If your website isn’t your number one seller, there could be hidden but insidious problems lurking just below the surface that are killing your site’s ability to convert.
If you answer “no” to any of the following questions, it’s time to seriously consider a redesign:
1. Is your site free of autoplay gimmicks and popups?
If you want to alienate a visitor right away, start playing music or have a spokesperson automatically start speaking as soon as they load the site. Audio, video, animations, banners, and popups are completely taboo in modern website design.
Do not insult the intelligence of your users by forcing content on them. It’s the online equivalent of having a pushy salesperson pounce on them the moment they walk through the door, hounding them into looking for products or services that may not be relevant to their interests at all.
2. Is the navigation intuitive?
When evaluating your website’s navigational structure, don’t look at it through the eyes of your most sophisticated and web-savvy users. Take a look at it from the perspective of your most tech-averse and reluctant users.
Is there an overwhelming number of paths featured on the home page? Do the options offered in the top-level navigation menus correspond to the specific needs and motivations of the users? How many layers are you asking users to explore to find the types of information they are most likely to need? Are the action buttons consistently designed and placed so that they are easy to identify when a user scans and scrolls through your site?
3. Does your site offer a search function?
Sometimes visitors will come to your site with a very specific need or purpose in mind, especially if they are comparing purchases on multiple sites.
Don’t force them to go through the navigation layers to discover the information they are looking for. Provide a search facility in the overall framework that allows them to skip the various menus and links and find anything on your site that relates to their particular interest, whether it’s in your brochure copy, product descriptions, posts blog or news articles.
4. Does your site support small screens?
In today’s 24/7 business world, the most useful website is one that can be accessed from anywhere, not just from a desktop. As a result, it is extremely important to ensure that your site works well with all mobile platforms and devices, including touch screens and tablets.
Access your business website on your phone. Then look it up on your friends’ phones. Then install it on every modern mobile operating system you can get your hands on. If you can’t open it, navigate through it, view the content, and complete core functions effortlessly, your users won’t be able to either.
To ensure that you provide the best user experience possible for those on small screens, you need to ensure that your site’s interface is clean and uncluttered so that you can make optimal use of the available real estate to enable what matters most. happy to take center stage.
Also pay close attention to details such as the amount of time it takes to load your site over mobile networks, the size and legibility of the font, the level of contrast between the text and the background, the function of the menus and the “pressibility” of links, buttons and navigation tabs.
5. Is your site touch sensitive?
With the explosive growth in adoption of touch-enabled smartphones and tablets, the likelihood increases with each passing day that customers are scrolling through your website using touch and swipe gestures instead of mouse and mouse clicks and scrolls. keyboard.
To create finger-friendly navigation, all links, buttons, and menus should be large, eye-catching, and obvious, and buffered around them to allow for more margin for error. In the world of touch, there is no such thing as rollover and hover states, so replace buttons that require users to hover over them for a feel of action with styling enhancements that call attention to them as action items. .
Again, the only way to be sure how your site rates on the touch scale is to test it on real touch screen devices. If you don’t already own such a device, borrow one, or if all else fails, take a trip to your local retailer and use the display models there. It’s worth a little legwork to make sure you’re delivering the best quality experience possible for the growing legions of touch users.
6. Is it without Flash?
The mobile web is officially a hostile environment when it comes to Flash. Apple’s iOS doesn’t support Flash, and probably never will. Android supports Flash, but the performance of Flash content on Android devices has so far been less than ideal.
If you have Flash anywhere on your site, be it in the intro, in your navigation frame, or in a video, get rid of it now or else most mobile users will be in trouble.
Today there are better, lighter, easier-to-use options available, such as HTML5 and JavaScript, that can replicate the same effects that Flash once required.
7. Is your site backed by a content management system?
Regularly posting high caliber and unique content to your site is a crucial element of today’s marketing that is critical to helping your business achieve many key business growth objectives.
The only way to achieve this efficiently and cost-effectively is to have a content management system behind the scenes of your website that allows designated administrators within your own company to create and publish certain types of content, such as blog posts, company news, event information and press releases – within the existing framework of your site. A solid and robust content management system will make it easy and intuitive for almost any user to post engaging and sophisticated content that includes photos or videos and follows graphic style conventions that maintain a cohesive look and feel with your site as a whole.
8. Is there a way for users to sign up for updates?
It takes a lot of effort to find and attract new qualified visitors to your website, but the greatest reward comes when you can engage these users and convince them to come back again and again.
Don’t put the burden on them to remember to check every so often to see what’s new on your site. Make sure they have the option to sign up for updates, either by RSS feed or by email, so that when you publish a new blog post or send out your next email newsletter, it’s in their feed reader or in their inbox input, asking them to click. and dive into your latest content.
9. Is your site free of black-hat SEO techniques?
If your website has ever been in the hands of a disreputable developer or “SEO expert”, there may be dangerous black hat SEO tactics at play that are seriously jeopardizing your site’s performance in the results. organic search.
Black hat tricks such as keyword stuffing and invisible text are the crutches often employed by SEO practitioners to artificially improve a website’s position on search engine results pages for terms or specific phrases. However, the problem is that all these illegitimate methods are condemned by the major search engines, which are programmed to remove and penalize impostors.
While these techniques may provide a temporary boost, when search engines discover them (and they inevitably will), your site will be blacklisted and completely off the map when it comes to organic search. There is no short-term benefit worth the cost of such a large potential risk.
10. Do you have tools to track metrics at key conversion points?
Where do your site visitors come from?
What keywords are they using to find your site?
What pages do they visit most often?
What pages could be turning them off and sending them elsewhere?
How many visitors leave after viewing just one page?
How long do visitors typically spend on your site?
Answers to all of these questions are critical in helping you shape your site and tailor your online marketing efforts to maximize conversions. However, unless you have the required tracking code at the bottom of your site to link it to a set of metrics tools like Google Analytics, you’re going to be left with huge gaps in the information you need to make crucial decisions that affect the growth of your site. your business.
How did you rate your site?
If you answered “no” to several of these questions, it’s time to move your site review to the top of your business growth priority list.
By partnering with a top-tier website design company, the initial investment required to redevelop your site to meet these criteria will pay you back many times over in the lifetime value of new customers you’ll be able to capture with a site. that offers a powerful and engaging experience to users on each and every platform and device.