Your website is the heart and soul of your business and your digital presence. All of your social media accounts, newsletters, paid ads, even your business cards lead back to your website. And even if you don’t believe in love at first sight, your visitors certainly do! So you will need to spend some time to ensure your website is getting the love it deserves.
For this Valentine’s Day, we have put together an easy list of ways to make your website better and visitors fall in love with it.
Make It Fast
You need to make your website fast. You cannot afford to ignore your page load times, as slow websites are one of the main reasons visitors jump off your site as soon as they get there. Who wants to wait around for things to load? No one, and certainly not your potential customers. If you don’t know how fast your website loads, we recommend checking out GTmetrix to see how your site performs, find out why it’s slow and how to optimise it.
- Optimise your images – ensure your images are no larger than they need to be and in the right file format and compressed for the web.
- If you’re using stock photos, resize them properly in Photoshop. Stock photos have gigantic size files.
- If you’re using WordPress, delete the plugins you don’t use. (P.S backup your site first and only do so if you know what you’re doing. If you don’t know how to backup your site or delete plugins, check out our maintenance page for help.)
- Reduce redirects – every time a page redirects to another page, your visitors are waiting longer for the response cycle to complete.
Attractive Web Design
When it comes to web design, looks matter more than personality – if your website looks beautiful you will make a great first impression. Around 38% of visitors will stop engaging with a web design that is unattractive or not intuitive enough.
When you’re designing your own website, ensure you stick with one colour palette, use consistent and intuitive page design throughout your site and make sure your visuals and text work together.
- Use a colour palette that captures attention and reflects your company’s vision
- Have the same background for every page
- Keep your images consistent
- Use modern fonts that are easy to read
Make Your Website Responsive
According to the Website Design Industry Statistics 2021, 48% of users think that companies that don’t have mobile-optimised websites don’t care about them. So you need to ensure your site is optimised for mobile. It is no surprise that most people use their mobiles or tablets to access the internet and browse websites, this is why responsiveness needs to be one of your top priorities.
- Throw in responsive design elements such as finger-friendly navigation, legible fonts and CTA’s.
- Grab your mobile device and see how your website looks on mobile, take screenshots of things that do not look alright and fix them. Keep repeating until it is fixed.
- Ensure CTA buttons are not too close together, the text is easy to read and the phone number and email address are clickable.
Keep it Simple, Yet Unique
Do you believe in love at first sight yet? You need to capture your audience’s attention when they visit your website. Consider the impression you want to make and the message you want to communicate to your potential customers. Do not crowd your navigation with lots of pages, the simpler the structure, the easier it will be to use.
- Don’t overload your homepage, this will distract users
- Ensure your site answers the critical questions such as, who you are, what your business is and why does your business matter to them
- Put your menu and contact info where you know people will expect it to be.
Make Your CTA’s Easy to find
If your site does not have easy to find or any Call-to-actions you are losing out on sales. Great CTA’s are: “Shop Now! Follow Us! Get Your Free Quote” and so much more, make it timely, personalised and play on people’s fear of missing out. Check out our latest Instagram post for power words you need to use in your CTAs.
Relationship With Your Website
Your relationship with your website is just like any other real-life relationship – you need to nurture it, give it attention and care. Checking up on it, finding out what is wrong and fixing it will make it grow over time. It is a long process, but 100% worth it.
Contact Web Design Portsmouth
However, if you do not have time to create or redo your website, then contact Web Design Portsmouth today and we will be more than happy to create you a website that will make you and your customers fall head over heels in love with your website.
Happy Valentine’s Day from all of us at Web Design Portsmouth!
