9 Tips to Improve Your Website Performance

Your website design needs to showcase the product or service that your business provides in a way that your target audience responds in a positive manner. When done right, your website will grab the visitors attention and cause them to convert into a lead or sale. A poor design and layout will push potential customers away and a website that is unappealing will turn that potential customer off and they will find another company to do business with.

How do you think your website is performing right now? If someone lands on your site and has 3 seconds to decide whether or not he or she will do business with you what would they say? That first 3 seconds is when a visitor decides whether or not to stay on the website and explore the content or bounce off the site and look for an alternative. Since every single visitor is a potential customer you want to make sure that you take the steps necessary to keep them interested in learning more about your products or services. Here are nine tips to help make your website perform better and make your brand stand out.

1. Simple Navigation

Have you ever landed on a website before and had no idea how to find what you were looking for? Confusing navigation is the quickest way to lose a website visitor, so make sure that when someone lands on your site they can immediately identify “how” to navigate your website. Many websites have impossible to locate contact pages and their main navigation menu is difficult to find. There is no excuse for this. All the website traffic in the world is useless if those visitors cannot easily navigate around your website.

2. Get Responsive

If your website is not responsive you are missing out on a large percentage of visitor traffic. You need a responsive website design to ensure that every single website visitor has a good user experience, whether they are on a desktop, laptop, tablet, or mobile device. If a mobile visitor cannot easily use your website they will find one that is simple to use on their device.

3. Make Sure Your Website Loads Fast

Nobody likes to wait for pages to load, so if your site load time is sluggish you need to make some changes, and quickly. Poor coding, heavy use of media and images, along with over use off plugins are some reasons that your website load time could be slow. A great tool is Google’s PageSpeed test, which will give you a score for both desktop and mobile and also provide some suggestions for improving the speed.

4. Use Simple Colors

Your website isn’t an abstract art project, so avoid using a lot of crazy colors that confuse the visitor. Simple and flat designs do very well now, so pick a few colors and stick with them. A good clean design will capture the attention of your visitor and allow them to understand the layout and functionality of the site quickly.

5. Use Easy to Read Font

It is amazing how many websites have a great design and great content but ruin it all with font that is either too small or a style that is difficult to read. Stick to simple common fonts that can be read easily on all devices. You also want to utilize H1 and H2 test to emphasize headings and information you want to make sure the visitor sees. Simple easy to read font and proper headings and bullet points will make your content much easier to digest.

6. Keep Your Sales Copy Short & to the Point

Make sure that you use shot and to the point sales copy on your home page. Remember, your visitor will decide whether or not they will stick around within 3 seconds. Your sales copy doesn’t have to be a book that dives into every detail about your product or service – that is what your blog is for. Make sure that the first piece of sales copy that the visitor is introduced to gets the point across quickly.

7. Don’t Forget to Use Images

We are all visual creatures and absorb information much better when it is presented visually. If you have an ecommerce website and you sell products make sure that you have professional pictures (multiple) for each product. Consumers love to look at images of products that they are interested in.

8. Clear Call-to-Action

Within that first three seconds of landing on your website the visitor should also be able to identify your call-to-action. You ultimately want every use to complete an action, whether that is to fill out a form, watch a video, or make a purchase. Make it easy for them to complete your CTA and watch your numbers increase.

9. Split Test Everything

Simply throwing up a website or landing page and just following the path of success or failure will most likely lead down that failure road. Test multiple colors, layouts, and CTAs until you have a winning combination. The only way you are going to find out the winning combination is to keep testing until you reach the level of actions that produces you with the desired number of leads, sales, revenue and profit. There is always room for improvement, so never be afraid to continue to test.

Source: B2C_Business

9 Tips to Improve Your Website Performance