Make Your Website Count
Having a website in 20201 is very critical to your business success. Did you know roughly 75% of people judge a company by how their website looks. That means 3 out of 4 people that visit your site will form an opinion based on your design, layout and loading speed of your website. That is a big number, and if your website is lacking, I suggest reading on.
You ask what makes me qualified to write on this subject well I have over 16 years of experience in digital marketing and web design services.
The Importance of Having A Website
You might think your small business can get away with not having a website or a one-page site that really doesn’t provide in-depth information about your company. Let me tell you are wrong; consumers want information about your company. It’s how they form an opinion about your business.
Let me paint you a picture it’s the new year and have vowed to find a good gym to help you lose some weight. You are searching online and come across two gym listings. One site has minimal pictures and very little information listed, while the other site has an impressive design that has very detailed information on the type of gym it is. My question to you is what gym are you going to pick. I think we both know the answer to this.
Design, Layout and Content
The design, layout, and content help build a sense of legitimacy within the eyes of potential clients. Especially if you don’t have a physical storefront. Your website will essentially act as a virtual storefront, or at the very least an online company brochure. Did you know 57% of your site’s visitors will not recommend your company to others if your site is poorly designed and lacking good content?
Now that you know the negative aspects of having a bad website design lets focus on positive aspects to improve your website. Provided below are three tips to help with our small business website design.
Tip Number One: Don’t Over Design
You want your website to look nice, function well and have good flow. However, I have seen far too many small businesses that go completely overboard on the design and add new trendy bells and whistles to their site. By over designing, you are distracting visitors from your business message and adding unnecessary code. You want your company message to be clear and precise. When a visitor has to many things to look or interact with, they lose focus. Plus, overdosing typically means more images and code which will slow down your site.
Tip Number Two: Your Website Loading Speed Matters
Roughly 50% of your website visitors will leave if your website takes over 3 seconds to load. The movement for faster loading speed became prevailing when mobile searches exceeded desktop. Cellphones are great, but some lack the processing speed and connectivity to process large items and heavy code. 5G connectivity will change will change this, but that is a story for a different day. Here are some ways to speed up your website’s loading speed
Use quality hosting: You want to use a reliable hosting company that has great uptime and fast servers. If you can afford the extra coin, check into managed hosting where tech support will help fix issues your website might come across.
Content delivery network: The using of a CDN will help increase load speeds because it distributes the content major server hubs throughout the world. It will serve the information when called from the closet server to that GEO location. Hence reducing the time, the data travels from the server to the end user’s computer or mobile device.
Images: When possible, limit the number of images you use and make sure to compress all images. You can manually do this before uploading the images or use a plugin to do it for you.
Reduce plugins: Depending on what platform you built your website on; you will have the choice of adding plugins or extensions. Plugins and extensions are great because offer the opportunity to add functionality to the site. However, plugins are generally designed with JavaScript making the code heavy. So be selective on the plugins you use.
Clean code: You want to make sure the site is coded properly to avoid errors and latency issues.
Tip Number Three: Be Mobile Friendly
Did you know consumers perform more searches through mobile than desktop? Yes, this depends on the industry you are in, but it’s safe to say if you are a consumer-based business, the majority of your site’s traffic will come via mobile. Nearly 8 out of 10 consumers will stop engaging if content doesn’t display correctly on their device.
I would recommend going with a responsive design that automatically adjusts to the screen size of the person viewing your site. This means your site will display well both in mobile and desktop. Yes, there will be some bugs to work out in the design to display properly, but this is by far the best method that allows you to have one design that works well for all.
If your loading speed is an issue in mobile, then maybe you will want to install AMP. AMP is an acronym for accelerated mobile pages. It’s an open-source plugin that essentially strips your website of heavy code, making it load faster in mobile devices. You might lose some of your plugin’s functionality, but the good often outweighs the bad.
In Conclusion
I hope you found the above tips useful and hope you truly understand the importance of having a well-designed site. You can either try build it yourself or hire a professional. If you would like to learn more about this topic, follow the link. I will leave you with this last state roughly 88% of online shoppers are less like to revisit a website they had a poor experience on. Don’t let your website hold your business back.
If you would like to learn the role your website plays in the success of your online marketing efforts, then I would suggest visiting our San Diego search engine optimization services web page.
