If you’ve got your own business or organisation having your own website is a must in order to keep customers, supporters and other interested parties up to date and informed about all of your activities. However, if your website isn’t doing as well as you’d like it can be frustrating, especially if you’ve got competitors whose sites are really taking off. So here are some essential steps to take in order to maximize your website performance and revolutionize your online presence.
1. Design (Website Performance Tips #1):
In this day and age there’s simply no excuse for having a poorly designed website, and most users won’t be impressed by an unprofessional layout and cluttered pages.
So the first step in maximizing the effects of your website is to make sure that it looks great. If you think it’s lacking in the looks department, consider hiring a professional to get it up to scratch.
When considering design it is also extremely important to remember the variety of devices and screen sizes your website will be viewed upon. While your website may look beautiful on desktops, have you given thought to the user experience on a mobile or tablet device? When designing for a new website in 2013 and beyond it is generally advised to design for the smallest device first and then scale up.
Many website designers are encouraging clients to build for mobile devices first with the minimum number of features acceptable and then as the screen size increases, so do the number of website features up to the desktop resolution, which offers the most enriching user experience.
2. Usability (Website Performance Tips #2):
Having a good looking website is great, but if it doesn’t work well, users will quickly get fed up and leave your site.
The best way to check the usability of your site is to ask some friends to spend a few minutes trying to navigate it and then to give you some honest feedback.
Ask them how fast the site was, whether it was intuitive to use and if they’d recommend it and try to take all comments on boards.
3. Onsite SEO (Website Performance Tips #3):
SEO is an important part of maximizing your website. If you are managing your own website you’ve probably heard all about the importance of SEO already, so make sure all of your onsite SEO is finished and in the correct format.
One of the main mistakes that people make with their onsite SEO is creating duplicate content, and as this is something that the search engines really don’t like, it should be avoided at all costs.
Try to make sure that all of the Metadata is specifically written for each page, targeting keywords and key phrases that appear on the page.
Remember to add internal links to help let the search engines know what your site is about.
4. Social Media (Website Performance Tips #4):
Social media is becoming more and more important in the world of website optimization, so if you want to maximize your website’s performance you need to integrate social media into your online strategy.
The first thing to do is to create social media profiles on the websites that are most relevant to you and your target audience and fill them in fully.
You can then start promoting your website via social media, driving more traffic to your site and increasing your online profile.
You can also look at integrating social media buttons onto each webpage. This is very easy to do and will allow visitors to quickly ‘like’, share or bookmark your page for future use.
Integrating social media into your website will help to drive traffic to your URL.
5. Get visitors involved (Website Performance Tips #5):
Whatever you use your website for it’s important to get visitors involved in some way in order to ensure that they remember your site and make a return visit.
The easiest way to do this is to get each visitor to sign up for a promotion, like a prize draw or a newsletter. That way you’ll have their contact details and can then notify them of your special offers or up coming events.
With a little bit of hard work and a concerted effort, you should be able to make the most of your website by maximizing its performance.
This article is written by Louise Harper. Louise, a self-confused web geek, she has a passion for web design and tech in general. Having studied IT & Web at University her primary interest is in website optimization through beautiful design and enhancing the user experience.
