There are many different ways to go about improving your website. This is because there are so many different aspects that need to be considered. Some ways to improve your website relate to improving the traffic and optimizing it for SEO, others involve improving the user experience, others may involve increasing the conversion rate of your website.
At the same time, with so much to think about, working to improve your website can be overwhelming. It’s also easy to forget about and neglect important aspects that may dramatically help your site’s performance.
Today, your website is like your business’s storefront. It’s the place where people come when they want to contact you, learn more about your business, or buy your products. With this said, it is obviously crucial that you do everything you can to make it as good as possible.
Best tips to improve your website
1. Prioritize the website
Spend a lot of time and effort on continuously developing and improving the website. A website is never complete. It is a work in progress that will evolve and improve over time. It takes time to work out structures and formats that are the most attractive and effective on your website. Therefore, it’s important to continuously think about how you can improve it.
2. Determine the purpose
Define a clear overall purpose with the website, for example, to build the brand as an employer, sell your services or form an opinion. The purpose of the website determines the target group and message you want to focus on. Your website should reflect your goal and purpose very well.
The most important and most basic thing when it comes to creating a really good website is understanding and meeting the needs of the target audience. Why do visitors come to your website? What interests them? What are they looking for? This is something that many companies miss when they develop their website and instead focus on what they themselves think is important and want to tell. In many cases, what the company is important and what the target group thinks is important are completely different things.
Tip – Always start from the target audience’s needs.
What functions should the website fulfill for the visitor? Should there be contact forms? Asking questions? A shop? Should the website primarily function as marketing to new potential customers or should the website primarily function as an information page for those who have already come into contact with the company in other ways? Depending on the purpose, different features of the website are needed.
Think about which functions on the website make it easier for the visitor, but also which functions make it easier for the website owner.
3. Adapt your website to your target audience
A mistake a lot of people make is to not build their website according to the needs and wants of the target audience. In order for your website to be effective, it needs to be tailored for your target audience.
Think of your most important purpose when you create the website and test it on the target group. By starting from the target group’s needs, you can more easily prioritize the content and design.
Start by thinking through which target group you want to reach and what challenges they may face. It is basic but so important to ask the question “for whom do I create my website?”.
The next question is what do you want your visitors to actually do on the website? Should they read about and see pictures of your products, read comments from your customers, or maybe buy from your online store? Start from what you want your visitors to do and then focus on those areas when designing your website. Make it easy for your visitors to find what they are looking for?
4. Call to actions
Think about what you want the visitor to do on each page and use clear calls to action. In this way, you can direct the visitor towards the overall purpose of the website. CTAs should not be underestimated in any marketing activity, including your website as it has proven to be extremely effective in increasing conversions. Therefore, think about how and where you can include effective calls to action.
5. Keep the structure simple
Make sure the website is easy to click around and navigate with just the right number of sections and headings. The visitor easily gets tired of a site that is difficult to navigate. You want your website to be simple to use yet informative and beautiful.
6. Use images and videos
Humans are visual creatures. They will much rather consume video and photos rather than text. This is therefore something that you want to focus on when building your website. Great photos and videos will make your website much more attractive and inviting. It can also help you convey a point, mediate information, and ultimately sell more items.
Illustrate what you want to say with pictures, infographics, and videos. It makes your message more accessible and gives the visitor a more pleasant experience of the website.
You canuse visual media in the form of video on the website to make visitors stay longer and increase the chance of sales. Eg. an insight behind the scenes at the company, how the production is made or how the product is used, etc.
7. Update frequently
Keep the website alive by constantly updating texts, writing blog posts, or posting press releases and news articles. This also increases the page’s ranking in Google searches. But most importantly, it shows that your business is up and runnng and gets people to return.
Visiting a website that has not been updated for a while and thus feels old is not very trustworthy. The risk with a website that hasnät been updated is that the visitor leaves the page and go to other more attractive alternatives.
To put your business on the map, you need to build trust right from the start. So make sure to keep your website alive with small simple means, whether it is with news or by updating with new images. Set aside time to update the website so that it continues to attract both new and returning visitors.
