As a business, your website should look and feel the best it possibly can. The reason for being is that there are lots of businesses out there, all competing for the spotlight. It’s hard enough to survive as a business alone, never mind competing against both similar-sized businesses and those who’ve got deep pockets to utilize.
There’s always room for improvement, especially when it comes to your business website. With the internet and digital platforms constantly evolving, there’s always something new to adapt to or follow as a trend. If you’ve got a business website that’s been neglected in recent years, now is the time to make the changes necessary.
Here are some top tips to help improve both the look and feel of your business websites in order to attract even more customers to your doors in 2023.
Consider the structure and functionality of the web design
What does the structure and functionality feel like when looking at the website design? It’s worth getting a few outside impressions rather than making the assessment yourself.
There are services out there that will provide both website experts and the average Joe to audit your website. They’ll test out different functions and features of the site, and perhaps highlight any room for improvement.
This is the first area of your website that you should be looking at improving upon. You need the structure of the site to be functional so that users aren’t going to get frustrated with it or simply click off the site.
Make it access-friendly
There are lots of people online that require access needs, yet many websites on the top-ranking pages of Google are not optimized to be access-friendly. Don’t believe that to be true? Well, according to AbilityNet, they found 90% of websites were inaccessible to people with disabilities who relied on assistive technology.
Making your site access-friendly isn’t difficult and as a result, you’re reaching a demographic of users that are being undervalued and underappreciated. Why not attract them to a website that’s access-friendly?
Consider the use of font and captions, as well as adding alt-text to images for those who have visual impairments. Every little improvement you can make will make a big difference to this major demographic, taking an interest in your site.
Optimize it for mobile use
Most of us are on our mobile phones constantly nowadays and that’s important to note because not every website out there has been optimized for this device.
It sounds hard to believe but there are still plenty of big websites out there that haven’t adapted their site for mobile use – and it’s frustrating. For customers, they don’t get the best experience on a site that hasn’t been optimized and that will often cause them to click off the site instantly.
Optimizing your site is easy enough when it comes to adapting it for mobile use. It’s also worth considering a mobile app to offer your users should they want a more tailored experience on their mobile phone of the site. With a mobile app, you’ve got more creative control too so it could offer the customer an even better experience.
Be wary of certain colors and fonts
Certain colors and fonts have a habit of clashing with one another and it’s important to be wary of this. Depending on what type of branding your business uses, you may want to tweak or adapt these so that they’re not causing your online visitors to squint and groan in frustration as their eyes start playing tricks on them.
With colors and fonts online, you can be a little more flexible with your choice but still stay relevant to the branding of the business. There’s often a lot more choice on offer and with the various screen settings of users, some typical colors may look a lot different than others.
Get creative with imagery and video
There’s a lot that you can do when it comes to media like images and video content. For your business website, you want to look at it like you were looking at a newspaper. Everything above the fold needs to be eye-catching. It needs to be enough to keep the user on the site and to entice them to scroll down to discover more of what’s available.
With that being said, you may want to have a carousel banner that serves as a billboard for your site. It could be that you have a full-screen video playing as an entry button to the site, requiring users to click anywhere on the video to remove it from view.
As a business, imagery, and video content is very important to entice users and keep them engaged on the site. Start exploring different media options to add to the site in order to grab your user’s attention on the site. Whether it’s their first experience or one of many, on the site, it should always be insightful and engaging.
Keep the content fresh and relevant
For any business website, it’s important to keep the users engaged long enough that the bounce rate remains low. The lower the bounce rate, the more users are interested in your site because they’re staying on the site for longer!
A good way of helping improve this bounce rate and engage with your users is by the content you’re adding to the site. Whether that’s through various landing pages for new products or new blog posts on your blog, it’s important to keep that content fresh and relevant.
If the content isn’t fresh and relevant, then your users are going to become bored and won’t bother revisiting the site after a while.
Optimize it for SEO
Search engine optimization or SEO for short is the practice of optimizing your site so that it performs better on search engines – like Google for example. By optimizing the site to adhere to Google’s preference of what they consider a top-quality site, Google will then drive many of their users towards your site as a result.
In an ideal world, you want as many of your web pages to rank on the top pages of the search engine. In reality, that’s very, very hard to achieve. However, it’s not impossible if you know what to do when it comes to SEO.
Some of the most common, best practices for SEO when optimizing your site, in particular, could be to add internal links and a mix of external links too. Compressing images and videos for faster page loading speeds is also handy.
For access benefits, adding the alt-text is also a great way of optimizing your web pages for SEO purposes.
Incorporate social media widgets
Social media platforms are a great way for users to interact with some of their favorite brands online. While they’re on your website, they may want to follow your social media handles or perhaps share something on the site that’s shareable on the social media platforms themselves.
Adding widgets to your site is useful to do in order to connect all of the relevant tools needed to run your website successfully. For your customers, social media widgets are beneficial to them for sharing anything they want from your site.
Use clear CTAs
Call to action is a great way to direct your audience and to get them interacting with the content online. Not only that but they can give your users an influential nudge to make a purchase or sign up for an email newsletter, for example.
Consider using clear CTAs within the copy and main pages of your website where you can. These could be in the form of a pop-up or a side banner feature on your homepage. Try not to overclutter the space with too many of them, but use enough to keep engagement flowing throughout the site.
Introduce more services for customer interaction
To help improve interactions with customers and ensure all their questions are being answered on the site, it may be worth getting one of the best live chat for small businesses, implemented onto your site.
Live chat services are a suitable alternative when it might not be possible for the user to get in touch over email or phone. Typically, live chat services often are quicker for users to talk to and get responses from.
Of course, to help avoid too much activity on live chats, you can have an FAQs page and FAQs on the live chat before the user connects to a sales agent. Live chats prove to be highly effective for those who use them.
Make use of white space
Finally, be sure to make use of the white space on your website. Don’t be afraid to leave this white space as much as possible. It adds to a clean aesthetic that any business can benefit from when a user lands on the page.
Improving the look and feel of your business website is a must in 2023, so use these tips to make sure your website is at its best this year.
