Is your website successful?
Your website, like any other business investment, has to make business sense. It has to fulfil its objectives and satisfactorily play its role as part of your business “machinery”.
If it does not, then it is a failing project and that needs to be sorted urgently.
Perhaps you have attempted (maybe more than once) to have a website.
You dreamed of that customer, searching on Google and finding your product or service. So you built your site and waited and waited. But no one showed up.
Up to now, you haven’t converted even one single customer from your efforts and expense.
If that sounds familiar, well, you are not alone. Which is why in this article we are looking at the 5 best tips for a successful website. But first, the big question.
Why do so many websites fail?
Out of over a billion sites on the world wide web (1,218,423,991 according to Netcraft’s May 2021 Web Server Survey), only between 10-15% are active and in use. Millions of websites on the internet are complete failures because they have no real traffic.
There are many reasons and combinations of factors that lead to a website’s failure.
For example, a lot of people have this dream of creating something great, they work on it, and it doesn’t go where they expect and then they quit – lack of commitment.
On the other hand, some businesses may develop a website because it’s the “thing to do”, (simply following trends). But that’s as far as they’re willing to go. There’s no strategy, there’s no research into what makes a “great” website, and inevitably they get out of the site exactly what they put into it – not much.
There are countless scenarios we can think of which would lead to a website’s failure.
But let’s examine the 3 fundamental reasons websites fail and see how we can avoid these pitfalls
1. Bad design
When it comes to web design, you need to aim at providing a seamless customer experience. A bad design can result in a total website failure due to things like slow page load speed and when people can’t take the actions they want.
Prioritize the site functionality and user experience. The interface is important, but the functionality of your website should carry more weight. You should deliver your ideas or your product to the user in a clean and logical way. Especially when you are building a brand, you need to make your site look trustworthy.
2. Content that is not solving users problems
Your website’s content needs to be useful and helpful to your site’s visitors.
When your content is addressing your audience’s pains, while at the same time providing solutions, visitors will spend more time on the site – they may even end up sharing and linking to your content. This will send positive signals to search engines which in turn will boost your page’s search rankings.
But if the content isn’t relevant to your customers’ needs, visitors won’t spend time on your site. And that’s a “worthless content” type of red flag to search engines like Google.
3. Web pages that are not optimised for search
Your website can have the best user experience at the core of its design. And your content can be user-focused. But if the intended audience can not find your website when they search, then your site is destined to fail.
This where search engine optimisation(SEO) comes into play.
On-page SEO ensures that your content is correctly optimised for search queries (keywords) your customers would use when searching for products or services like yours. On the other hand, technical SEO will take care of all underlying issues to make sure that your site is indexable by search engines.
While a failing website can seem like a problem without a solution, that’s not the case. If you can do something about it, you can turn around the fortunes of your site.
5 Tips For a More Successful Website
1. Clearly Define Your Goals
You should always start a web project with clear goals. When setting goals, you need to consider your needs and that of the site’s users.
Defining goals for both your organization and your user should be easy to do.
Remember, your site can only generate traffic, leads, and sales when it has what your target audience wants and can deliver it in a satisfactory way.
If the goals don’t align, then you’ll likely have a problem where you’ll seek to make profits yet not be able to deliver the product and experience your audience seeks.
2. Use a User-Centered Design
Your product or service offerings may be great, but a laggy website or poorly designed interface can turn away potential customers. Even an aesthetically pleasing website is pointless when no one can actually use it for its intended purpose.
Thinking of your users should never be an afterthought. Their needs must be carefully considered throughout the entirety of the design process. When you fail to consider your users from the very beginning, you end up wasting valuable time, money, and resources.
It is painful to invest time and money into a site only to learn that everyone is bouncing from it. This is a big clue that you focused too much on your end goals and not theirs
3. Implement a website maintenance plan
A website shouldn’t be created and then left to grow stale. Your website is an investment and it should be treated with the highest quality care. It needs consistent monitoring, updating, and optimising to perform at its optimal level.
A maintenance plan can typically be catered based on your highest needs, which means it can include as many or as few services as you want. Below are two main aspects of website maintenance.
Content updates: If you want to encourage people to return to your site again and again, you will have to update your website with new and relevant content as frequently as possible. Additonally, both content quantity and freshness are also important to search engines.
Routine Website Maintenance: This usually includes website backups, ongoing or monthly security updates, installation of the most up-to-date software, and optimisations to enhance web performance and speed.
4. Optimise your website for search engines
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a set of practices you apply to your website to ensure search engines index and rank your website appropriately and then show it to search engine users.
SEO is an extremely important ongoing process that can mean the difference between showing up on the first page of search engine results pages (resulting in large amounts of free traffic to your website) and not being found in search results.
5. Use Web Analytics
Web analytics provides a means of measuring the performance of your website and other relevant metrics. With analytics, you will have access to the required data to make informed decisions concerning your website.
Among others, you will have better user demographic insights, you will be able to determine how much business value the website is contributing, which pages users spend time on and which pages are not working
Analytics will empower you with a deeper understanding of how you can improve your website to effectively communicate with and serve your target audiences, and drive measurable growth.
Afraid your website is failing? Save it today.
If you’re worried that you have a failed website, you can change that.
Digital Marketing Malawi can help your business with the support and services you need to turn your website into a success.
Discover how our services, from SEO to web analytics, can help by contacting us online or WhatsApp us on +265 99 226 5658 today!