8. Link to your website frequently
Make sure to frequently link to your website in social media, newsletters, and press releases. It is an effective way to drive traffic to your own site, where you can get the visitor’s full attention. Make sure you include a link to your website in the profile of all your social media accounts as well.
9. Have an informative and inviting homepage
Make sure that the start page contains references and information about all the company’s relevant areas of your business and can serve as an introduction to your business and what it offers. It should be welcoming and immediately convey key information that you want to share with new visitors.
10. Have “share” buttons on your website
Make it easy for your visitors to follow your business and share your content. Incorporate “share” buttons on your website and you can enjoy organic advertising and increased reach.
11. Do not use too many different fonts or hard-to-read fonts
The ideal is usually to have one font for headings and one for running body text. Furthermore, you should not use too complicated fonts that are hard to read. Choose a font that looks good but that is also easy to read.
12. Check that the following parts are on your website
- Customer benefit. Clearly explain the benefits of using your service and product.
- Have an overview of the company’s services and products.
- Have an “About us” page that tells who you are, where you are and the company’s background.
- Include customer references that instill trust in your company.
13. Make it easy to navigate your website
Your goal is to create a user-friendly website and a functional navigation is very important and what web visitors consider to be the most important feature of a website.
There should be a clear path for visitors to information about what you offer and to how they can get help from you. In other words, you should make sure that it is easy for visitors to find what they are looking for.
Let the visitor understand what is on the page through a clear menu. Give the visitor an opportunity for in-depth information – helpful links to relevant content.
Even if a website has a lot of content, it should be easy to find.
On the one hand, it should be easy to understand the categories and what is included in them, and on the other hand, they must not be too deep so that it takes too many clicks to find something. It is also good to have many internal links so that it becomes easier to find related content on the site.
If you have a site with a lot of content, it can also be good with a search function. Then the user can find what they are looking for immediately.
A clear structure and navigation on your website to make it more user-friendly and search-friendly.
14. Mobile-adapted website (responsive website)
If your website isn’t optimized for mobile, you have a huge problem. Today, the majority of people who browse websites do so on their mobile. With that said, if your website isn’t responsive, it will cause huge problems for the user. The text will be all over the place, buttons may not work, and so on. In other words, if your website isn’t mobile optimized, it won’t be possible to use it with mobile.
Most people who surf with their mobile phone are looking for something concrete such as your address, your phone number, opening hours, etc. Therefore, it is crucial that your website is responsive and can adapt to all devices.
Back in the days, the majority of users browsed on a desktop or laptop computer but users’ behavior has changed, and now, a responsible website is no longer optional. It’s necessary.
This means that your website should be able to be used on all devices, regardless of whether your visitors use a computer, tablet or phone.
To check if your site is customized for the different devices, you may want to use Google’s Mobile Friendliness Test.
15. Create a search engine optimized website and work with SEO
To be visible on Google and other search engines, you need to have a search engine optimized website so that the website is indexed by the search engines and ranks well. We could talk about SEO for days, but let’s start with thge most basic.
You should work with an SEO strategy that brings out your most important keywords, relevant links and structure. SEO is an art that has many different aspects to it. There are many different things that come together to create a successful SEO strategy and ultimately result in good traffic. Gooogle uses over 200 ranking factors when raning your website and your pages, so there are obviously a lot that come into play here. We’ll also go into some of these further on. But it’s worth knowing that some things you can do with your website have a direct or indirect effect on your rankings. It’s not just about writing good, optimized content, but also about providing users overall a good user experience.
User experience is something that Google has emphasised more and more in the recent years.
Use the same words and phrases on the website that people use when they google and search for something related to your business. Keyword optimization of the site can be absolutely crucial for people to find you.
When it comes to search engine optimization of a website, there is not a single simple method that solves everything as there are a number of different factors that affect the website’s position. But just don’t neglect to create an SEO strategy, you should work carefully and intentionally with SEO with almost everything you do when it comes to your website.
