How to Breathe New Life into a Website
A website is one of the greatest assets any business can have. For e-commerce businesses, a website is their digital store. For regular businesses, a website is a great marketing tool or a necessary proof of existence. For small or local businesses, a website can be a way to increase in-store foot traffic. If it doesn’t have any performance issues, a website can do many good things for businesses of any type.
But what happens when a website has been around for a while, and it has become bland and anemic? It can be running perfectly fine, and it might still attract customers. But the numbers it’s pulling are not exciting — they are just okay, or slightly worse. It doesn’t have to be a complete disaster. It’s just that the website has become what’s best described with the word “meh.” That point is a great opportunity to take action and make some changes that will help revitalize your website.
Look Under the Hood
Many parts of a website that users can’t see influence their experience. Loading speeds, for example, can depend on everything from hosting to plugins, and the size of the elements used when designing the website. Many user-centric performance metrics depend on the technical side of a website, which is why it has to be as good as required.
Start with hosting. You will need a larger package, so you should try to get one. If your provider can’t give you what you need, choose a new provider. You should seriously consider opting for dedicated server hosting for the control options it gives you. Then you should look at how you use your CMS. Make sure to optimize the website for search engine crawlers as well as fast loading. Look at the installed plugins, and remove any that seem unnecessary. By the end of the process, you want to have a lean website with plenty of room to handle better features and an increase in traffic.
Redesign It
Web design is a huge field where you can make many consequential changes. You can divide those changes into functional and aesthetical.
When you’re dealing with the functional elements on your website, keep in mind the functions they perform. Your goal will be to help them perform those functions better. The navigation menu, for example, needs to let the user know instantly how to get where they want to be on your website. It has to be intuitive, easy to spot, yet nonintrusive. Contact forms need to entice the visitors to contact you. The checkout process needs to be easy, intuitive, and quick. These are the things you’ll need to optimize for better performance.
On the aesthetical side of things, you should make sure that your website follows the latest web design trends. If you’re redesigning your website in 2018, you’re in luck — it will be a year of bright, bold, and colorful design. There’s nothing that will bring excitement to your website more than interesting color schemes, custom illustrations, cool animations and cinemagraphs. Functionality will still be important though, but the looks alone will increase your visitors’ enthusiasm. And they will remove that “meh” stigma.
Market It
People have to be aware of your website if you want all that effort you’ve put into it to be worth it. You need to spread the word that you’re launching a new, bigger, better, bolder website. You have to market your new online presence.
If you want to burst into every possible marketing channel, guns blazing and ready to attract a new host of visitors, you can. A tactical approach would probably work better. Depending on your business and your website, some marketing channels will work better than others. But you have to know your options first, and you have to try out a couple of things before you settle on the channels that give you the best results.
Email marketing is an inexpensive type of marketing that’s almost fully automatable. It’s also more than capable of delivering great results, which makes it one of the most popular choices among online marketers. Content marketing is emerging as the indispensable type of marketing. It’s amazing for SEO, and the use of video has proven to be very effective. Social media marketing is another staple in digital marketing, although it will likely experience some changes this year. There’s also the possibility of paid digital marketing you should consider. Ideally, you want to be able to run everything for a bit, gather some data, and then use it to find the most cost-effective solution.
Breathing new life into a “meh” website can be quite a ride. However, if your website is a business-critical asset, you have to put in the time, the work, and the money to make it exciting again. The good news is that the results of your efforts easily translate into a good ROI, better conversion rates, more visitors, or whatever you aim to do with your website. So dive in.
