Improving the performance of a website is normally best left to the professionals unless you are tech savvy.
You can find other posts on this site that provide information on more technical aspects like SEO, page load speeds, hosting specifications etc but the purpose of this training is to highlight issues that can be fixed quickly and easily that will Guarantee your website will perform better
- No Call to Action (CTA)
Lacking directions is a frequent side effect of bad web design.
Without a prominent call to action (CTA), your customers won’t know why they are visiting your website or what your company offers.
Even worse, 93% of small business websites do not display a contact email address, and 49% do not list phone numbers on their home page.
If you don’t give visitors a reason to visit your site or an easy way to contact you, they will move on to your competitors.
Action:
Make sure you add a phone number and business email to every page, in addition, adding other ways to contact you shows you mean business so contact us forms, SMS chat bots and live chat all work very well and set you aside from many of your competitors.
Make it easy for your visitors to contact you and they will!
- No Metrics
Without performance metrics, small businesses cannot track their progress, organic or paid reach, or customer habits and needs.
Unfortunately, 33% of small businesses do not use analytics tools like Google Analytics to measure their business website’s performance.
And 60% do not feel they have the tools needed to make sense of their site’s analytics or take action to resolve issues. Unresolved problems only become worse over time.
Action
Many website analytics resources are free to use and install, and they are not limited to Google or Bing Analytics.
Tools such as Pingdom and GTMetrix can provide detailed feedback regarding your website visitors.
This data includes how long your website took to load, the device and browser used to visit your site, and their overall satisfaction level.
This insight can pinpoint bottlenecks on small business websites and recommend ways to correct them.
There is no reason now, any small business owner would not use free tools to help
- Poor SEO
Small business marketing is becoming more competitive, and owners need every advantage. Online discoverability is essential for helping potential customers find your company or business.
Yet 26% of small businesses cannot be found in online searches!
Many small-business owners hesitate to implement a search engine optimization strategy because they do not understand SEO basics.
Whilst SEO can be complex and if you want to really focus on building your website ranking, a professional service is highly recommended, you can apply a basic SEO Strategy to every page to ensure the search engines can find your content
Action
Apply the following On Page SEO basics to each page or blog post in your site
Title Tag:
Include the primary keyword.
Keep it under 60 characters.
Make it compelling to encourage clicks.
Meta Description:
Summarize the page’s content in 150-160 characters.
Include the primary keyword and a clear call to action.
Headings (H1, H2, H3):
Use one H1 tag for the title (include the primary keyword).
Use H2 and H3 tags for subheadings, incorporating secondary keywords where relevant.
If your website is built using WordPress, you can also find free plugins that automate a lot of the requirements and if you want to take it up a notch, upgrade to a paid plugin service
- No Credibility
You can say great things about yourself or your product, but they are worth nothing to your website visitors if you are the only one saying them.
They have just met you and don’t trust you yet, so they won’t take your word for it.
To build trust quickly, you need credibility enhancers: Case studies or testimonials, logos of your clients, “as featured in…” section, awards, certifications, etc.
If you have nothing to back up your claims, your credibility suffers.
Action
Contact your best customers and ask them to provide a quick testimonial, build a follow up process for new customers to provide feedback and a testimonial and display these in a prominent position on your website
If you are starting out, you can get a couple of testimonials from friends in exchange for some free advice and build on this because this is vitally important
- Confusing Navigation
If your website were a city and visitors were tourists, navigation would be the direction signs. If direction signs in a town are confusing, the tourists won’t visit many places and will leave soon for another city where the mayor cares more about his guests.
All navigation labels must be descriptive and intuitive. But when you use ten navigation labels or labels that are too wordy or unclear, you have a problem.
Here is how to make your navigation more concise:
Action
Make it no longer than seven items (the maximum amount of elements our short-term memory can hold).
The fewer navigation links you have, the higher is the probability that your visitors will click on something.
If your page is just one paragraph, it does not deserve to be a separate page in the first place. It shouldn’t occupy a valuable slot in your navigation.
Apart from not providing enough value for your visitors (how much can you learn from a paragraph out of context?), Google considers it low-value content, and it won’t rank.
Make it clear where each navigation item leads. For example, visitors may not guess that “How can I help you?” leads to your “Services” page.
Also, navigation is the last place you should try to be clever. If your visitors don’t understand the label of that navigation menu item, they won’t click on it. Would you?
- No Social Proof
Social sharing is vital to any digital marketing and lead-generation strategy.
According to Sprout Social, there are estimated to be 5.17 billion social media users worldwide in 2024.
The average person uses 6.7 different social networks per month. Internet users’ time on social media declined slightly to 143 minutes daily.
Yet, only 32% of small businesses have a social media strategy in 2024.
Allow your customers to share their experiences with your brand via social channels.
As a result, you enable information about your business to reach people you might not have otherwise targeted. At the very least you should have a Facebook page for your business.
Other social media platforms, such as Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, YouTube, Vimeo, or the professional networking platform LinkedIn, are most often missing. This makes it impossible for visitors to share your small business website or interact with the business through social media.
Some social media platforms have become less effective over the past few years. X (formerly Twitter) has undergone significant changes under the ownership of Elon Musk and, as a result, has been dropped by both brands and advertisers.
Since July 2022, Google My Business has been unavailable for download, replaced by Google Business Profile (GBP) and two apps: one for Google Search and one for Google Maps. In 2024, Google My Business remains an indispensable tool for local businesses aiming to thrive in the digital landscape.