16. Landing pages
In order for you to reach your goals with the website and get your visitors to do what you want, you need effective landing pages that get your visitors to convert. This is particularly important during marketing campaigns when you are driving traffic to your website via a certain campaign. For example, if you are promoting a new model of shoes, you want your visitors to come to a page that is specifically focused on these shoes. Otherwise, it creates a disconnect between the user since they are not immediately presented with information about the product that they initially clicked the ad for. And therefore, the risk is that they will just leave the site because they can’t immediately find what they are looking for.
17. Use email marketing
Encourage your visitors to subscribe to your newsletter. You build your brand and loyalty to your customers and are “top of minds”. A newsletter is a good channel to link traffic to your website. You want to take advantage of the visitors that come to your site and keep them from only visiting your site and never coming back. An email newsletter signup on your website can therefore be really effective.
18. Review the website’s speed (load time)
In today’s society, we are used to getting information quickly, and if we need to wait, we would rather choose another alternative. Your website loading time (Website speed) is crucial for the success of your website. If your website takes too long to load, a lot of people will leave before they even get a chance to enter. In addition, a slow loading time will negatively affect your site’s SEO performance and search engine rankings.
Heavy images is one of the main reasons why a website loads slowly. However, this can be influenced by optimizing all images before they are posted on the website.
You can test how fast your page loads with the toolPingdom Website Speed Test. The tool gives ou tips on how you can improve your site’s speed.
It has been shown that fast websites are more profitable than slow ones, and therefore it is of utmost importance that yours is too. Have a meeting with your technical manager and start a project whose purpose is to speed up the website. It is a form of technical SEO. Consider using an external server for uploads if, for example, you have a lot of images that slow down the download. Otherwise reduce and optimize images.
Improvng the load time on your website ultimately gives more traffic but also more sales. It has been shown that fast sites are simply more profitable than slow sites.
With the introduction of Google’s Speed Update in July 2018, the load time became a ranking factor even when searching on mobile devices. In other words, your positions in Google are negatively affected if your site has slow loading times.
Even for users fast load times is very important. There are several studies that show how your site can be negatively affected by slow load times.
19. Present your employees/team
Publish pictures of the company’s employees with their roles and other information as a description if it makes sense. It helps Make your company more human and more relatable.
It is not only good for the customer to see who works there and further increase the engagement. It can also be great for employees by, for example, receiving publicity. Group photos can be good, depending on the turnover of staff.
20. Ask a professional for help with SEO
Continuing on the theme of SEO, the concept of SEO is complex and requires the proper skills and knowledge to execute properly. With that said, if you don’t have that knowledge, it is best to seek help from an SEO professional to get the best results.
21. Track and evaluate results
In order to optimize and revise, you need to be able to evaluate your results in order to see what works and what doens’t.
You can track a lot of details and information via Google Analytics and if applicable (ie if you advertise) also in Google Ads.
It is really important to consistently measure and evaluate your results sos that you can change your strategies and marketing activities accordingly for the best possible results.
22. Ask for feedback
Ask an honest friend for feedback on what they think of your website. It may be difficult to get technical feedback, but what you can usually get feedback on and which is very valuable is how user-friendly and clear your website is.
23. Add your site to your Google My Business and Bing Places.
Make email addresses and phone numbers clickable. A visitor should be able to click on an email and get their email client, or click on the phone number and be offered to call. This is about HTML tags, quite simply. The exception is if you receive a lot of spam, but then you should first consider investing in a spam filter.
Go to google.com and type site:yourdomain.com (eg site:wordpress.com) in the search field and make sure that no pages give 404 as a response code. Should you have it, it may be appropriate to use 301-redirects to redirect the broken links to other, working links.
24. Improve titles & meta descriptions
Use unique meta descriptions for each page and post. In particular, your home page, otherwise Google normally takes the page description that appears in search engines from the first paragraph it finds on the website and it is not always relevant.
Creating inviting titles and meta descriptions is an effective way to improve a website’s visibility as it allows a better CTR in seatch engines. Use the Google Search Console to review which 20 pages are most popular on your site, and think about how headings and descriptions can be improved.
25. Do a keyword analysis / examine customers’ search behaviors
Users’ search behaviors can change over time and for successful SEO, you need to examine how they change so that you can customize your website accordingly. Open the Google Search Console and analyze which keywords visitors use to find your website. Do you see any new patterns? Then you get to create new content based on that.
