How can you improve your current website?

Having an underperforming website is beyond frustrating.

You may have invested a lot of time into building it yourself or paid someone a considerable amount of money to do it for you.

And yet, it has no impact upon your business.

So whilst you don’t want to give up on your website, understandably you’re fed up and hesitant about what your next step should be.

Before you invest any more time or money into it, you need to understand why it is underperforming.

Why is your website underperforming?

Firstly, when you work with us, we would always investigate the reasons behind why YOUR website isn’t working because there is no generic approach.

However below are a list of common reasons which may be ringing a bell with you.

Your website…

Looks unprofessional.
Doesn’t make it clear what you do.
Isn’t mobile friendly.
Is slow.
Isn’t SEO friendly.
Is difficult for you to use.
Is difficult for your visitors to use.

Let’s take a look at these each in a little detail and explain how we solve them for our clients.

1. Your website looks unprofessional

The way your website looks is very important.

Here are some stats about how quickly people form impressions of your website and therefore your business.

Within 0.5 seconds, first impressions of your website are made.
Within 0.5-5 seconds, users refine that impression based upon layout, images, typography and ease of perceived navigation.

So you have a very small window to impress potential customers.

This is a blessing if you have a visually appealing website and a curse if you don’t.

How we make your website look professional

The good news is, it’s easy to rectify.

We have 15+ years experience of designing websites in Reading.

We make sure our designs are modern, industry relevant, take into account good UI/UX practices and incorporate everything that you have asked for.

Design should never be trivialised. If you are currently underwhelmed by your website design then we can guarantee that you will be excited and delighted when we deliver you the new designs for your website.

2. Your website doesn’t make it clear what you do

This sounds trivial but is a very common mistake.

If someone has been searching for something on Google, finds your business and then lands on your website, don’t confuse them.

They need to know that you do what they think you do.

Remember that a competitor is only a click away.

If a visitor has to put any effort into establishing what you actually do for themselves, then your website has failed.

How we make it clear what you do on your website

If we are designing your website, this will be forefront in our mind during the design phase.

We will make it very clear in the ‘above the fold’ section of your website that you do what you do.

This is the section that is visible to a visitor before they have to swipe / scroll down on their mobile phone, tablet, laptop.

If we’re just doing the development then we will challenge your designs having reviewed them and will suggest amendments to them.

Once your website is live and you are publishing content, we can review your content for you or if you don’t want to get involved with the content side of things, we can create your content for you.

And best of all, now you’re in the know, it should be something you automatically do if you choose to create your own content.

3. Your website isn’t mobile friendly / responsive

When visitors look at your website, you don’t want to worry about which device they are using when they do that.

You just want them to have a consistent, device optimised experience that delights them.

So if they’re looking at your website on the way to work on their phone, they get just as good an experience as if they were sat down on their laptop at work, or browsing your website in the evening on their large Mac display in the evening.

Nowadays it’s completely mandatory for any business to ensure their website is mobile friendly as it is most likely that your website will be viewed on a mobile device and it impacts your SEO, think Google rankings.

Yet we still see large numbers of website who fall short when it comes to the experience they offer their visitors, particularly on mobile devices.

How do we deal with this?

Ensuring the success of a website across mobile phones, tablets and larger devices starts in the design phase of the project.

For example a large block displaying service teasers that looks fantastic on a laptop, may take up far too much space on a mobile device.

In this particular example we can:

Break these into a carousel
Remove some of the information and push users to the detail page quicker
Turn it into a short list
Push it into an accordion

As you can see, there are many options available to you.

Once we’ve delighted you with the web design phase of your project, we move into the web development phase.

Here we take the visuals from the web design phase and turn them into pixel perfect, Google friendly, optimised code.

We’ll test your website on a number of physical devices but also have a number of digital tools so that we know you’re website is looking stunning to all of your potential clients, regardless of how they are accessing your website.

4. Your website is slow

There can be many culprits here. The most common are:

Unoptimised images

Unoptimised images are the biggest culprit of websites being slow.

If you simply take photos on your phone or a digital camera and upload them to your website, then they will be HUGE and slow for your users to download.