By maximizing your GMB presence, you enhance your visibility and build trust, connect with your local audience, and stay ahead of the competition.
Action
If you have social media accounts, make sure to add social media icons to your site and connect to your pages
If you don’t have any social media business pages create a Google my Business Profile, Facebook and Instagram page as a minimum, all 3 of which are free
Make sure you create a cover image to compliment your website brand and post useful content you as a reader would appreciate, and details of completed work with great quality images
Some people believe they should be posting daily, this can work on platforms like TikTok for certain products but generally once or twice per week is great way to build engagement for free
- Hard-to-Read Text
Before your visitors can appreciate the value of your content, they need to be able to read it.
One of the big problems with small business websites is content that is difficult or even impossible to read.
The first problem is the text is often too small to read. Not everyone has a 20/20 vision, and if you make visitors squint, they will not stay around. If you want to keep your target audience reading, I suggest using a font size of at least 14px; 16px is even better for mobile and 20px or 22px for desktop (This content is 22px)
Action
If you have access to your website admin area, its easy to increase the font size and make any background colour changes
Be sure to keep sufficient contrast between your text and your background.
Avoid using similar colours that can blend into each other. And be careful when placing text on top of background images. Select images carefully, or add a darker overlay to keep your text legible.
Light backgrounds and dark text make it easier to read than white text on a dark background. And here is a little-known fact: dark grey text is easier to read than black.
- Outdated Content
Small business websites that get frequently updated rank higher on search engines and are more engaging for visitors.
However, curating appropriate content and updating a simple website can be time-consuming and frustrating for many small-business owners.
64% of small-business owners find updating their website a major challenge, and 24% say the cost of maintaining their site is a big hurdle.
When small-business owners maintain their sites, they risk wasting time that could be used to cultivate new businesses.
Building your local business website on a content management platform (CMS) is a much better option.
The biggest platform in the world is WordPress, you can install WordPress for free and you can find thousands of free plugins to help with lots of tasks to maintain your website and keep it online
Action
However, there are other content management systems for small businesses. A word of caution, as my good friend and WordPress expert Bob Dunn likes to say: “Sure, WordPress is easy! Once you know how to use it!”
So, instead of trying to build your WordPress business website yourself, I highly recommend that you engage the services of a professional web designer or web design agency.
Yes, it will cost money. But you can count on professional support and training to get you started on the right foot. And you can usually receive ongoing support, just in case you get stuck.
- No Footer
The footer often seems the most underestimated part of a business website, which is ironic because it’s an area visitors see on every page!
The footer is ideal for drawing attention to important information, pages, or products, keeping visitors on your website longer, and helping them navigate through it.
Here are the things you can include in your footer:
Copyright
Navigation to the main pages
Privacy policy
Terms of use
Contact
Postal address/link to a map
Phone and fax numbers
Social icons
Email Signup
Search box
Your mission statement
Latest articles
Call to action
Of course, not all of these points have to be in your footer.
Just select the most relevant to you and your business. Whatever you do, don’t leave your footer empty. Instead, make that valuable space at the end of every page work for you.
10.Choose the right hosting
The last thing you need is for your website to go offline due to technical issues.
Some hosting services provide only the space on the server and things like updating the website theme and any plugins become the responsibility of the website owner and this is not a good way to work
Yes, it may on the surface save a couple of pounds per year but the consequences of a non-managed website can have a major impact if the site goes offline and then the prospect of paying a web developer to find the issue and get the site back online
Action
Check your hosting service to make sure your general website updates are included and if not, look for a new service ASAP.
Website Issues that normally require Professional Help
The 2 biggest issues with the performance of a website is ensuring it is mobile optimised and its visually appealing because if its not, the visitor will simply click away and visit a competitor
Unfortunately, both these issues are not easy fixes and normally require professional help
Why mobile is critical
Currently in 2024, 60.67% of website traffic comes from mobile devices. By 2025, there will be over 1 billion 5G connections globally.
92.3% of internet users consider accessing the internet through their smartphones compared to other devices.
But 19% of small-business owners do not have a mobile-friendly website or even know if their website is responsive and mobile-capable.
Many small businesses are missing out on critical consumers without the technology to engage their mobile visitors. And the only way to fix that problem is with mobile-first web design.
Modern Design Now Essential
The other issue is the look and feel of the website, design technology has come a long way and if your website was built even 10 years ago, chances are it is outdated and simply not up to the job
Website design and performance are not at the top of many local business owners priorities because they are busy trying to build their own businesses so its easy to overlook issues that are costing the business owner lost sales
Under normal circumstances, any major upgrade or update, is likely to require a significant investment so whilst there is no quick fix to make a non-mobile responsive website mobile friendly or to quickly update an old website design.
Because we have found this to be a big problem for many website owners, we have designed a service to help specifically with this task.
Rather than try to upgrade an old website, our rebrand service simply transfers the existing content of the website to a new modern website beautifully optimes for mobile at the lowest possible cost.
We can use the existing hosting and domain name to make even bigger savings, and you can go from this typical 10-year-old website not optimised for mobile to a website any business owner would be proud of
You can get more details here and we are here to help.
If you currently have a website that is in need of an update, please either contact us using our support link below, use live chat or give us a call and we can help bring your ideas to life without breaking the bank.
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