26. Calculate the value of SEO
How much do your marketing projects cost in relation to what they provide? By calculating how much your various investments cost, it becomes easier to determine whether they are profitable or not. This will make it easier to create more profitable and effective campaigns in the future. But it’s also important to keep in mind that SEO is a long term strategy and it can take months before you start seeing any results from your SEO efforts.
27. Obtain https certificate (SSL)
Make sure your website is secure by obtaining an https certificate. This makes it much more difficult for external parties to access information transmitted via your website. This is also something that Google likes and that helps you in your search engine rankings.
Order an SSL certificate so that your site is secure and ranked higher by Google.
Get an SSL Certificate, it is free via CloudFlare or Let’s Encrypt if it is not in your interest to pay for one (of course paid and unpaid certificates differ, if you have e-commerce, for example, you should definitely invest in a better SSL).
Choose a secure web host with high uptime (ie a server that is not down often), make sure you have a quality SSL certificate (green padlock) that encrypts the traffic and regulates your GDPR requirements for you as a serious business owner, and that visitors get to accept cookies.
28. Work continuously with link building
Websites that other companies and websites link to benefit from improved rankings in the search results so it’s important that you make sure you get links to your website, known as “backlinks”. If a website mentions your company in a text, you should contact them and ask them to add a link to your site. You should do research about SEO and backlinks to make sure you understand how it works and how you can create a successful link-building strategy.
29. Create quality content that answers users’ questions
Google rewards quality content that gives users the information they are looking for. When you design or write texts, it is therefore important that the texts are of high quality and answer users’ questions within the subject.
30. Improve website H1s
If you have already improved the titles and meta descriptions of your website, you need to remember to improve the texts’ H1s (main headings) so that they match. Otherwise, there is a risk that your potential customers feel that the description of the page didn’t quite reflect what the page was about.
31. Improve H2s and H3s
It is beneficial if the texts’ H2s and H3s (subheadings) on your website are designed as questions. Then the user, already when he sees the search engines’ search results, will know that he will probably get answers to his questions. It simply increases the likelihood that the user will click on the link to your website.
32. Prepare content for voice search
Voice search is still not very common, but will probably be in the future, and it is growing quickly. There is therefore an advantage to being proactive and producing content that is adapted for voice search, so you do not have to do it later. Create content based on longtails (search phrases with many words) and remember to formulate the content as if you are answering questions.
33. Work with internal links
External links is not the only thing you need to think about when working with SEO. Internal links are equally important. Not only for SEO but for the user experience.
Make it easy for users to find all the information they need on your site – make sure there are internal links in the texts. This allows the reader to spend more time on your website, which in the long run is both positive for the sales figures and the website’s position among Google’s search results.
34. Use Google’s new image format WebP
With Google’s new image format WebP, you can upload significantly larger images than with other formats, without affecting the speed of your website. Another benefit of using Google’s own format is that it positively affects the ranking of your website.
35. Solve duplicate content
Something that can negatively affect the position of your web page is if several URLs lead to the same content. It is therefore important that the content of the page is always unique, and that you clear or correct the texts that are similar to each other. There are some exceptions where duplicate content on your website is fine, but in general, you should avoid it as much as possible.
36. Improve conversion
Take advantage of the existing traffic on your website and work to improve your conversion rate by making it easier for visitors to buy your products. Analyze what users are looking for when they visit the site and customize the website accordingly. With better conversion, your business will be more profitable and get a higher ranking among the search results.
37. Write quality content and select the correct images
Visitors generally don’t like to read long descriptive texts when they look around on a website. Write short, informative, and qualitative texts and capture the customer with powerful headlines. On average, the visitor spends only a few seconds looking through the home page’s images and texts, during which time they have time to evaluate if you offer something of value to them.
If you write so that the customer does not understand or feel excluded, you have lost the customer. Therefore, work through the texts and choose pictures carefully. The pictures should breathe the feeling you want to convey. Why not ask a knowledgeable person in your network, a potential customer or a friend, to read the texts to really ensure that you write so that they understand.
