How to Improve Your Business Website – 25 Simple Strategies

Ready to learn how to improve your business website? Your website is one of the most vital components of your business. Whether you’re in e-commerce or doing business face-to-face, your website is the first place potential customers will discover and decide if they want to do business with you.

Whether your site has just launched or has been around for years, there’s always room for improvement. Here’s a list of 25 tips to make your business website more impressive, effective, and easier to find. Follow these ideas to improve your business website and potentially attract more customers.

25 Ways to Improve your Business Website

1. Focus on Your Website Objectives

Start by identifying who your customers are and why they would use your site. Knowing the needs of your target audience helps you drill down to the purpose of your site: the reason it exists in the first place.

Are your customers:

• Meeting you in person, then visiting your website?
• Finding your website online, then calling your business?
• Visiting your website to learn?
• Visiting your website to make a purchase?

Put yourself in your customers’ shoes.

Stepping into your customers’ shoes can help you determine what they’re expecting from your website. For example, do they need to shop online, or are they there to perform research about your business and products? Please look at competitors in your space and analyze their websites to help plan your own.

Discover strengths and weaknesses

Free tools like Google Analytics provide valuable data about how people currently find and use your website. To determine if your website is matching up with your customers’ needs, examine metrics like: 

• Traffic sources (how your visitors find your website)
• Top pages (the most visited pages on your website)
• Bounce rate (how quickly visitors leave a page)
• Time on page (how long visitors spend on each page)

2. Make Your Website Mobile-Responsive

According to Statista, 63% of Google searches are done on smartphones now. Also, Google’s search engine prioritizes discovering and cataloging (a.k.a. crawling or indexing) mobile versions of websites over desktop versions.

These two facts alone tell you why you need a mobile-responsive website.

“Mobile-responsive” means that your web pages load well on both desktop and mobile devices. Your page display will change based on the viewer’s device to search.

Use Google’s mobile-friendliness test to get a general idea of how mobile-friendly your web pages are.

A good mobile-responsive website displays well on all screen sizes, has easily digestible information, and is stable on mobile devices (i.e., page elements like images and buttons don’t shift upon scrolling).

To make your website more mobile-responsive:

• Make text large and hyperlinks easy to click on
• Remove long block text in favor of shorter paragraphs, bullet points, and visuals
• Make buttons large enough that a user can easily click on them
• Minimize animation usage
• Make images (especially infographics) large and easy to scan

Your mobile website should not be a scaled-down version of your desktop website. Instead, it should be a stripped-down version that’s way easier to navigate.

3. Make your Website Easy to Navigate

You want them to have a seamless and uncomplicated experience whenever someone visits your website. The more difficult it is to navigate, the higher the chance a visitor will leave out of frustration before finding the information they need.

Great website navigation:

• Uses descriptive labels
• It is simple to use on mobile and desktop devices
• Directs visitors to the most important pages

Understand your customers’ needs

Understanding why customers visit your website is crucial to building helpful navigation. For example, when viewing a restaurant’s website, most visitors are looking for menus, location details, and how to make reservations. Meanwhile, someone comparing contractors will want to know all about your typical projects, pricing, and timelines.

Whatever your customers want, place it upfront on your homepage or create a separate page linked through a visually dominant call to action.

Examples of top-visited pages:

• Location and contact page
• Pricing page
• Portfolio or examples of work
• Customer reviews
• Meet the team page

Keep it simple

Much like good design, the best way to create a positive user experience is to keep everything simple. One rule of thumb is that it should take your visitor no more than three clicks to find out what they want to know. At most, limit yourself to four or five top-level pages with supporting pages under those as needed.

4. Follow Web Design Best Practices

According to a study by Kinesis Inc, 75% of customers will judge a business’s credibility based on its website’s design. With that in mind, take a moment to consider if you’re following best practices in website design, with a focus on:

• Readability (font size, color, and spacing)
• Plenty of white space
• Responsive design for mobile
• Consistent use of colors and fonts

When it comes to design, it’s always best to take a “less is more” approach. Don’t try to cram all the information onto a single page. Instead, spread it out evenly and take advantage of whitespace to give your website a clean and minimalist aesthetic that’s easy to read.

