Written by Emily Lord

Featured in
Design & Branding Guide Digital Marketing Guide Huga Blog Web Design Guide

Have you considered that your website is working for you 24/7, with a wider reach than any other channel, and therefore has the potential to be your most powerful marketing asset? In today’s marketing landscape, your website has become the centerpiece of your marketing efforts and therefore it needs to be constantly reviewed and improved.

Download our free guide to web design here for more tips on how to design a smarter website. 

Constantly changing digital trends can make your website feel old and outdated. While sometimes a redesign might be ideal (read our post on ‘what to look for in a web design agency’ if this is something you are considering), you may not have the time or money to invest in such a large project. To help you overcome this challenge, we’ve put together a list of simple ways you can improve your website today. 

Make Your Mission Instantly Clear 

  • What is your customer’s problem? Why should they trust you? How are you going to solve their problem? 
  • By answering these questions you can begin to create your mission and values. Making these explicitly clear to your audience is key across your website.
  • The following are examples of the Huga mission and values:

Create a Clear Call to Action

  • SEO is second to your user – your page is never going to rank well on Google if your customers leave as soon as they reach your website.
  • Time on Site and Bounce Rate are important indicators of whether a user is finding your website useful or not.
  • Find out how to improve your customers Time on Site.
  • Having a clear call to action is a vital step in this process – your call to action should guide the user through your site page by page and lead them to the point of purchase or enquiry once they have gathered enough information.

Website Speed = Success 

A one-second delay in page load time yields:
11% fewer page views
16% decrease in customer satisfaction
7% loss in conversions

Crazy Egg:
  • No large images, gifs or videos here thank you. Where you are using imagery ensure to use JPEGS and compress them to as small as you can without losing clarity.

Consider Colour Psychology 

“All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites”

Marc Chagall
  • Complementary colours are your friend here.
  • You should be aware of your branding colours and style – utilising these for recognition and professionalism is key. Contrasting these with their complementary colour for a strong and effective call to action button. For even more info read our post on the importance of colour psychology.

Forget The Fold – It’s All About The Scroll 

  • Often we become so caught up in trying to cram as much information into the small section above the fold we forget the importance of encouraging the scroll. Place key information above the fold and feed in images, subheadings and further information as the user scrolls to encourage them to keep going. 

Which brings us to our next point ….

White Space Wins – Always. 

  • White space draws your eye to the key messages on the page, reduces clutter and ensures your customer finds what it is they are looking for. Think calm tranquil sites that make you feel like you enjoy using them rather than hectic sites with so much information you feel overloaded and just want to leave. 

Responsive Responsive Responsive 

  • Your mobile traffic is just as valuable as your desktop traffic. Especially as mobile takes over desktop as the most used for search in 2019. 

Get Rid of any 404 Errors!

via GIPHY

  • A HTTP 404 error page appears when a web page can’t be found.
  • Its imperative to fix your 404 errors as you aren’t going to engage users and improve your time on site if they cant access your website because of broken links!
  • Don’t stress if you aren’t sure if you have 404 errors or you don’t know how to fix them, there are some great tools out there that you can use:.
  1. Screaming Frog Spider SEO.
  2. Google Analytics
  3. Google Search console

In conclusion

  • Make Your Mission Instantly Clear 
  • Create a Clear Call to Action
  • Website Speed = Success
  • Consider Colour Psychology
  • Forget The Fold – It’s All About The Scroll
  • White Space Wins – Always. 
  • Responsive Responsive Responsive
  • Get Rid of any 404 Errors!