Make Sure Your Website Doesn’t Put Off Your Customers

Your website is hugely important, no matter what it is that your business does or what you are trying to achieve in it. You need to ensure that your site is always kept as good as can be. Your website is the first port of call that customers will use when they want to contact your business, and it is also usually an invaluable marketing tool as well. With that in mind, it should be clear why you need to look after it.

In particular, aim for your website not to put off your customers in any way. This will require that you are paying close attention to how it actually operates and what it might need to improve. Let’s take a look at what you might want to consider on this front right now.

Keep It Simple

In general, you will want your website to be fairly simple and stripped-back. It is all too common, and too easy, to end up with a site which is trying to do too much in one go, and that is something that you are certainly going to want to bear in mind here. The trouble there is that it can end up actually being less useful, or in some cases even a little overwhelming. So keep it simple as best as you can, and you should find that this helps.

That means, for instance, keeping the amount you have on any one page to a minimum, and not trying to go over the top with the design of the overall site too. If you can remember that and keep it as simple as possible, that is really going to help you out a lot.

Improve Page Load Times

One of the quickest ways to put people off your website, and therefore your business, is by having pages that take ages to load. This can be a really disconcerting thing, and it’s something that you will certainly want to avoid wherever possible. The good news is that there are plenty of ways in which you can hope to improve the load times of your pages. And if you can approach it from a few different angles at once, that can be especially powerful.

For instance, you can reduce latency by caching data locally using an APO like Real Life. This way, the data doesn’t take as long to fetch, and the result is a page that loads so much quicker. Or you can avoid having too much on one page in the first place to load, which as we have already seen can also be used in keeping things a little more simple. These are the kinds of things you can do which will improve page load times, and avoid people getting too frustrated.

Get That Bounce Rate Down

If you haven’t looked into this already, it’s something you will want to investigate, because it can tell you a lot about what you are doing right and wrong with your business’ website. The bounce rate is a measure of how many people go straight back on to that Back button before even looking into your site more deeply. It goes without saying you want this to be as low as possible. If you look into yours and you discover that your bounce rate is quite high, then there are a few areas you might want to focus on in order to improve that.

For instance, you might simply need to add some more information to the site. This is the most common reason that a page might have a high bounce rate, and it’s something that you are definitely going to need to bear in mind. If your page is not providing anything of value, then people are not going to stay there – it’s that simple. You should also look into whether you are getting the right audience to your pages. If not, it might be that you need to look at improving the targeting of the marketing.

However you do it, getting your bounce rate down is going to help you to get so much more out of your website, so it’s something you should definitely look into.

Keep It On-Brand

If customers are looking for your place online and they come across a website with your business’ name on it, you had better make sure that the branding is consistent across the board with how it appears everywhere else. If it looks different to what they expect, this can reduce trust in the site and can frustrate people too, and that is going to mean that you will end up with many fewer customers actually wanting to use your website at all. Clearly then, this is a really important thing to focus on.

Fortunately, it’s a relatively simple fix. You just need to apply your brand’s style guide to the site as closely as you can. If you can do that, you should find that you have a much better chance of success with your site, and that people are going to enjoy visiting it a lot more, which can be a huge help as well. Keeping your website on-brand in this way is therefore hugely important and something you should be careful not to overlook.

Optimize It For Mobile

It’s amazing how often people still think of this as a second thought, given that the majority of web browsing is now done on mobile devices. If anything, you need to be optimizing your site for mobile devices from the very start, and that is easier than ever thanks to a huge range of tools specifically designed to achieve just that. Optimizing it for mobile simply means that the site will function and appear as it should, as you want it to, regardless of the device that someone uses to access it.

Of course, the best way to check for this is simply to try and access your site through mobile means, and see if it works as hoped for. If not, you should tweak until it is perfect. Almost 70% of web traffic is now through mobile, so it’s clearly really important to do this as best as you can, and not as an afterthought.

Improve The SEO

Although your customers will probably not be specifically thinking about the SEO of the website, it’s something that can prove to be really important if you want to make the site as good as possible, and ultimately in a way that will affect the experience the customer has on the website as well. There are many kinds of SEO you might be considering but the main point is to ensure that it functions as it should, and that it is not getting in the way of a good user experience.

For that second point, it’s all about making SEO subtle and not in your face. If you can balance that right, you will probably find that it helps customers to actively enjoy your website all the more, so that is something that you should really think about here. It’s amazing how much it can help you out with making your site as popular as possible.

Those are just the main things that you may want to look into in order to ensure that your website is suitable for your customers and that they don’t get out of it. As long as you have got these right, that is going to help you out on this front a great deal.