Every day we come into contact with a lot of websites, either whilst browsing or looking for design inspiration for a client website. It’s surprising to see just how many websites are out there, that still don’t follow the most basic principles of web design that will ensure conversion levels are high and website abandonment rates are low.

Here’s a list of website improvement tips that will cost you nothing to implement but can go a long way in making your website easier to use.

1. Phone number – If you are a small business, this will be the most essential piece of information that you can have on your website and ideally, you want this to be seen in as many places as possible. The contact no should be placed, in addition to your contact page, somewhere on the website header so it appears site-wide. Including your business hours under the phone number can also prove to be a subtle way to encourage visitors to pick up the phone and get in touch.
2. Contact email address – As with the phone number, you want this to be placed on a site-wide location so a prospect can get in touch with either email or phone. Placing the email address somewhere alongside the phone number is always a good idea.
3. Call to action button – every small business website has a Call to action. In our case, it’s Request a Quote. For a hairdresser, it may be “Book an appointment”, for an online shop “Start shopping”. Whatever the Call to Action for your website is, you want to make sure this is prominently displayed, in the form of a button so it’s difficult to miss, in a site wide location.
4. Pop-up windows – You want to avoid pop-up windows at any cost. Stats clearly show that websites which use pop-up windows not only have a higher Bounce Rate but also lower conversions. This isn’t just a result of people leaving the site but many users may not get all the information you want to share with them as modern browsers have built in pop up blockers which means that a user may not even know about the information she has missed
5. Contact form – it’s amazing that many websites still don’t have a contact form on the contact page. Even if you have listed all your contact details clearly along with an email address, a contact form is essential as it provides yet another way for the user to get in touch.  In this case, more is definitely more!
6. Avoid flash or splash intro pages – if you are concerned about visibility within the search engines, you want to avoid intro pages at any cost.  Search engines cannot read Flash elements (yet) and having Flash elements on your home page (which is the most important page, SEO wise) will limit your search engine ranking visibility.
7. Lead generation – your website must have at least one way it is generating leads. This can be as simple as a Newsletter sign-up feature. Anything that asks a user to provide at least one form of contact in return for something that they may find of interest.  If newsletter marketing isn’t something of interest to you, then even a Request a Call-back feature would do.
8. Active logo – when the logo on your website is clicked, it should take user to the home page, even if your website navigation already has a “Home” button or tab.  This is somewhat standard practice nowadays, and looking at the analytics data of our own website and some of our clients, we find that approx. 65% of users click on the logo to get back to the home page even if a Home button is present within the navigation menu.
9. Website counters – avoid these! Even if your website receives a lot of traffic, this still isn’t a good idea. Ironically though, most websites which do have website traffic counters are fairly low traffic in which case, this can put new visitors off.

These tips will cost you nothing to implement but can increase your conversions significantly when carried out correctly. You may wish to make a note of your website Key Performance Indicators such as Bounce Rates, Time on Site and so on to track before/after changes.

We look forward to your feedback!

Need a high ROI digital marketing agency? We’re not only a PPC management company but we also do Facebook ads, LinkedIn, SEO, Google Ads training and all of Social Media.