Top 7 things to spruce up your website
Now more than ever, your website is most probably the first thing many new customers and/or clients will see. And it only takes a few seconds for users to form an opinion about your website, that will determine whether or not they’ll stay.
That’s why making a great first impression is crucial, and to do this, regular maintenance of your website is important. But sometimes you need to look and think if it is time to spruce up your website.
Open up a new tab now and take a look at your website. Ask yourself these three questions.
- Does the design look outdated?
- Are my conversions/sales decreasing?
- Have I received complaints about user experience or design-related issues?
If the answer is yes to any of the above questions, then it’s time to spruce up your website.
There’s no need to completely overhaul your website every few months, but it is a smart decision to make a few quick changes and additions to your website to remain current and improve customer engagement. To get you started, we’ve listed a few suggestions that make for easy tweaks to upgrade your website’s design and deliver a better user experience to visitors.
1. Add fresh content
It’s important that your website adds value to your users, along with demonstrating your competency and knowledge of the subject in which you operate. The best way to do this is by adding insightful and helpful content to show that your site is relevant and contemporary. Fresh content is hugely beneficial to the overall success of your website. This refresh will improve your SEO rankings and delight your visitors with something new while enhancing the user experience.
2. Repurpose old content
Having a website which is content-rich, is great. However, this content needs to be relevant and up to date. It’s worth spending a good few hours every few months, to check the content of your website, whether this is blog content or products descriptions. Then it’s time to update your older blogs and webpages with new and updated stats, figures and quotes.
3. New imagery
Images are a really important design element that can be used to engage the audience. They can also be used as a source of information when graphics and illustrations and transformed into infographics. In case you’re still using old stock images, consider adding fresh images to your website. This is crucial, especially if the imagery on your site is outdated it simply means a visual change is in order. A set of new high-quality stock images will give your website an impressive touch and improve your site usability and overall appeal.
4. Simple forms
The best way to interact with your customers is to have them approach you. If you haven’t already, a great way to gather leads from your website is by adding a subscription or inquiry form to your site – typically under the ‘contact us’ section. Add a subscription form or an inquiry form to your website for visitors to engage with your brand by reaching out to you. You can design the form to fit your website’s look. Keep the form simple with minimum fields so your visitors can breeze through it without being too inconvenienced. The example above is a fun way to engage with your users!
5. Add your socials
If your website currently lacks social share buttons, you could be missing out on a lot of social media traffic that’s generated from people already reading your blog or website content. Adding socials to your website is a great way to demonstrate to your audience that you’re active online and encourages followers – which can positively impact on brand awareness and recognition. This can inevitably lead to returning website visitors. Where should you add your social media links? The best places are on the homepage, contact us page and on all subsequent blog post pages.
6. Check your website analytics
This is something which would be an on-going process, typically a weekly or monthly occurrence. The key analytics to look out for are;
- Which pages on your site are the most popular (typically denoted by time on page)
- Whether any of your pages have abnormally high bounce rates
- Which pages generate the most engagement
Having a good understanding of how users interact with your website and allow you to know exactly what to do to spruce your website up. For example, having one page which has a great time on page and engagement when compared to another with high bounce rates, will give you an inkling that the latter page needs a makeover.
7. Homepage makeover
With the homepage of your website, typically being the forefront of your company, it’s important to regularly update it with new information and creatives. This can be done by aligning your current design to the current web design trends of 2020. To help, we’ve written a piece which looks at the top 10 web design trends of 2020.
If you’re still unsure whether or not to spruce up your website, here are 9 brilliant reasons why you should redesign your website to get you thinking. For more information follow Codeminers on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to see what trends they are paying attention to and how to incorporate those designs into your own website.