Opt for a user-friendly website design tool

Choose a website design tool that is easy to maintain by yourself. Hiring a web developer for every little change you need to make will cost you both time and money, which means you might put off essential updates to your website. We recommend WordPress, but you can choose other content management systems (CMS).

5. Have a Consistent Theme on Your Site

A consistent theme across all of your web pages gives visitors confidence. High-quality websites will follow the company’s brand guidelines throughout the site. Conversely, mismatched fonts, text sizes, color schemes, and images make a website look unprofessional.

If a visitor finishes reading one page and clicks a link, only to discover an utterly different-looking page with different colors and fonts, they can feel confused and may think they’ve left your site.

Consistency is also crucial for navigating your website. For example, the user may be confused if the search bar is in the top right on one page and the top left (or completely absent) on the next page. By maintaining consistent styling, layouts, and navigation, you’ll make a better impression on visitors and keep them on your site longer.

Website elements that need to be consistent include:

• Colors
• Fonts
• Font sizes
• Navigation
• Image style and resolution

6. Follow Modern Design Trends

If you want to stay competitive, your site has to appear current. So let’s run through a few modern design trends for mobile sites that you should keep in mind:

• Use White Space: Don’t cram information into your web pages. Instead, allow your pages to “breathe” by focusing on a few key elements, especially as you’re scrolling down a page.
• Choose Branded Colors: In general, try not to use any more than three colors for your brand. Instead, include them across your website and social media profiles.
• Minimalism Is In: Your website does not need to be flashy. Strive to do more with less. Use a few carefully curated pictures and videos on your website’s main pages.
• Make Header Menus Simple: Don’t add too many clickable URLs to your top menu. It looks cluttered. Instead, use simple terms, then branch out to other pages.
• Incorporate A Mega Footer: A mega footer is the vast block at the bottom of every website page, which has links to important pages, lists contact information, houses social media buttons, and asks readers to fill out a newsletter subscription form, etc. Add your logo brand colors to your mega footer.

If this sounds like a lot (and you have the money for it), hire someone else to design your website.

7. Create a Content Strategy

A compelling description of your product or service is just the beginning. Today’s successful websites also include information that can help customers learn more through blog posts, case studies, video tutorials, infographics, and FAQs. Based on the topic, visitors may prefer one medium over the rest. 

Hub-and-spoke content strategy

Creating a few articles is a great start, but not enough. Ideally, you want more than a content strategy—an entire content ecosystem. One easy way to approach this is by applying a hub-and-spoke model to your content strategy. 

You create one authoritative piece of content and then link to other relevant content details from the same page. Internal linking is a great way to keep your audience engaged with your site and optimize your website’s SEO by building your internal linking architecture.

8. Write Engaging Copy

Engaging copywriting has to:

• Include Many Details: Give as much detail about your product/service/mission. The more your users know about your offering, the more they will trust and buy into your offering.
• Show Utility: Paint a picture of how a buyer can use a product/service, how their contribution will help your organization’s cause, what they can do with the information in a course, etc. This part is dependent on the purpose of each web page.
• Appeal To A Specific Audience: Think about who might want what you’re offering or want to do what you’re asking them to, and why. Then, write using words that align with that target audience and their purpose.

For copyediting on a budget, try using a service like Grammarly. It’s not perfect, but it catches most basic errors, and it’s free. Also, consider asking someone else to copyedit your work.

9. Regularly Update Your Content

A great website contains new, current information. If you open a website in July and see information about a New Year’s Day sale, your confidence in the information on that website will probably decrease. Set a calendar reminder to check sections of your site related to sales, upcoming events, or recent news and update them accordingly.

A simple way to improve your business website is to make sure it is up to date and reflects the latest products and services you offer. In addition, you should update your content marketing regularly to make sure the answers they provide are still relevant and helpful to readers.

10. Avoid Spelling and Grammar Mistakes

You may get away with poor grammar on social media, but your website is not the place to be careless.

