Your website is one of the most important assets of your operation. It brings in new business, helps establish your brand, and sells your products and services.
But, if your website isn’t doing those things, if you have an underperforming website, then something is wrong with it.
In this post, we look at six reasons your website might be underperforming and what you can do to fix it.
No Clear Calls To Action
A call to action (CTA) is a concise statement that clearly expresses what action the user should take next and provides a mechanism for them to do so (e.g., ‘Learn more,’ ‘Download’ or ‘Buy now’).
An absence of clear calls to action can cause a sub-par conversion rate, which means you’re missing out on potential deals. If you don’t direct customers to make that purchase, then you’re losing out on revenue!
A CTA can be accomplished in many ways. Providing your visitors with instructions on what they should do next is crucial if you want them to convert to customers. Even if your website has amazing content, and even if you are an industry leader, no one will buy anything off your website unless you tell them exactly how – this includes creating a simple and easy-to-understand CTA within your website stating exactly what they need to do next in order to buy from you.
One very important call to action on any page is a form to capture information. This allows the visitor to exchange their contact details with you in return for something like a free report or a step-by-step process. Allowing them to register helps you create a communication channel and gives them an opportunity to provide feedback.
Once you’ve got them subscribed to your email platform, you have a perfect way to stay in touch and nurture that business/customer relationship.
Not sure how to do this? Contact the skilled folks at Orange Media for ideas.
Your Site Isn’t Mobile Friendly
Most smartphones run faster than many computers. And a whopping 91 per cent of the global internet population relies on tablets or smartphones to browse the web. The demand for mobile optimisation has been increasing exponentially.
Google places such a high expectation for websites to be mobile-friendly that your ranking on search engine results pages could be hampered if your site isn’t “responsive.”
A responsive site is a type of website that can be viewed on any device regardless of whether it be a computer, laptop, tablet, or mobile phone. Mobile-friendly websites provide an excellent foundation for growing a successful business as they make your website accessible to the widest potential audience and group of people.
Without a responsive design or a mobile-friendly website, you’re not only missing out on a large chunk of the market, but you’re also missing out on most traffic.
There are many ways to make a website more responsive. Some common methods include using a content delivery network (CDN), optimising images, and using caching.
A CDN can help improve website responsiveness by delivering content from servers that are closer to the user’s location, improving page load times.
Images can also be optimised to improve website responsiveness. This can involve reducing the file size of images, using proper file formats, and using responsive image tags.
Caching can also help improve website responsiveness. By storing frequently accessed files in a cache, the website can avoid having to fetch those files from the server each time they are needed. This can improve page load times and help the website handle more traffic.
Your web developer should have other suggestions to make your site mobile-friendly. Why not contact Orange Media today for some ideas?
Search engines cannot find your site
Search engine optimisation (SEO) can make your dream website a reality.
SEO isn’t just a nice thing to incorporate into your website. It’s imperative.
Your website needs to be found. Your business needs a way for potential customers and clients to find exactly what you offer because the main purpose of the Internet is communication and information exchange.
Your business has a website, which means there are written words on it, making it important for searches with keywords to show up as results for people who are looking for your service or product.
But not only do you have a site, now your company has to learn more about search engine optimisation so people can find your site by typing in specific words that relate directly to what you’re offering.
The goal of SEO is always to have your site appear as the first search result when someone searches for a particular keyword. This is a very important step in making sure your site is getting the traffic it needs. Good SEO improves the volume and quality of traffic to your website from search engines via unpaid (organic) search results.
Search engine optimisation is implementing a combination of on-site and off-site search engine techniques. This can be done on any kind of website, and the basic principles of search engine optimisation apply to all websites and many search engines.
Many organisations find it beneficial to hire someone who understands SEO rather than try to learn it themselves. And if an SEO strategist makes changes that allow customers to find your site more often, the expense could very well be worth it.
Your site is slow
Most people don’t know the speed of their websites. They just publish a site and hope for the best. This is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. A slow website is almost always a dead website.
Slow websites don’t get the traffic they need, and they don’t make the money they should. But how fast is too slow? Any site that loads under 2 seconds is acceptable. Any site that loads over 10 seconds is unacceptable. So, let’s do a bit of math: if your site takes 5 seconds to load, you’re losing 67 per cent of your traffic. If your site takes 10 seconds to load, you’re losing 100 per cent of your traffic.
But how do you know how fast your website is?
There are many tools to help you with that. Any experienced web developer (like the team at Orange Media) can look at all the factors slowing down your site and give you suggestions for how to speed things up.
You don’t update your site
Each page of your website is like a chapter in a book. But a book is just a collection of pieces of paper that are put on a shelf until someone takes it off, reads it, and then puts it back on the shelf. You can’t update a book quickly.
But a website is different. People come back to their favourites regularly to get new information. If they come back several times, and the content of your site hasn’t changed, they’ll simply stop visiting.
Your brick-and-mortar store isn’t sitting on a corner with no new products or services, right? Your website is just the same. The site needs to be updated. Either you can take the time to publish new information about new products or services, or you can hire a web developer to maintain your site for you.
Google and other search engines notice when the content on your site is updated. If the information is static, the search engine will list your site on later results pages.
Poorly written content
Poorly written content is one of the biggest reasons your site is underperforming. Your content is the foundation of your website. Poorly written content tells visitors you either don’t know any better or you’re too lazy to make sure everything makes sense. And people who think business owners are lazy and don’t care to tend to not purchase from them.
The most common problem with poorly written content is that it isn’t written in a way that connects with the audience. You can have the best content in the world, but if it doesn’t connect with the people, it will not do you any good. The way to fix this issue is to focus on your target audience.
Often organisations overlook using a professional copywriter to produce the copy on their sites. The return on your investment into a professional copywriter could be incredible. A professional copywriter can write in the correct tone and voice of your organisation, correctly represent your brand and values, help determine and write for your ideal customer, and write content that conforms to SEO.
There you have it
Six reasons you may have an underperforming website and suggestions for website performance improvement.
The Orange Media team is ready to discuss these issues with you and develop a plan to create clear calls to action, make your site mobile-friendly, incorporate SEO strategies, maintain your site, speed upload times, and write better content.
Your website needs to bring in new customers. By addressing these six areas, you can increase your chances of thriving in our global, digital economy.
