How to improve your website in 2021

How to improve your website in 2021

Within five seconds of landing on your website, can your visitors determine what your company does? Could users easily navigate to the blog if they need to? Is the layout of your pricing easy to understand? Does your website have a low bounce rate?

If you're finding yourself answering ‘no’ to these questions, it might be time to take a hard look at the way you’ve been designing and optimizing your website.

1. Have a plan

Now that you’ve acknowledged that your site likely needs some improvements, it's time to work your way backward and create a plan detailing how you’ll tackle them.

Start by mapping out your customer journey from the first time someone visits your website to the moment they become a customer.

When doing this, think about which pages are they going to view, what content are they going to read, and what offers are they going to convert on. Understanding this will help you design a site that actually helps nurture leads through the sales funnel.

2. Remove distractions and reduce friction

Certain elements on your website are going to detract from the value and message you're trying to convey. Complicated animations, content that’s too long, and “stocky” website images are just a few examples.

With an audience that only has an attention span of eight seconds, you need to make it abundantly clear what your user will learn on the page they're viewing and your design must not detract from this.

This starts with making sure you have consistent brand guidelines you can work off of.

This should detail your font styles, colors, imagery, iconography, and logo usage. Without this, it’s easy for brands to struggle when designing pages. You’ll likely start to see arbitrary colors and varying font styles and sizes used, which in turn, can distract from your message or create visual confusion for people trying to convert.

3. Implement calls-to-action

Once your visitors land on your site (likely through the blog or home page), you need to guide them to places on your website that will help nurture them to conversion. People are lazy, so make this easy for them. Point them in the right direction so they don’t have to struggle to find what they are looking for.

One of the best ways to improve your web design with this in mind to use strategically placed call-to-actions in areas such as the top right of your navigation, below sections that require action, and at the bottom of your website pages.

But don’t lose sight of your buyer’s journey. The easy thing to do on your website is to inundate users with the most bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) call-to-action wherever they go, but if someone is not ready to buy, then they likely will take no action at all.

Instead, you should meet your user where they are based on the page they’re viewing.

For example, if they're on a website, learning about a material used to build a custom closet, this person is more likely still educating themselves and becoming aware of their problem. Rather than smacking them with a ‘contact us’ call-to-action, give them one to view a comprehensive guide on custom closet building materials. They’ll be more likely to convert as it’s their current concern.

4. Let your visitors scroll on your homepage

There was a time where we were wary about making our website pages too long, especially your homepage. This was out of fear of users not scrolling, so it forced folks to try and cram what they could into the most common screen size people view their website with.

But those days are long gone. In a 2018 study by the Nielsen Norman Group, 74% of the viewing time on a website page was spent in the first two screenfuls, up to 2160px horizontally. So there's no need to be afraid of creating a more robust below-the-fold experience.

Use your homepage real estate to your advantage.

A good rule-of-thumb is to include three to five sections that help direct new and recurring users to the key areas of your site.

What should these sections be? This list could go on forever, but a quick hit-list of some of the more crucial elements includes:

Each nav item has ample space so it's clear where the separation is.

In some cases, like in the image above, the menu item will even have a descriptive line to provide more context to the purpose of that page. The hover effect also makes it clear to the user that these are links that will result in them going to another page.

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Taking the time to implement these tips on your website can bring dramatic change that can help improve the performance, experience, and customer conversion rates of your website, but once you get some of these tips in place, you may be thinking that the greater project at hand is to refresh your website with a redesign.