People may not trust websites with spelling and grammar mistakes or think that the site owners are inattentive to detail. Either way, poor spelling, and grammar will put off some potential readers.

11. Maintain an Active Blog

Blogs exist to provide helpful information for current readers, draw new readers to your site, and (eventually) present them with your CTA.

Here are some articles types that work well for business blogs:

• Listicles (e.g., “Top Ten Things You Need To Know About ___”)
• How-To Articles
• Dos & Don’ts
• Product Comparisons
• Guides
• Best Of/Worst Of Lists
• Industry News
• Study Results
• Trends & Fads
• Interviews

Research and incorporate trending keywords, subjects, and queries from your industry. Then, use the keyword research tools mentioned above, plus social media platforms specific to your industry, to create a list of blog post ideas.

Publish new content when possible. Also, update any old, irrelevant, or inaccurate content to keep it fresh. Your readers and Google search bots will appreciate your efforts.

If you don’t feel up to creating content yourself, hire someone who is.

12. Only Use Original Content

A big mistake that many small businesses make is plagiarizing content. Creating high-quality content can be time-consuming, but copying content from another website isn’t a shortcut you want to risk-taking.

Google has stated that it wants each search result to be unique. Otherwise, visitors could click on ten links and find the same content, resulting in a bad user experience. Therefore, Google will filter out identical or highly similar content. If you copy a competitor’s web page, your page may not appear in search results at all!

13. Use Page Headings as a Road Map

Internet users often skim through headings to learn what’s in store before they begin reading. The titles on your page should provide a quick preview of the entire page in a few seconds. Having clear headings for each section that includes your topic’s keyword reassures users that they clicked on the correct link.

Page headings:

• Are important for SEO
• Should be skimmable
• Give the reader a clear overview

Even search engines use a page’s headings like an outline to determine if they should recommend that particular web page for a search term. Google can even highlight text and send users directly to that part of the page to make sure they find the answer they need fast.

But, of course, both humans and search engines prefer scannable, well-organized content, so spend time making sure the topic is precise and the necessary details are easy to find.

14. Use Bullet Points to Get to the Point

The attention span of the average internet user is short. That’s why bullet points help users to:

• Quickly find what they’re looking for
• Skip over sections they don’t need
• Highlight the most important details

As readers skim down the page, all of the essential information from that section is broken out into easy-to-read bullet points, allowing them to digest it quickly. Nobody wants to hunt for information in a giant wall of text, so bullet points help visitors absorb essential details about your company while keeping them on your website.

15. Give your Visitors a Clear Call to Action

After a customer has become familiar with your brand and learned about your product, it’s time to get them to act. A clear call to action (often a button or link) lets them know what to do next, whether downloading a resource, completing a transaction, or using live chat to schedule a consultation.

Call to action best practices:

• Use a differently colored button that stands out
• Write engaging text that entices a user to click
• Place calls to action on your most-visited pages—not just the contact page.

Streamline your contact forms

If you use a contact form, make sure it’s easy for visitors to complete in a short amount of time. While it is tempting to gather all the information you want right from the start, form submissions increase when the number of form fields decreases. 

Stick to the following fields to make the process quick and easy:

• First and last name
• Phone number
• Email address
• A “How can we help?” field for the visitor to enter any additional information they would like to provide

Use contrasting colors to draw attention to your CTAs.

Make your buttons and forms stand out by using a color that contrasts with the rest of the page. Contrasting colors will draw attention to the button and entice users to click. For example, a white page with a brightly colored “Order Now” button will attract users’ eyes.

Use A/B testing for your call to action.

All call-to-action phrases are different, so try other terms like “Get a Quote,” “Buy Now,” or “Message Us” to see which ones customers click on the most. Something as simple as swapping out a low-performing call-to-action phrase with a better one can improve your sales with minimal effort. Test your call to action buttons regularly to ensure they lead the visitor to the correct page.

16. Be Interactive

Instead of giving your audience a passive experience whenever they visit your website, give them opportunities to engage through interactive content actively.

