How to Make Your Business Website More Engaging and Functional

Having an online presence is essential for any modern business. Consumers use the internet to research businesses before using their products and services. According to Mass Appeal, one of the top marketing agencies in the United Kingdom, your website should make a long-lasting impression on first-time visitors.

As time goes by, your business website will have to be updated to stay looking fresh and working great. Failing to provide your website with routine updates can create many problems. The last thing you want is for your website to make a bad impression on potential customers, which is why investing in these updates is so important. Here are some things you can do to make your website more engaging and functional.

Make Your Website Load Faster

In a recent poll, nearly 38% of the consumers polled claimed they would stop engaging with a website if it was slow to load. Not only do consumers loathe slow-loading websites, search engines such Google are not very fond of them either. A website is not something you can just set and forget. It will need to be updated and optimized regularly to keep it running properly. Take time to periodically test the speed of your business website to ensure it is loading well.

If you detect that page load speeds are slower than they used to be, you need to figure out why. When trying to diagnose these page loading issues, one of the main things you need to look at are the size of your images. Websites that use high-definition images with large file sizes tend to load more slowly. 

Luckily, there are a number of plug-ins and software programs designed to help you shrink the size of your image files. If your website still loads slowly after these changes, you may need to invest in new hosting. Allowing IT professionals to take a look at your website’s framework can help you diagnose the underlying causes of your page load problems.

Use Your Homepage to Connect With Consumers

Designing a business website for the first time can be a challenging process. Inexperienced business owners that are left to their own devices tend to make common web design mistakes. One of the main mistakes business owners make is putting the wrong information on their homepages. Modern consumers want to see social proof on the homepage of a business they are thinking of using.

The best way to provide this social proof is by prominently displaying your positive online reviews. Putting these reviews front and center on your website can help you immediately make a positive impact on potential customers. Asking satisfied customers for these reviews may be uncomfortable at first. However, if you don’t ask for these reviews, you will be unable to provide your website’s homepage with these important updates. Offering customers discounts and incentives for these reviews is a great way to increase the number of reviews you have at your disposal.

Perform a Website Security Audit

Do you sell products on your business website? If so, you need to make sure that the sensitive financial information consumers put onto your website is safe. Accomplishing this goal is easy when investing in things such as encryption and an SSL certificate. Finding and fixing the security vulnerabilities your website has is important when trying to avoid hacks.

During this audit, you must ensure the software and plug-ins being used by your website are updated. Procrastinating the updates to these programs can put your website at risk. Plug-ins and software programs that are not properly updated will have security holes that hackers can take advantage of. Seek out the help of a web development professional when trying to adequately audit your business website.

Review Your Existing Blog Content

Driving organic traffic to your business website is very difficult. There are millions of websites that are all vying for the same people. If you want a competitive edge, then try creating blogs and posting them on your business website. Consumers love reading blogs because they are both entertaining and informative. The longer you have a business website, the more blog content you will ultimately require.

Going back and reading your blog content from time to time is a great way to find and fix errors. Updating blog content with current information is essential when trying to keep your website relevant and current. When checking your blog content, be sure to click each of the inbound and outbound links because over time, the links in your content may malfunction or break. Fixing these broken links can help you keep your content on the radar of powerful search engines like Google.

Focus on Lead Generation

One of the main things you need to do with your business website is to create sales leads. Getting people to your website is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to generating leads. You need to make sure the content on your website is geared towards getting people to the next level of your sales funnel.

Letting people know what action they need to take next to experience the benefits offered by your products or services is easy with a call to action. This is the part of your content where you ask the reader to call your business or click a link to set up an appointment. You also need to put contact forms at the bottom of each piece of content.

These forms provide readers with an opportunity to reach out to your business with questions or concerns about what is being offered. If people have to hunt around on your website to find contact forms, they will probably get frustrated and leave. This is why you need to focus on putting these forms in easy-to-find areas on your site.

It’s Time to Make Some Changes

As you can see, there are a number of things you can do to improve your website. By making some of the changes mentioned in this article, you can attract more visitors. If you are unsure about how to address the problems your website has, hiring professionals to help out is always a wise move. 

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