The goal of this article is to show you how little changes can make a huge difference. Businesses all too frequently underestimate and miss the little things that make the difference between a good website and great website performance. It only takes one small mistake or omission in your website to hamper search visibility or to turn the potential client off.
If you've just arrived here, this is part two of this weeks topic "12 Critical Factors to Ensure Maximum Website Performance".
In part 2, I will be covering:
Security
Usability
SEO
Accessibility
Social Media
Behaviour
Even if you don’t sell products online, the security of your users is hugely important. If you take the time and effort to protect the security of your users, it will be rewarded by their perception of your business and their loyalty. Consider installing an SSL certificate on your website. This will secure the site and put the little green padlock in the address bar. Hubspot Websites come with this.
Think about the ideal journey that you wish your visitors would take and make that journey easy for them. Guiding them through your site and towards your CTA's, forms and links so that your potential customers navigate to the information they need with ease and speed. Your visitors don't want a wasted journey.
SEO may seem like a huge task to just throw into this list, but making sure that your website is optimised for search is crucial to being found online. As a starting point make sure that each of your website pages are optimised for your chosen keywords and that page titles and descriptions are present on every page (find more details about this on our blog "Get found by Google.")
Don’t forget users that use assistive technologies to browse the web. Make sure that your website is setup so that screen readers can access your content with ease. Also ensure that all images are provided with descriptive alt tags and that there is a text only version of your navigation for users who struggle to use a mouse. The W3Cs content accessibility guidelines are a great resource to ensure your site is as accessible as possible.
Leverage social media to broadcast your content to new and existing followers. Make sure that you give users every opportunity to share your content and follow your social profiles. Add social share and social follow buttons to your site.
We all lead such busy lives, we just haven't the patience for interruptions when we're trying to view a website. No one likes windows popping up, text that doesn't fit the page of the device we're currently using, or sites that take an age to load. Your website needs to tick all the boxes (no pop-ups, responsive website design/mobile optimised and fast load times).
Also your business loses credibility if the information you provide on your site is inaccurate, out of date, difficult for your potential customers to understand as well as the obvious errors within your website content e.g. spelling, grammar, correct names etc.
Users have a high expectation of websites ‘just working’. If you can’t tick all the boxes Your business will lose credibility in the users mind and a sale becomes less likely.
Along with smooth navigation, your company website needs space; you don't need to fill every page with logos, text and images. This just makes it harder for your visitors to find what they are looking for, so don't be afraid to leave space.
Once you are confident that your website fulfils all of the above, check your visitor numbers and make a note of how many visitors your site is getting. A successful website with good authority can receive many visitors a day with a high amount of click throughs and leads (for example a B2B website with 26 employees would attract approx' 513 unique visitors per week: source HubSpot). If visitors and conversions increase give yourself a pat on the back, if they dip, revisit this list and make some adjustments.
Continually analyse and monitor your Hubspot Websites performance to ensure that it is always working for you. Click on the handy website checklist, for more ‘must haves’ and do a quick analysis of your business site.