A well-designed website goes beyond simply just looking good. To drive brand growth, your website needs to offer an excellent user experience (UX), which hinges on several key features.
With mobile traffic accounting for over half of all global web traffic, it’s essential that your website looks great and functions well on all devices. A responsive design ensures that your site adapts to different screen sizes, from smartphones to tablets.
A fast website is critical. Slow loading times can lead to higher bounce rates and lower search engine rankings and they can also be losing you customers. Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to test and improve your site’s performance. Compress images, and enable browser caching to speed up your site. Lazy loading can also be beneficial when you have a large website.
Protect your website and your users’ data by ensuring your site has SSL encryption. HTTPS is now a ranking factor for Google, so securing your site is not just a trust signal but an SEO boost as well.
A great CTA for your users is like a beacon to a ship - steadily guiding them to perform the action that you want them to do. A CTA should be extremely clear, concise and consistent. Try not to put two CTAs too close together or you risk confusing your user and they might not take action with either.
Make it easy for visitors to find what they’re looking for. A clean and simple navigation structure helps keep users on your site longer and improves their overall experience.
Use Google Analytics or a similar tool to track visitor behaviour. Understanding which pages are performing well and where users are dropping off can help you continuously improve the site. You can also use Analytics and tools like Hotjar to understand the customer journey and onsite user behaviour.
What sets you apart from your competitors?, who do you serve? and what do you offer? Value propositions are essential for brand positioning and communicating who you are to your website visitors. This is the equivalent of your sales pitch, so make it good.
Email marketing is one of the most effective methods to retain your brand advocates, spread company information, encourage impulse purchases & service uptakes and build a community.
Start with benchmarking your current website performance - good decisions cannot be made without facts and evidence. Not only should you take a look at technical performance in terms of speed and accessibility, you’ll need to understand how each of the channels are contributing to your marketing efforts as a whole. You’ll need to understand the typical user journey across your website - right from how your visitors find you, all the way to where and how they convert.
It’s good to review as much data as you possibly can for accuracy (12 months is ideal); start by understanding your channel performance and device category conversion rates. With each new insight, you’ll be able to dive deeper to build a relatively complex picture of reality.
Data is the key to understanding where and when things can be improved but having accurate data to begin with is essential for analysis. It can be helpful to create a Looker dashboard; where you can connect your data sources for better insights and ease, it will drive efficiency. The deeper your understanding of your stats, the faster you’ll be able to identify potential issues and be able to identify interesting observations that you can capitalise on.
After auditing your website, you’ll be left with a list of things that you can, could and probably should do. You might feel a little overwhelmed, particularly if you have a very small internal team and a resource issue. Giving each element a score based on effort and impact will help you to organise your priorities and the order in which you should tackle them. Things that are high impact but high effort may require some extra budget. You might also find that this kind of exercise can help identify anything that could be fixed with a single solution.
Looking at your website, it can sometimes be challenging to know where to start and what to prioritise. Whether you’re reviewing the technical performance of your website or looking at what analytics data is telling you, look for the quick wins - the easy to fix, minimal effort but high impact things that you can do to instantly make your website better.