Small businesses need a well-designed and functional website to succeed in today’s world. Your website should provide valuable content apart from being engaging and visually appealing. With this in mind, here are six ways to improve your small business website.
1. Optimize for mobile
With the number of mobile internet users constantly increasing, a responsive small business website is of paramount importance. People should be able to view it on various screen sizes. Use clear and large fonts that your visitors can read on small screens easily and light images that load quickly. In addition, your layout should be easy to navigate and uncluttered.
2. Use consistent colors, fonts, and logos
Your business’s website should use the same logos, fonts, colors, and other visual elements on each page as an extension of your brand. This way, potential buyers will begin to associate your site with your business. It pays off to work on this because it can help create consistent branding that will make your company more memorable and recognizable. It will also help build trust with your target group.
3. Make sure visitors can see your contact info
Your business contact information must be above the fold so that visitors to your site can see it. This is the area that is immediately visible to first-time visitors. The information should include the name of your company, address, email, phone, and social media info. Keeping it visible can even lead to conversion. Ideally, place it at the top of your homepage.
4. Upgrade your hosting plan
A small business that’s just starting out can make do with shared hosting. It’s cheap, and you don’t have many visitors, so there’s little risk of overwhelming the shared server. As your business grows, you want to consider upgrading to a faster and more scalable hosting plan. A VPS hosting service can ensure this and more. It is still affordable, albeit a bit more expensive, but the increased reliability and flexibility more than make up for the higher price.
With VPS hosting, your site is not at risk of downtime if another site on the server experiences a surge in traffic. On shared hosting, this risk is very real. If your site doesn’t go down, it will definitely start loading more slowly, which will frustrate potential customers and ensure they never convert.
VPS hosting offers a portion of each server per user, so the activity of other websites on the server does not affect yours in any way. It’s also scalable, meaning it can easily accommodate increasing website traffic.
5. Optimize your website for search engines
Optimizing your website for this purpose is crucial if you want to grow as a business and reach a wider audience. You want your website to show up in relevant results when people are looking for products or services like yours.
Leading SEO practices include:
- Using keywords throughout the site.
- Building backlinks to it.
- Creating valuable, keyword-rich blog posts.
Keywords and keyphrases are words and phrases that are relevant to your small business, which people search for when looking for services or products like yours.
Blogging can provide valuable and relevant content, which can help your site rank higher.
Meta descriptions and title tags can make your website more likely to be discovered by users. Title tags appear in search engine results when someone looks up keywords relevant to your business. If crafted well, they will increase the likelihood of people clicking on your URL.
Meta descriptions are the short text snippets you see under website links after a search. They give people an idea of what they can expect to find. They are critical because of the extent to which they influence someone’s decision to click on your link or not.
Finally, optimize every image used on your site. Fast-loading images improve the overall load time of the website. This can improve user experience in the long run.
6. Effective calls to action
Using convincing calls to action (CTAs) throughout your site increases the likelihood of conversion. CTAs are links or buttons that encourage visitors to buy a product, download something, sign up for a newsletter, or take another action. They should encourage specific action rather than be general, ex. “click here.” Place them above the fold so they are visible, and use clear language, such as “sign up for our newsletter” or “download our free e-book.”
