In the world of running a business, efficiency is absolutely paramount. Components like your website demand that they are in complete working order, not just for the sake of our customers, but for our business. The biggest issue most businesses have is that so many companies fail to look at their website as something that can instantly speed up the customer relationship-building process. There’s so many ways to make your website more efficient, so let’s dive in:
Make Payment Easier
Ensuring effective and efficient payment processing for online businesses is critical because our customers could easily slip away if they get to the very end of the payment process and find that it is not user-friendly. In fact, your whole website should be user-friendly and guide your customers towards this natural end. You could have an amazingly efficient and responsive website but if it gets to the payment processing page and there’s an issue with their cards, this could easily turn them away from you potentially for life. It’s critical to make life easier for the customers and this is where payment becomes pivotal.
Optimize the Little Things That Make a Big Difference
Lots of websites make the most of supplementing their pages with content and in terms of search engine optimisation (SEO) there’s a number of little things that we can upgrade to optimise our website, including:
- Using white space
- Catching dead website links also known as 404s
- Being mobile friendly
- Keeping the website formatting consistent
- And many more
When it comes to your marketing your website is absolutely essential and you have to design an amazing user experience that solves common user problems. Your website is valuable real estate and therefore you have to look at it from a design perspective as well.
Making Your CTAs Visually Appealing
Calls to action are often considered an afterthought, especially for content creators. It makes logical sense because they’ve spent a lot of time working hard on guiding users towards purchasing products but a CTA can span in a number of disciplines. It’s not just about asking them to sign up for newsletters or making purchases but it can be something far simpler. A CTA should be prominent but also visually appealing. Many content creators use it as a simple sentence but in terms of design utilising a CTA button makes it a far more striking component of any website page.
Prioritise Security
It is just as important to ensure that we can protect user data. As far as building relationships with customers is concerned, we have to instil trust at every turn and we can do this by implementing SSL certificates and other associated security measures. A very simple thing that can make a massive difference is upgrading your HTTP to HTTPS. We have to remember that if a customer has any shred of doubt in their mind that your website is not user-friendly or not worth their time, they will instantly navigate away straight into the hands of a competitor. Making your website more efficient by upgrading software patches on a regular basis will, over time, instil trust.
Add Tracking and Analytics
It is vital that we gain insight into user behaviour. The great thing about a website is that we can consistently look at ways to make it function that little bit better, it is never set in stone. Web analytics tools allow us to identify areas for improvement by monitoring user behaviour, gaining insight into our ideal target market, and ensuring we use this data to make far more effective business decisions.
Refresh Your Content
An essential part of our website is the content mill. Our website has to be relevant to keep users engaged and we can do this by updating our content. There’s many ways to upgrade your content rather than just constantly hunting for new ideas. For example, you can prioritise evergreen content. These would consist of best-of lists for a specific year and upgrading it to this year will always ensure that you make your content far more relevant and contemporary while also making life easier for yourself.
Add a Feedback Mechanism
Finally, if you want to make your website far more efficient you’ve got to go and ask the people that use your website. If you can provide a simple way for your users to offer feedback on every component of your website, whether it is the content or the general user-friendliness, you can start to identify certain trends and make those appropriate changes that will give your website a far better opportunity at being more efficient and effective in the long run.