Poor development

Every time a user visits your website a number of things have to be fetched loaded.

A website will slow down if there are numerous requests being made.

Bloat can occur when a website uses an off the shelf solution which tries to do too many things for too many people rather than directly understanding the needs of your individual business.

Poor hosting

Hosting is where your website ‘lives’.

When a user clicks on your website it sends a request to your hosting and the website is returned.

A solid host will have numerous things in place to improve speed as well as additional benefits.

Plugins which provide useful functionality for websites can also slow down if there are too many of them or they are not coded correctly themselves.

Caching & CDN

Caching stores copies of files so that they can be resued quickly rather than being fetched anew each time.

A CDN is a network of servers that stores copies of static files, e.g. images, videos, scripts and stylesheets.

The physically closest CDN will serve these to the use increasing pereceived speed of website load times.

HOW WE SPEED UP YOUR WEBSITE

Optimise images

Image sizes can be optimsed before uploading, or they can be taken care of in the CMS (Content Management System) automatically before being displayed on your website.

We also ensure we use modern image formats such as WebP/AVIF.

Images will also be responsive. We don’t want for instance a nice big hero image that looks great on a desktop also being used on a mobile phone.

We will use a smaller version of this same image that will be automatically generated by the CMS and intelligently used on mobile devices..

We also lazy load images so there are only requested when they are needed.

Expert web development that has speed in mind

Where possible we combine large numbers of file together, remove the whitespace and make one call to a much smaller file which is far more desirable in terms of speed.

A custom theme built specifically for your business will ensure that all code is specifically for you, no bloat, which will speed things up significantly.

We only use approved plugins where absolutely necessary and build simple functionality from scratch to keep it small and directly tailored to your needs.

Recommended hosting

When you recommend something, you have to be sure it’s up to standard.

We absolutely love Flywheel.

It’s fast, easy to use, secure, allows us to create development sites should you need additional work without interrupting your live site and takes daily backups.

Caching & CDN

Flywheel helps us out again here.

It has its own built in caching which means that means repeat visits don’t have to rebuild the page by visiting the server.

It also has a CDN (Content Delivery Network) that serves your websites assets, e.g. images from a data center close to the physical location of your website visitor.

5. Your website isn’t SEO friendly

There are two aspects to SEO.

These are:

Technical SEO
On page SEO

Technical SEO

This refers to how easy it is for say Google to crawl, index and understand your website effectively.

Crawling means that search engines can access your pages and indexing means that the right pages appear in the right search results.

It also covers site speed and mobile-friendliness which we have mentioned previously above.

Then we have to look at SSL certificates, site architecure and structured data if applicable.

On page SEO

On page SEO is all to do with the content on your website.

Although the Google algorithm changes often, they have always been very firm on the fact that fresh, high quality content is very important.

It’s a great area to invest some time as although it may appear simple, the time it require mean that many people give up after the initial excitement of the website going live.

Think of it as a marathon and not a sprint and you’ll see incremental gains from these efforts.

How we take care of your SEO

Technical SEO is all on us

As website developers, we are responsible for your technical SEO. There are 8 things we care about:

Site speed and performance.
Mobile friendly / responsive.
Crawling and indexing.
Site structure and URLs.
Security.
Duplicate content control.
Structured data.
Error handling and health.

These are a mix of things we have to do and things that we help you to do.

On page SEO can be on us, you or a third-party

On page SEO is all to do with the content on your website and ‘someone’ will need to look at the following:

Content creation.
Keyword / long tail keyword research and implementation.
Link building.
Social media marketing.

6. Your website is difficult for you to use

We touched on the issue of new, fresh content earlier in the SEO section.

In order to publish that content, your website will need to be easy for you to use.

You should be able to do the following with ease:

Publish new pages, posts, case studies with ease.
Update existing pages, posts, case studies etc with ease.
Add new items to your navigation.
Update your header and footer.

Don’t battle with your website

If you have to battle with your website, the likelihood is you won’t enjoy using it.

And if you don’t enjoy using it, then you’ll give up on keeping your website up to date.

