Your business website is the shop window for your business.
Whether you are a bricks and mortar store looking to get more people to visit your physical location or an online-only business seeking to boost website visits, sales, and conversions, it’s critical that your website is continuously updated to ensure that your existing, and potentially new, customers get a seamless, engaging experience with you and don’t decide to visit one of your competitors instead. In this article, we’ll explore a few ways you can ensure your business website is up to date and performing profitably.
1. Update to a modern, clean design
Whether you are updating your website yourself or using the skills of an outsourced design agency to keep your online presence looking good, it’s very important that your website presents itself professionally and appropriately for the type of business you run. If you are relying on the design you invested five years ago, then you are inadvertently sending a message to your potential customers that you don’t really care about their online experience with you. If they can see that you are clearly invested in how you present yourself to them, it speaks volumes about your commitment to their satisfaction.
If you’re using WordPress, there are so many pre-designed, business-relevant templates out there that you can simply slip over your old design that are either free or relatively inexpensive. These templates are easy to find in online repositories such as Themeforest where you’ll have no trouble finding a clean, modern design that will make your website look bang up to date.
2. Update your user experience with robust testing
It doesn’t matter how pretty your website is, unless your visitors find it easy to use, simple to navigate and full of relevant, engaging content allied to clear calls to action, they will most likely depart with haste. Nobody wants to spend time navigating a poorly constructed website, getting lost down endless loops of dead links and unexpected content.
Neither do your potential buyers want to interact with broken integrations such as contact forms that don’t send, videos that don’t play, shopping carts that fail or web apps that don’t generate the requisite results. If you rely on your website for business-critical income generation, then it’s definitely worth investing in professional help, like the web and app testing experts at digivante.com, for example, to make sure that your potential customers don’t leave frustrated but enjoy a well designed and thoroughly tested user experience.
3. Update your website to be mobile-friendly
More web searches are now conducted on mobile devices than they are on desktop or laptop computers. This means that the majority of your potential customers are going to not only try to find you but also attempt to interact with your website on a screen that may only be 4 inches in size. If your website doesn’t scale to whatever device you are using, then you risk losing them down the tunnel of frustration.
Not only must your website be clearly presented and easy to ready at the different screen sizes, but it also needs to retain all the core functionality such as easy navigation, clear access to contact details, visible and easy to interpret calls to action. Without a mobile friendly website you also risk Google penalizing you for not being usable on certain devices and missing out on burgeoning local and mobile search opportunities. If you are updating your website template make sure you chose a responsive design and if you are working with a designer, ensure that they work with you to develop a mobile friendly website.
4. Update your media with images and video
Is your business starting to look like little more than an online version of your print brochure? Somewhat static and text-heavy? People engage with and respond to strong imagery (especially if your product or service can be clearly illustrated with high-quality photography) and especially with video. Video content is being consumed at a voracious rate across all platforms and is a great way to display your products, case studies or even your testimonials.
It doesn’t have to be difficult to update your business website. Focus on a clean, modern and well designed site with fantastic content that is thoroughly tested to be the best experience it can be for your customers. If you invest the time and effort in updating your website, then you are also clearly investing in your customers’ experience; this suggests you care about them, and happy customers are always far more likely to spend money with you time and time again.
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