15 Easy Ways to Improve Your Website

You may have heard the term ‘successful customer journey’ before. This is having a seamless experience on your website. In short, from arriving on the homepage, a customer can navigate through the pages they way they want to. This is often without hassle of using a search bar, working out unclear page headers, or closing multiple pop-ups or ads. First impressions count! Don’t lose customers because they couldn’t find their way.

Maybe your flow from homepage to inner pages isn’t all what it should be, but you can still provide a simple navigation to help customers find their way. Keep your top-level navigation headers simple . Use no more than 6 headings + a search bar.

For product websites, be sure to classify your products in simplistic categories that any user could understand. E.g. avoid product categories like “Miscellaneous” or “Accessories”. Make sure that any prospect who hovers over your navigation knows exactly what you do.

Secondly, do not neglect your product filters. Keep them organised with as little values as possible. E.g. for Colour, use simple colours to filter your products such as Blue, Red, Grey, Brown, Green, Yellow. Avoid Forest Green or Black/Grey in your filters. Your product pages can be used to show details like shade  or secondary colours. 

It is difficult to generate enquiries or  reduce your bounce rate on site when customers don’t like what they are looking at. It seems obvious, but many sites neglect design because they believe in their content or service. When customers don’t like what they see, they are unlikely to read your content and more unlikely to purchase.

Keep your content and design tidy with space between sections. Solid colour space and dividers between sections balance content and imagery to improve readability.

Bluntly, customers do not read paragraphs of your content. However, they do read short and poignant content. We see this often using heat-mapping software for our clients.

Balance your content across pages with imagery for successful information architecture. Remember 3 steps to successful content; headline, explain, call to action. Headlines attract attention, content provides more detail before a call to action directs the customer.

If you want to lay text over an image, overlay the image with a highly-contrasting colour to your text. Websites lacking readability are an extremely frustrating user experience for your customers.

Engaging or intriguing headers are extremely powerful, particularly when followed up with information architecture. Questions or instructions can massively improve click-through-rate on your call to actions. For informative headers, keep them concise and easy to understand. Your audience will appreciate knowing what your section is about, before reading your content.

Call to actions is the difference ground between a good and effective website. A good website looks nice and has great content, but may not generate any sales or enquiries. Call to actions can directly change this. A call to action provides the next or final step in a customer journey which shouldn’t be exiting your page.

Employ your call to actions with content like; Say Hi / Book Now / Shop Now / Call Us / Begin Your Journey / Start / Get a Quote. If you offer something to acquire customers, e.g. first order discount or free consultation, include it on your website!

Every site can use a little bit of movement but be careful to not go over the top. Call to action hovers are great and content being gently highlighted with motion definitely improves a customer’s likeliness to read. Animation is a useful tool to make elements of your website stand out. Use wisely, otherwise nothing will stand out!

We always recommend using branded illustrations to strengthen the brand identity on site. It is preferable for customers to feel immersed in your brand as they travel the wonderful navigation and design you made from tips 1-3.

A branded image or short animation can say 1000 words… much better than a paragraph of content! However, if you’re struggling with this, there are stock images available on sites like Unsplash, Pexels and Pixabay. Again, keep it on-brand and use them wisely!

Thank you for reading! We hope you’ve found some useful tips. There are hundreds of things a business can do to improve their website, so be sure to use other sources of information too. As always, we’d love to hear from you and offer a free website review!