11 Ways to Fix Up A Failing Website

Literally everyone who is anyone has a website these days. Because no matter how big or small your business or brand may be, owning a website is a must.

Websites are an essential digital marketing tool and are awesome for a variety of reasons.  It serves as the first point of contact between your business and your customers. A website can take on a variety of roles depending on your needs. It can be an extension of your physical store. It can be your entire store, a digital portfolio or blog.

But what do you do when your website isn’t doing as well as it should? You’re not getting as much traffic as you hoped for, people aren’t interacting or sharing your content and its overall performance is rather meh.

If this sounds like familiar or if your want to avoid a major website fail in the future, here are some tips to help you fix up your website.

How To Fix A Failing Website

Anyone can create a website but its success or failure can be determined by a few simple factors. Follow these tips to ensure that your website is ready to be its best self.

1. Choose The Right Design/Theme

The design/theme you choose for your website can play a major role in your ability to convert visitors. A website with a design that’s outdated, too flashy or over stimulating probably won’t do well with visitors. To build a successful website you need to find the right balance between fun/engaging, professional with your companies branding done correctly. A website with the perfect balance will attract new visitors and keep old ones coming back for more.

2. Consider The User Experience

User experience (or UX) refers to the user-centric method in which websites are designed. When designing your website you need to ensure that it meets the needs of users and provides a positive overall experience. The importance of creating a good user experience can never be over emphasized. The best way to ensure a good overall user experience is by…

1. Creating a website that isn’t overly complicated
2. Ensuring that important information (contact info, physical address, etc) is easy to find
3. Making sure the menu and search bar are easy to find and navigate

Make sure that information can be accessed in no more than two clicks

3. Website Speed

Website speed refers to how fast your site loads in response to a request. The hard truth is no one likes waiting ages for a website to load. And if your website is slow, you risk people leaving in search of an alternative. Here are a few ways to ensure your website is optimized for speed…

• Enable website caching
• Remove unnecessary plug-ins and add-ons
• Optimize your image sizes
• Avoid using too much code

4. Responsiveness

A responsive website will adapt and changes according to the tech being used to access and display it. . Things like orientation, images, text size and general layouts are designed to change in relation to the device that is being used on digital platforms to view the site. By ensuring that your website is responsive users across all devices (laptops, tablets, and mobile phones) will get the same, high quality experience when visiting the site.

5. Content

Always try to create unique content that visitors will find useful and engaging. This will give your website an added edge because you’re offering visitor something others aren’t. Your site will stand out from a thousand other websites and will encourage people to share your content and visit your site again.

6. Focus On A Single Niche

Trying to cater to everyone at once is an impossible task. Your marketing messaging will become so vague; it may not resonate with anyone at all. A single niche website allows you to cater to a specific target audience in a relatable and relevant way.

7. Secure Your Website

Most people will quickly exit a website that doesn’t have the lock symbol and the letters “HTTPS” (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure) in the URL. This is a sure fire way to discourage people from visiting your site. Make your website secure by…

• Registering your domain name
• Encrypting your website
• Setting all your pages to HTTPS
• Updating old passwords
• Using 2-factor authentication

8. SEO Compliance

Making sure your website is SEO compliant may seem obvious but it’s often overlooked by a lot of people. Having an SEO compliant site will make it easy for search engines to read and understand your content. This helps you achieve a high ranking in online searches and makes it easier for users to find your site online. You can make sure your website is SEO compliant by

• Creating unique titles and descriptions
• Correctly formatting URLS
• Optimizing images
• Create pages with structure
• Avoid using too much JavaScript

9. Update Your Website

People get bored by seeing the same old content every time they visit a website. Keeping your website updated with new and exciting posts is a great way to fix that. Try adding a blog section or live social media feed to your site to keep things interesting.

10. Fix Mistakes

Making sure your website is free of mistakes is essential. Check for things like broken links and missing content that could affect your sites SEO. The solution is to fix, redirect or delete the problematic pages or links.

11. Navigation

It’s important to make sure that your website is easy to navigate. No one likes visiting a site and not being able to find important stuff like the search bar and main menu. Ensure that your navigation is streamlined and simple to use.

In Summary

A website can fail for a lot of reasons. But luckily most of them can be fixed. By catching mistakes early visitors will have a great experience when browsing your website. If you’re still unsure about the details a digital marketing course can help you learn all everything your need to know about fixing up a website.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

If you are curious to understand website structure, SEO or digital marketing in general. Please visit the Digital School of Marketing to find out about their cutting-edge courses to assist in your educational journey.