It is a good idea to also test how they experience the images that you intend to use on the website. What feeling do they give? And above all – does that feeling match what you want to convey with your company? Taking the time to really test different images can be a success factor for your new website. Remember that a picture says more than a thousand words…
38. Create a clear contact page
Your website acts as a bridge for new contacts and therefore you should make it easy for visitors to get in touch with you. For example, you can add a simple form that visitors can fill out if they have questions. And create a phone link so they can easily call you.
Also make sure to include your contact information so that those who want can email you. The point is that it should be easy for your visitors to get in touch.
39. Invite to a test party!
Invite your friends and your network to a “test party” and let them surf around your new website and give you feedback on how they experience it. Here, it is absolutely best to test on people who are part of the target audience you want to reach. Maybe they give you really awesome suggestions on what you can improve.
It is also a great opportunity where you get to know what works and what you can do to make your website even better. You always run into small bugs and errors, so take advantage of your friends’ discoveries and make it a festive event. A test party can simply lift your website to unimaginable heights! So what are you waiting for?
When your website is finally up and the visitors find it, there is a tool you can use to keep track of the visitors – how they navigate on the website, what they click on and which pages they choose to leave. The tool is Google Analytics!
By analyzing “navigation patterns”, you can optimize and improve the website so that it generates more contacts and increases sales. Are you not yet in full control of what your visitors do on the website? Then it’s high time to start that work!
40. Create and upload an XML Sitemap in the Search Console
Another thing we recommend you do is implement a so-called XML sitemap on your website. This map can be compared with the table of contents of a book. In other words, it is a kind of listing that helps search engines to index the various pages of your site.
If you use a publishing tool like WordPress, you can easily solve this via extensions like Google Sitemap Generator or Yoast SEO. Then check that your XML sitemap has been created by typing https://www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml into your browser.
Once you’ve created your Sitemap, you should also upload it to Google’s Search Console (SC) tool. Once inside the control panel, click on crawl actions
- Then on Sitemaps
- Then tap add / test Sitemap:
- Then enter the URL of your XML Sitemap and click submit
41. Fix 404 pages
A so-called 404 page occurs, for example, if you change the permalink (URL) on a web page, or alternatively deleted a page. Let’s say that one of your pages has been indexed by Google, thereby ranking for several keywords. If you then decide to delete this page, users who find it will be met by a 404 page and will not be able to find your content.
You want to avoid and resolve 404 at all costs because it is negative both for your site’s rankings as well as the user experience. You’ll likely lose out on potential customers if they come to your site and are met with a 404 page and cannot find what they are looking for.
In order to solve this problem, it is important to locate any 404 pages and then redirect them to another similar page. In the “worst case” you can redirect to the home page.
If you want to locate 404 pages, we recommend using the Google Search Console. Once inside the Search Console, click on Coverage in the menu on the left, whereupon you will be presented with any errors.
On the same theme, anothing thing you should look at is broken links. What is a broken link? It is usually a piece of content that has been removed for a reason. It could be a product, a job advertisement or that someone is inside your organization and fiddles with the website.
It is quite common for large websites to have many users and it can be difficult to keep track of what is going on. So you can have a number of URLs without content but they have links that point to them. When these links point to a URL without content, it will lead visitors to a removed/dead page. You can use a tool like Ahrefs, look at broken links if there are any. And if there are some, you can do two things;
Recreate the content of that URL or two, make a redirect to content similar to the content that was there before or change the link on your website to a new link.
42. Pictures are everything
If you have a nice graphic profile, it will help your website a lot. A stylish logo, easy-to-read font and nice colors are clearly a strong decisive factor for your image, but the last piece of the puzzle is to use great images.
If you do not have access to professional photos, I recommend a hybrid of purchased and custom photos. In today’s situation, the phones have become so good that portrait photos with an iPhone can sometimes trump a DSLR camera.
43. Great texts help you rank on Google
Text is the single most important thing on your website for SEO purposes. In order to be able to rank for keywords, you need to have text that focuses on these keywords and answers people’s queries.
Your texts are what will make your website actually start indexing on Google.