According to Rocket Content, 88% of marketers say interactive content helps brands differentiate themselves, and 79% say combining interactive content with other content types improves message retention. Interactive elements can be as easy as quizzes and surveys or as complex as tools like ROI calculators.

Types of interactive content include:

• Quizzes
• Surveys
• Calculators
• Chatbots

A simple tactic is to offer visitors the chance to enter a contest or giveaway by sharing something via social media (along with a branded hashtag) or by entering their contact details on the site.

Likewise, chatbots offer a way for you to engage with your audience in real-time by answering questions, guiding them to the information they’re looking for, or demonstrating that you’re available to listen and talk.

Beyond using a chatbot as a customer service tool, you can even use your chatbot to help you with your marketing and sales. For example, some businesses use their chatbots to help set up sales meetings and appointments, and others even use chatbots to make direct sales to customers.

17. Use High-Quality Unique Images

Images are an essential part of web design. They convey concepts and inspire emotions in a way that a block of text just can’t. It can be tempting to fill your website with stock photography, but when a user encounters a generic photo they’ve seen before (or even worse, used as part of an internet meme), it may feel like you didn’t put much effort into your website.

Website images should:

• Make an excellent first impression
• Complement text on a page
• Help increase conversions

Examples of value-adding images:

• Founder/team member headshots
• Product-in-use images
• Infographics
• Your business/workspace (if relevant)
• Previous events (if applicable)
• Impacts of a project you or your business are/were involved in (e.g., hosting a fundraiser, doing outreach to schools, improving a business’s workflow)

Add a human element

When possible, use images that feature people (the human eye is naturally drawn to people’s faces) and make sure that those images are clear and viewable on every type of device. If possible, use images unique to your company in place of stock photography. An original photo of your business will have a much more significant impact than a stock photo.

Images can influence sales.

Using stock images, preferably free images, are a dominant strategy, especially for startups and small businesses. But that can work against you. While downloading a stock photo is cheaper and easier in the short term, studies proved that unique images could improve sales.

Be choosy about which images you use on your website. The images you include should be intentional and add value to your site. They should also be well-lit, focused, uncluttered, and personal to your brand (avoid stock photography whenever possible.)

18. Add Social Proof Everywhere

Credibility and trust can make or break a business. Credibility is all the more crucial online, where misinformation and scams abound. It’s easy to brag about your own business, but website visitors want to get a second opinion from your actual customers.

Social proof includes:

• Customer reviews
• Testimonials
• Ratings
• Brand mentions on social media

The best way to build credibility is through social proof. On your website, you can highlight your company’s social proof by:

• Showcasing written or video testimonials from your happiest customers 
• Displaying positive reviews from Facebook, Yelp, and Google Business 
• Sharing industry awards, recognitions, and certifications specific to your niche

19. Include Comments/Customer Testimonials

If your website is for a business, posting customer testimonials is a way to build trust between you and your buyers.

Testimonials should be:

• Specific
• Plausible
• Short
• Natural-sounding
• Edited for brevity and specificity, but don’t edit the actual content

Try to scan review sites and respond to negative testimonials, ideally with some sort of solution to their problem or negative feedback. It will let current, and future buyers know that you care about your customers.

If your website is purely content-based (think: affiliate marketing), enabling comments will help build your authority in your field or industry. Try to respond to all comments. By answering, you will help readers know that you care what they think.

20. Optimize for Search Engines (SEO)

Of course, all of this content and social proof also helps with search engine optimization (SEO), provided you are using the right keywords. SEO is the process of continually improving your website to increase its rankings in search engines.

Search engine optimization:

• Can improve your business website’s Google rankings (if done correctly)
• It can be performed by a specialist or done in-house
• It is essential for any business website

Free keyword research tools like Wordtracker or Keyword Tool can help you decide which ones are the most valuable.

SEO do’s and don’ts 

SEO is an ever-evolving process. Strategies that worked months or years ago may not help your website rank today. A good general principle is to create content that you want to read and find helpful.

DON’T

• DON’T stuff your site full of keywords. That strategy doesn’t work anymore, and major search engines might penalize you.
• DON’T put all of your faith in plugins and programs. It takes a human element to write for humans. 
• DON’T create content on topics outside your area of expertise or authority.