It’s still incredibly common for this to be an issue and we put this down to a few reasons.

Too much choice and not enough choice

Sometimes the solution you are provided with is a generic solution.

Imagine a website that has to be all things to all people.

This isn’t necessarily a terrible thing but it does mean there will be countless configuration options for instance that you will never need or want.

On the flip side, you may not have enough options. You want to do things that are just not possible.

Worst of all is when the CMS (Content Management System) is just highly unintuitive and complicated to use.

Logging into it feels you with dread and you therefore have to rely upon somebody else to do it which is both frustrating and costly.

How we make your website easy for you to use

When you get a bespoke website with us, we’ll build you a website that is entirely fit for your needs.

You’ll get EXACTLY what you want. Nothing more, nothing less.

We’ll also provide you with training so that you know exactly how to use it and you can have as many people as you like in that training session.

What’s more we’re just a phone call or email away. So if you’ve forgotten how to do something, just get in touch and we’ll get you moving again quickly.

7. Your website is difficult for your visitors to use

Consumers today are in a great position because they have an abundance of choice.

If you have a website that is difficult to use, you can be sure a visitor won’t hang around.

In just a few clicks they can be on a competitors site.

How we ensure your website is easy for your visitors to use

Everything we have already mentioned so far goes into making your website simple and intuitive for your visitors to use.

An intuitive and easy-to-use website begins in the design phase.

We ensure that our UX (User Experience) and UI (User Interface) skills inform all of our design decisions.

We’ll ensure that:

Navigation is intuitive.
Breadcrumbs are utilised if necessaray.
Core offerings / services / products are highlighted.
CTAs make it clear what you want your visitors to do.
Your content has room to breathe.
Fonts are legible and have heirachy using headings and sub-headings where appropriate.
Colour contrast is strong so text stands out on backgrounds.

Then in the development phase we’ll ensure:

The designs are adhered to strictly.
The website is responsive / mobile friendly. However someone accesses your site, they’ll get a consistent and optimised experience.
Provide search functionality so users can find what they want quickly.
Continuous testing.

We like to treat every website like it’s our own

Every time we make a decision with regards to your website, we’ll be thinking, ‘If this was our website how would we want it to work?’

It’s this approach that continuously provides the high quality websites that we design and develop for ambitious companies just like yours.

Where does this leave you? Where does this leave you?

Let’s deal with data and opinions

It’s human nature to have an opinion on why things aren’t going the way they should and no one is saying that those are wrong.

However, if they are wrong, then more time and money is wasted.

Luckily, there are numerous tools that can be used to give us solid data as to how a website is currently performing.

They’re quick and easy to set up and they are free.

We can use things such as:

Google Analytics
Google Search Console
Heat maps
Page speed tests
Accessibility audits

Armed with this data, we can make decisions based on facts showing us where exactly to spend some time and money to get the best return.

Also, just as a small example. A customer once came to us with a website that looked great and had a large amount of high quality content on it.

There was one small setting in the website that told search engines such as Google not to index it.

This is the kind of thing we look out for when we do our audits.

Do you need a brand new website?

Not necessarily, no.

Let’s say you have a great design for your website but your content is lacking.

In that instance, the fix would be with the content and not with the website.

But then you may say that you can’t add content to your website because it it too difficult to use.

In that case we would keep what you have visually and rebuild the backend so that you can take full control of your content.

On the flip side, you may have a lot of great content but your design is dated and people leave your site as quickly as they come to it.

Your content is then still of value but we can modernise the look and feel of your website to increase conversions.

We provide the best advice possible

We will always provide you with the best advice as to what your next steps should be.

This advice will have clear reasoning behind it and our costs will be transparent, broken down into as much detail as you need.

Website refreshes

As a general rule of thumb, a website requires a refresh around every 3 years.

However if you’re in the position where you know your website is just not fit for purpose but you’re not sure where to start, then we can simplify the whole process for you and play as big or smaller part as you need us to.

If you’re fed up with your current website and need our help, simply fill in the form below, call us on 07877878967 or email us at hello@wecreatedesign.co.uk