5 Simple Yet Clever Tips to Optimise your Website Design

For many businesses these days, simply having a website is no longer enough. If you want to boost the growth of your business, you want a website that goes beyond just being ‘available online’ and one that does the job in terms of generating sales and increasing profitability. 

There’s a lot of potentially overwhelming information online about what you need to do to optimise your website. Here we’ve done the legwork and broken down the important techniques into 5 key considerations in optimising your website.

Tip #1 Know the goal

Having no website goals kills conversions. So before jumping into optimising your website design, take a minute to think about what your website’s goals will be. Knowing these will have a profound effect on your design.  Do you simply want a beautiful website? Or are you looking for a high-converting one? Having nice images, brand colours and a compelling copy is all great but initially put them to the back of your mind whilst you think about your goals. 

Here’s some questions to consider.  

• What content would you like to push out on your homepage? 
• What pages would you like to highlight and point users to? 
• What’s the marketing offer of the website? 
• Do you offer free coffee or a discount for every contact form submission?

Knowing the answers to these questions will help guide the design and decisions you make for your website. Your answers will also help drive the content flow for the user experience. Many business owners fall into the trap of creating a website without a goal and are then disappointed when the website isn’t functioning as it should. If you’re not sure, here is a 27-point checklist to help map out a goal for your website design.

#2 Sell with a website that’s pleasing to the eye

Your website visitor’s first impression of your site is fueled by its design. In fact, according to a study from Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, 46% of users say that a website’s design is the number one determining factor in assessing the credibility of a business. Whilst it’s not necessary for you to have the most swoon-worthy website out there, it’s important that the site looks contemporary enough to keep up with the modern times and appeal to your audience. 

Imagine yourself as a user who happened to stumble upon a website that looks like something from the early 2000s, would you consider submitting your info in the contact form? 

Interestingly, arngren.net is a site that still goes with the old 90s website look. Question is, would you buy from this website?

#3 Responsive is the name of the game

Having a responsive website isn’t synonymous with a mobile-friendly website. Basically, mobile-friendly websites simply mean your website will look good on a mobile browser. What you should aim for is a responsive website design that looks good on every screen size and resolution. These screen sizes could be small desktops, tablets or phone screens. Get this right and you’ll have a greater likelihood of ranking in Google search results. It also makes for a good user experience across all platforms and lesser bounce rate.

#4 The Need for Speed

If you want your website to be on good terms with Google, having a slow website speed is not an option. You may have the best-looking site or even one with the most optimised conversion flow, but if people wait for 10-20 seconds to get the content they need, your site will suffer the consequences of having no conversions. According to Google, websites should ideally load within three seconds. You can expect low rankings in Google SERPs and higher bounce rates if your site loading speeds are poor.

There are lots of factors that influence the page speed of your site but perhaps the easiest and quickest way to optimise a page load is to minimise web files like images. Graphic-heavy websites can be bulky in file size and slow to download. You can fix this by making sure all images are compressed and optimised for the web. Image sizes should ideally be below 200kb. The smaller, the better. There are lots of plugins you can install if you’re running on WordPress, to help compress images or you can use free image compression tools online.

#5 Testing is King

Once your website is live, can you really say that everything is done and dusted? No. If you want to make your website profitable, use tools like Google Analytics to track your website’s performance and how users interact with it. Monitor the data monthly and get data on who your users are, what pages they visit the most, what their interests are etc. The data is a powerful way to further optimise your website and achieve maximum conversion rates. You will never know if your website is working to your goals (remember tip #1?) until you put it to the test. Once the results are in, use the data to plot what your next marketing steps will be.

Let’s take a moment to talk about web design.

If you want to know that your website is going to work or that your new replacement website will achieve more than your old one it’s best to work with experts who ask the right questions, right from the start. 

This means having a beautiful website that works to create conversions as well as one that doesn’t sabotage your previous SEO efforts. Reach out to us at J&M Marketing if you’re feeling overwhelmed by the choices and unsure about what you need. 

We’ll treat you to a cup of coffee and a friendly no-obligation conversation about website design optimisation.