DO

• DO ask yourself if visitors would find your web page helpful.
• DO answer the most critical questions regarding the subject.
• DO look for ideas and create original content for your site based on what’s working for top-ranking competitors.

Use Keywords Throughout Your Site

All websites have one or a few core subjects, with topics branching out from them. Those topic words are known as keywords.

Think about all the relevant subjects and topics on your website. Then, include those keywords in:

• Page title tags
• Subject header tags (H1, H2, etc.)
• URLs
• Category names
• Page meta descriptions, which show up as descriptions in Google search results
• Alt-text for images, which are descriptive words that help search bots and people who can’t see the image understand what the images are
• Paragraph text

Create a cluster of primary and secondary keywords related to your industry or subject. Then, add them to your web pages and blog posts.

To get keyword ideas and see what people are actively searching for online, use a keyword research tool like the Ahrefs keyword explorer or the SEMRush keyword analysis tool.

Try to balance words relevant to your site topics and topics that people are actively seeking.

Don’t use keywords too often, or Google might interpret your website as spam and bump your site down in search engine results.

21. Get Quality Backlinks

Backlinks are hyperlinks from other sites that lead to your site. If a trustworthy, authoritative website links to a page on your website, they’re giving you their vote of confidence. Both your site visitors and search engine bots will acknowledge and appreciate this.

“Quality” backlinks differ by industry.

For example, if your website is about catering services, it doesn’t make sense for an automotive dealer’s website to link to yours. They’re not related, so they’re not helpful for your site visitors.

A food blogger writing about your services on their website and linking to yours in the post would be a quality backlink.

To get quality backlinks:

1. Identify authoritative websites in your industry with a domain authority checker
2. Find some sort of offering that is beneficial for their website (a piece of content that could benefit their site, a review of one of their products, an interview, etc.)
3. Pitch your idea to that website via email

These are the basic steps. Here is more detailed information on how to get quality backlinks in 2022.

22. Keep Your Site Secure

Every website should have an SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificate. SSL certificates signify site security for people, browsers, and Google search engine bots.

You can get one from your web hosting provider. However, there may be more cost-effective and feature-rich SSL options elsewhere. Shop around before committing to anything. Ensure to renew your SSL before it expires, or your site may have a lapse in security.

23. Speed Up Your Website

Speed is crucial to users and is one of the most critical SEO ranking factors for Google. According to Google research, studies found that the probability of a customer abandoning your page increases by 90% when page load time goes from one second to five seconds.

Website speed:

• Is an SEO ranking factor
• Keeps visitors on your site
• Can be improved over time

Some types of code used to make a website function can slow it down. Removing this code can improve your business website’s speed. In addition, you can test your website and receive recommendations from Google using its Pagespeed Insight Tool.

We recommend that you test your website on various mobile devices and connections to get an idea of how fast your website loads for visitors on their phones. A low-end mobile phone on a standard internet connection will give you a good idea of what the average mobile user will experience when visiting your site.

To improve page speed, consider doing the following:

• Invest In Good Web Hosting: Web hosting is a service that allows you to post your website online via special computers called servers. When someone clicks on a webpage, the computers “serve” them your page. So it’s worth it to invest in the best web hosting providers with the fastest server load times.
• Register With A Content Delivery Network: A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a set of data centers worldwide where your web pages can live temporarily. All you have to do is register your site on the CDN closest to the majority of your site’s viewers so they can access content faster. Cloudflare and Cloudfront both have free CDN options if cost is a concern.
• Optimize Images: Large, high-resolution images take a long time to load. Compress your images with a plugin or website like Imagify or Smush to reduce load times. Better yet, convert all your png/jpeg images to WebP format. WebP produces the smallest image sizes, yet the compressed images are visually indistinguishable from the originals.
• Remove Unnecessary Add-Ons: Periodically audit your website to remove any plugins, apps, and files that you don’t use. Also, make sure you don’t have two add-ons that do the same or very similar things.
• Choose Fonts Intentionally: Use a free Google font or “web-safe” font like Times New Roman. These kinds of fonts load quickly and are easy on the eyes. Include one or two fonts max on your website.
• Reduce Moving Assets: In general, site elements like sliders and animations are taxing to load. They can also make your web pages unstable. Only use these elements if they will significantly improve your users’ browsing experience.
• Place Fast-Loading Content First: Web pages load top-to-bottom, meaning that the content at the top of the page loads first—place “heavier” elements like maps, image galleries, and related posts lower on the page.
• Incorporate Asynchronous Loading: Asynchronous loading, also known as “lazy loading,” is a technique where different elements load at different times, so users can still interact with a page even when other “heavier” elements are still loading.
• Reduce Redirects: When you send a user from one URL to another, this is a redirect. For example, you might redirect users when you change your business name or send them to a page with updated content. Sending users from one URL to another can slow page load speed. Use a free tool like Screaming Frog SEO Spider to identify redirects you don’t need, then delete them.
• Minify CSS, JavaScript & HTML: You can optimize the CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), JavaScript, and HTML files that make up your website by minifying them. Minify your files with a plugin, app, through your CDN, or with a minifier.

Optimize what you can, but don’t go too deep into your website’s code unless you feel comfortable doing so.

24. Locate and Fix Broken Links

Over time, pages of your website will be moved or deleted. These changes can result in broken links that don’t go anywhere. In addition, if visitors begin clicking links on your site only to find that they don’t work, they may give up trying to navigate your website and return to the search results.

Broken links:

• Are a negative SEO ranking factor
• Frustrate website visitors
• Are easy to find and fix

Once someone visits your website, you want to keep them there. Updating your internal links ensures that visitors get to where they’re going. You can manually visit each page for small websites and verify that each link works. For medium-sized sites, you can use Google Search Console (it’s free!), which will give you a list of broken links that you need to fix, or a tool like Screaming Frog SEO Spider.

25. Experiment with Your Website

Experimentation is a great way to improve your business website. Have you ever had two competing ideas for enhancing a web page, but you couldn’t decide which one to use? A/B testing allows you to try both and learn which version users prefer. Tiny changes like swapping out the color of your “Order Now” button or rearranging elements on a page can result in higher sales.

Free products like Google Optimize allow you to show different page versions to other users and track the results. For example, would a black-and-white homepage result in more appointments than a homepage that’s bright orange with pink text? Experimentation lets you find out.

Web design is constantly evolving.

A website should constantly improve, so refine, update, and upgrade yours regularly. A website that’s four years old could look like someone pulled it out of a time capsule, so keep making minor improvements to make sure your website looks modern and trustworthy.

Check out competitors in your field (especially those that appear at the top of search results) and see how your site matches up. Then, use their sites as inspiration to improve your own and ensure visitors have a great user experience.

Follow these Tips to Improve Your Business Website

For any business to stay competitive in today’s market, you need to be able to make your website a place that your audience enjoys visiting. So whether you’re opening a new store or revamping your website, take advantage of the tips we’ve outlined above to help you reach out and engage with customers in a way that they appreciate.

Improving your website can seem daunting, but it’s one of the most worthwhile projects you can tackle for your business. After all, a well-designed website pays dividends, selling you and your company to potential customers you didn’t even know were looking. We are here to help!

Are You Looking to Improve Your Business Website?

Do you need to improve your business website? Our team of WordPress experts will be happy to help you with this. But, first, look at our portfolio and read our case studies.

Then, if you believe we are a good fit for your business web design needs, let’s talk! We offer a full range of consulting and design solutions for businesses and product brands.

If you are unsure how website improvements support your business objectives, let’s talk! Our team will listen to your concerns, evaluate your needs, and develop a list of things you need to do to improve your business website.

Are You Providing a Great User Experience?

Are you working on your website? If so, has it improved your overall user experience and boosted conversions? If not, what prevents you from improving your website? Do you have any other web design tips for increasing conversions?

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Thank you! We appreciate your help in ending bad business websites, one pixel at a time!

By PixoLabo
Not Your Average WordPress Web Design Agency
@pixolabo