your hosting provider doesn’t have any options allowing you to grow
- You need more resources for apps and data on your site
You likely have more free time on your hands right now! Use it productively to do a little spring cleaning on your website to see fast page loading speeds, a better user experience, and—hopefully—more sales conversions.
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