Tip: compile a really good FAQ page with frequently asked questions and answers. This is both user-friendly information for your visitors, but also a good trick for Google, as this is often how people Google today. That is, searching for issues. If you build your website correctly, your questions and answers can also be indexed directly into Google’s FAQ module.
If you want to give yourself even better conditions for your texts to be visible on Google, you can supplement them with a Youtube video on the same theme as your text. Since Google owns Youtube, it is not so far-fetched to imagine that the algorithms belong together and talk to each other.
Another tip is that you make sure to write all the texts based on a professionally developed SEO analysis that a web agency has developed to map your keywords that you can start from.
An SEO analysis is a way to ensure that you do not spend money on good copywriting from an advertising agency that still no one reads, as no one will find the texts on Google.
44. Have a clear message
The visitor can get a better and faster understanding of what a website is about through a clear and well presented website.
Your website should provide the visitor with answers to these three questions, with a quick glance (5-8 sec) before scrolling down:
- What are you offering?
- How will it make my life better?
- How do I buy/book you?
Feel free to enlist the help of others who do not know your products and services to analyze your message. Can they easily understand what you are offering?
A website can easily become overwhelming to read if it has too long pieces (blocks of text) at first glance. By dividing the content, it becomes easier to absorb and consume to see if the content is relevant to the visitor.
Ways to make it more friendly:
- Shorten paragraphs
- Use clear headings that describe subsequent content.
- Use visual elements as icons that provide increased understanding.
- Add images to help describe the content.
- Use space space to highlight the content.
Few things frighten a reader as much as large masses of text. Especially if they use a smartphone. Therefore, it is important to think about how you format your text. Make it airy and easy to read.
45. Include relevant and up-to-date information
It is important that the content on your website reflects and provides answers to what has been searched for and is within your expertise.
If you work with content marketing, then it can be a very good idea to regularly go through old posts / articles and update them to see if it still feels relevant to your business and if the article is up to date.
It could be that you have links to someone else’s website that are no longer relevant. It could also be that they have removed the page you linked to, which may cause a broken link – which may harm the user experience.
46. Have a clear menu
Not infrequently, websites have such extensive menus that it becomes confusing for the visitor. Here it is important to really think through what the visitor is looking for. Think about how important the different headings in the menu are. Can some be added as in submenus? Maybe some choices do better in a separate button?
47. Present important information on all pages
Do not just have the company’s contact information on a special contact page. Many of the site’s visitors will be looking for contact information or opening hours. Make sure these are presented on every single page, either at the bottom or in the top right corner. It is also good to have a short description of the company’s operations on each page.
48. Match the website with your graphic profile
No matter how potential customers get in touch with your business, they should recognize themselves. The business card provided, the letterhead on which the quote is written and the website that the visitor comes to, should all give a feeling that they are connected.
Use the visual identity pattern as a background on the website or as a border, match the colors so that they match the company’s color palette and feel free to make sure that the same font is used on both business cards, invoices and websites. It gives a thoughtful, confident impression and gives the feeling of a serious company with attention to detail.
It should be easy to understand what different elements do and what the structure in general looks like. Therefore, a website needs to be as consistent as possible in its design. Images and other graphic elements can be the same size and placed in similar places. It should also be clear what happens when you click on different things, such as links.
As with the organization of the website, this is something that is good to think about from the beginning. Otherwise, you risk unnecessary work to change things, once you have found a formula that you like.
49. Less is more
The more content and information on the website that competes for the visitor’s attention, the less the visitor will perceive and only the highly motivated will stay to discover your company’s website. Shorten the texts if they are long, select the most important and remove superfluous information on pages that are particularly important. This will highlight the things that matter the most and will help you convey this information.
50. Adapted for different types of readers
Everyone reads differently. And if you want to make readers and search engines happy, you need to adapt accordingly.
But how do you do that, of course you wonder? Well, by including bullet points and other types of summaries. Then a fast reader can pick up the most important part of an article and leave it after having consumed the key information. At the same time, the masses of text can be used for going in-depth and sharing more key information. And this may be exactly what someone who wants to read the article in depth wants. In addition, Google often likes longer, more detailed web pages.
