Give Your Website a Spring Cleaning

Tips for Giving Your Business Website a Refresh

The coming summer season can be hectic and frantic for many businesses. Now is a great time to review your website and make sure you’re ready to handle any uptick in business. Is your website reflective of your business? Does it tell the right story for your offerings, or is a website refresh in order for the summer? You may want to update your website’s design, improve functionality, optimize performance, or all of the above. Here are some tips for keeping your website engaging and competitive!

Review Before You Move Forward

Before you make any changes to your website, it’s a good idea to review your brand’s historical information in order to make a plan to move forward. To identify structural issues with your website, review your website analytics to determine how visitors are navigating your website.

1. Evaluating your Analytics

The way visitors move around your site, as indicated by entrance and exit page metrics, can tell you a lot about how your website works. A well-structured menu and intuitive navigation are essential for positive user experiences. Can visitors quickly find what they want with a clear menu structure and effective search functions? Directing shoppers through your site effectively can help reduce bounce rates. If hiring a web developer is an option, you can quickly streamline your website’s navigation and improve several aspects that affect your website’s performance. Once your web pages are user-friendly, updating your website’s design will give your site a fresh, new look.

2. Updating your Website’s Look

A website refresh might include simplifying your layout and eliminating clutter. Too much going on with your website might overwhelm users. Simplifying your layout with a clean, contemporary design will help your website navigation become more intuitive for users. Focus on removing unnecessary elements and embracing white space to improve your user experience. Next, tackle your home page!

3. Updating your Home Page

After viewing your Money Mailer ad, the next thing most customers may see is your website’s home page. Your home page sets the tone for your brand, so take the time and effort to make sure that your home page reflects your business’s current goals, branding, and messaging. Your home page should show what your business is all about and not just tell shoppers about your brand. When it comes to content, there are many ways to improve engagement with your site through content. Regularly updating your content keeps your audience engaged and improves your SEO. Optimizing your content with relevant keywords in your product descriptions and blog posts and adding new blog posts, testimonials, and case studies will keep your audience engaged and interested in your brand. Along with content, other considerations in your website design should include:

• Clean Fonts and Typefaces

Use appropriate, easy-to-read fonts for your brand. Most often, e-commerce sites use straightforward sans-serif fonts, such as Roboto or Calibri, depending on their style. As a general rule, staying away from serif fonts with thin lines and complex or curling features will help improve your content’s legibility.

• Color Scheme

Your website should follow your brand colors, which are usually the predominant colors in your logo or signage. Most logos consist of one text color and a contrasting background color. While your branding may use more colors, your website should coordinate with your brand colors to create a unified look. Once you’ve got your fresh new home page in place, you’ll need to update your calls to action (CTAs).

4. Updating your Calls to Action

CTAs guide your visitors through your site, prompting them to sign up for a discount on their first purchase, or to “Shop Now,” and so on. Ensure your CTAs are updated and strategically placed throughout your site to maximize conversions. With all systems going for your website refresh, it’s time to optimize your website’s performance for a better customer experience.

5. Accelerating your Website’s Speed

Website speed is crucial for keeping visitors engaged. It’s a well-known statistic that the first five seconds a visitor engages with your site are critical for your website’s conversion rates and that eCommerce sites that load within 0-2 seconds have the highest conversion rates. This also means that the faster your website loads, the more likely it is to rank higher on its search engine reports page in Google. A few things you can do to speed up your website include:

• Optimizing images

While it is vital to use hi-res images and multiple images of your products are recommended to allow shoppers to make more informed purchasing decisions, compressing images using tools in Photoshop, TinyPNG, and other photo editing programs will enable you to optimize your image file sizes, so that images load faster.

• Minimizing HTTP Requests

Keep the number of elements on your pages, like scripts and stylesheets, to a minimum, combining multiple CSS or JavaScript files into one to minimize HTTP requests.

• Enabling Browser Caching

Allow browser caching to store frequently accessed resources in visitors’ browsers to reduce load times for returning users.

You can also use tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights to identify areas for optimization in images, code, or server performance. Optimizing for mobile is another aspect of your website refresh to consider.

6. Optimizing for Mobile

With more than half of online transactions involving mobile devices, ensuring your website is mobile-responsive is essential. Optimize your site to work seamlessly on mobile devices. This will improve user experience and boost your search engine ranking.

7. Prioritizing Website Accessibility

Before launching your new website, ensure your site is accessible to all users, including those with disabilities. Follow Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to create inclusive experiences. Accessible websites not only serve a broader audience but can also boost your SEO. Also, to keep the Internet a fun and safe place to visit for all, user privacy is a growing concern. Knowing which concerns are critical for your website depends on your industry, target audience, geographic location, and other factors. User privacy is a complex and important topic, so we highly recommend seeking a competent professional who understands the particular compliance needs of your website.

8. Updating your Security Features

Website security is critical to protecting your business and your customers. Ensure that your SSL certificate is up-to-date, and regularly update plugins and software to prevent vulnerabilities.

9. Testing Forms and Links Before Launch

Before rolling out your updated website, thoroughly test its functionality across devices and browsers. This includes checking for broken links, ensuring responsiveness, and verifying that all interactive features work smoothly.

For Money Mailer advertisers, the busy summer season will reveal the strengths of your website, as well as some areas where your business website could use some work. Fortunately, refreshing your business website will breathe new life into your brand’s image and help keep your visitors engaging with your website all season long!