7 tips for an optimal website

Every business owner naturally wants a good website. Whether you use it to sell your products or to provide information about your company to your target audience. You want it to be well organised and to work optimally. But what exactly makes a good website? This depends on several factors, all of which are connected.

In this blog we give you a number of tips to help you optimise your website.

1. User friendliness

User friendliness is one of the most important things to consider when building a website. You naturally want the people visiting your website to have a good experience using it. If this is not the case, they may drop off, and that would be a shame.

The user friendliness of your website really starts with the basics: your target audience. Which people do you want to reach, what is the goal of your website, and what exactly do you want to convey? These are all questions you can ask yourself in advance to make sure you take the right direction with your website.

There are also several content related things you can take into account to give your website visitors an optimal user experience:

• Easy to navigate
  An easy to navigate website prevents visitors from getting lost on your website. A clear navigation/header menu and the use of breadcrumbs are examples of things that contribute to this.
  
  
• Use of white space
  The user friendliness of your website is also partly determined by the layout of the pages. It is advisable to find a good balance in the use of white space. This applies not only to lines of text, but also, for example, to the spacing between different content blocks on your pages.
  
  

Cramming too much content together will feel unpleasant for many users. At the same time, you also do not want to leave too much valuable space unused through excessive white space. So make sure you find a good balance here.

Clear calls to action

In most cases you have a specific goal in mind for your website visitors. For example, you want them to make a purchase in your webshop, or to contact you by leaving their details in a form on the website.

Using visually appealing, encouraging calls to action makes it clear to website visitors which action they should take. In most cases these are buttons that link somewhere. The colour of the button and the text on it are also important factors to take into account here.

2. Also think about mobile users

The use of smartphones and tablets continues to grow every year. It therefore makes sense that you also need to pay attention to the mobile design of your website. A responsive design is the best solution for this. With a responsive design, the design of your website is automatically adjusted/rescaled, depending on the size of the screen on which someone views your website. Nowadays this is usually already included automatically in most website themes.

But it goes much further than just a suitable design for mobile devices. Also think about why people visit your website specifically on their mobile. This may provide useful insights that you can use to further improve the user experience. For example, by placing a call to action button in a specific spot on a page.

3. Do not forget your findability!

Before visitors can land on your website, they naturally first need to be able to find it. With a good SEO (search engine optimisation) strategy you optimise your website for search engines.

The SEO of your website can be improved in several ways. First, search engines scan your website (pages) to check whether there is relevant content on it, in relation to a particular search query someone performs in the search engine. Based on that, the search engine determines whether your website page is also shown in the search results.

With a keyword research you can map out which search terms are frequently searched for that are relevant to your website. You can then incorporate these search terms yourself into the content on your website, so that over time you will rank higher in the search results for those specific search terms. This increases the findability of your website.

Besides adding relevant content to your website, there are also technical aspects that influence the position of your website in the search results. Things like your website load time, alt text for your images, and internal/external linking also contribute to this.

4. Good hosting is also very important

The hosting of your website should also not be overlooked. If you randomly choose the cheapest hosting provider, there is a chance that, for example, the load time of your website will increase. As discussed above, load time is one of the factors taken into account in SEO, and therefore also in your website ranking.

In addition, good hosting providers have better security, such as HTTPS and SSL. And should something go completely wrong, there is a greater chance that a professional web host has a recent back-up version of your website data.

5. Plugins

Do you find maintaining your website a tricky task? Fortunately, there are many useful tools that make managing your website a lot easier.

Here are a number of useful (Wordpress) plugins that should not be missing from your website:

• Yoast
  A plugin that lets you easily configure certain things for your SEO. For example, you can use the plugin to add meta titles and descriptions to your website pages.
  
  
• Duplicate page
  Saves you a lot of work in some cases, because you can duplicate pages instead of having to rebuild pages from scratch every time.
  
  
• Wordfence Security
  With Wordfence Security your website is a lot safer. Among other things, the plugin offers a security scanner, firewall, and various antivirus features.
  
  
• Cookie Notice & Compliance
  This is a useful tool that lets you easily set up the cookie notice on your website.
  
  
  

6. Choose a powerful, user friendly CMS

The content management system (CMS) that your website runs on can (indirectly) also contribute to how your site performs. With a user friendly CMS, in which you can easily make changes, you ultimately get the most out of your website. With HubSpot's CMS Hub you can, among other things, easily build website and landing pages with the drag & drop editor, create call to action buttons, and set up personalised content. HubSpot CMS has both several paid and free versions available.

7. Analyse your changes

Have you used all the tips above to optimise your website? It does not simply end there. It is important to monitor and analyse the performance of your changes.

Tools such as Google Analytics give very useful insights into how users interact with your website (pages). For example, you can see which pages get a lot of interaction and how long visitors stay on a page on average.

But you may also come across potential pain points on your website here. For example, do you see that people massively click away from a particular page without interacting? Then find out what is causing this and solve the problem using these insights.

So do you want a good website? As you have read above, quite a lot goes into that. Do you need a complete new website, or do you want to optimise your current site? We are happy to help you with this!

Feel free to contact us, or schedule a no obligation meeting directly. Then we can work together to find the best solution!