3 Ways to Quickly Improve Your Website

Author: Rachel Durkan Category: B2B, B2C, E-commerce & Retail, Nonprofit, Web Design Date: May 29, 2014

Sometimes we just want a change.

Change is good.

Change can also be expensive.

For a business, change can get confusing – especially for your clients or customers. But, I am not one who goes by the whole “if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it” phrase. That is for the birds.

There is always room for improvement. Improvement warrants change.

Well, how do you change something without bothering your customers? Let’s take your website for instance. How many times are you just dying for a redesign, knowing that you could improve you rankings, usability and conversion? All the time. Right?

You can’t afford a redesign every year. You shouldn’t spend your money on a redesign every year. But, there are certain features that you can do to improve your website year after year. Making small changes to your website can always help improve the user experience of visiting your website, or even your traffic or web conversions.

1. Re-read your content from you visitor’s perspective.

If you haven’t visited your website in awhile, it’s time to pretend like you are the customer. You know you customers better than you did last year (hopefully). Use their thought process while you navigate the website. Read what you have. Does it make sense? Does it flow? Is everything there or do you have too much? Once you make some notes, make the necessary changes to create a better user experience with the most useful information exactly where someone would expect it to be.

2. Update your imagery.

You don’t need to (and shouldn’t) update your logo. Unless it’s a long time coming. But, you can update your imagery. Do the photos on your website match the content? Do they appropriately reflect to the universe who you are as a company? Do you even have photos up on your website? You can always use stock photos from the web, but I really think you should take your own photos. It gives your website and your company a face and a personality making you look approachable. These are the types of areas that will increase your conversions – whether it’s a sale or an inquiry.

3. Update your links.

Ahhh!!!! Do you know how many times you possibly have a link on your website that is no longer a live link? Go through all of your links and absolutely make sure that they are live. And correct. Even your social media profile links. This not only will just help the user experience, but your search engine optimization as well. Google does not like websites who do have broken links. Additionally, you should double check the unique URLs for each page of yours. Are they using keywords appropriate to that page? Or, are they using numbers and gibberish? If you have the capability, you should update your URLs so the words in the URL match those of the webpage in question. This will help with your SEO efforts as well.

There are a few other ways you can improve your website quickly. I’d also highly recommend including a blog on your website if you don’t already have one. This will ensure that you are writing new and fresh content as often as you possibly want. New content shows the world that you are still in business, and you mean business. Have a great time improving!