Living in the digital world, a website is now a necessity for a business, big or small. If you have a business and don’t have a website, you are probably losing a number of great opportunities for your business.
A website itself can be used to accomplish many different marketing strategies to help your business grow. The web has a far wider reach than any other form of advertising. While it takes time to build up enough traffic to your website to make a worthwhile impact on your company`s marketing campaign, it costs next to nothing to do so.
Your website will be the center of your company`s online presence; through it, you advertise your business around the Web on social networking sites, forums and through pay-per- click advertising programs.
Increasing visibility is one major factor that makes having a website important. Even if people have heard about your company, they may want to carry out research online first, before entertaining the idea of leaving the comfort of their own home.
Websites usually provide a map and directions to company`s shops or offices, for visitors to less likely have trouble finding your location. Another important reason why having a website to represent your business is to give you credibility. By building a website, you are giving your business the opportunity to tell consumers why they should trust you and the testimonials and facts to back up those opportunities.
Believe it or not, most people will search the internet for a product or service before the purchase to check the credibility first. When you provide good service or product, positive word-of- mouth about your business is likely to spread. This in turn, delivers more repeat and new business.
A website will not only give you credibility but it will also help to give the impression that your company is bigger and more successful than it may actually be. One of the great things about the internet is that the size of your company does not really matter. There is no reason that you can`t get your site to rank in Google ahead of a large multinational competitor and funnel off some of their traffic.
This is a big part of the reason that a website is even more important for a small business than a big one, it tends to level the playing field.
I get it – now is not the perfect time to talk about how great our websites are. We get that most marketing budgets have been significantly decreased and new launches pushed in time. But hear me out – you don’t need a whole new website to improve your online presence. If your site has good bones, homepage redesign can do wonders for your business, without breaking the bank.
The homepage is the key landing page for most websites, and online, the same as anywhere else, you need to put your best face forward. So, if you were to do one thing with your website – have the homepage redesigned. Since most users land there, if the homepage isn’t enticing enough and doesn’t direct users to do what you want them to do, you might lose their interest way before they even see your offering, no matter how amazing it is.
While you might feel that keeping your marketing budget at the bare minimum and hoping for the quick resolution of this whole mess is the best strategy, your competitors might not.
Plus once the economy starts to bounce back, you’ll want to make sure it’s your business that comes to people’s minds first. This won’t happen if you lock your marketing budget down. Now is the time to strategize and build.
I’ve been talking about website creation process and now I want to talk about Optimization.
In this age of instant updates, same-day delivery, and otherwise high customer service expectations, site visitors simply are not going to wait very long for your website to load. Research shows that milliseconds can make a real difference in customer behavior and get those sales conversions.
Most website owners automatically assume they need all the “bells and whistles” on their site to get the most customers. But those extra features, such as parallax web scrolling and the trendy moving background are only fine as long as customers don’t have to wait 10 seconds for the site to load.
The major point to keep in mind is that a fast website comes with some sacrifices. You’re going to have to decide very quickly about what constitutes the core of your user experience, and then get rid of all the “extras” that don’t enhance that primary experience.
In order to provide the most optimal, fast, and efficient user experience to your customers, I recommend 7 key strategies to increase traffic to your website. Please read on!
1. Optimize for mobile friendliness and speed; If you use Astra theme as suggested previously, you don’t have any issues.
2. Reduce image size; (preferably Smush, it’s a free plugin)
3. Try using a CDN; a content delivery network, or content distribution network, is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. The goal is to provide high availability and performance by distributing the service spatially relative to end users. -Wikipedia
4. Cache as much as possible
5. Reduce the number of HTTP requests
6. Load JavaScript asynchronously
7. Adopt cloud-based website monitoring
P.S: Seek an expert’s advice as some of these modifications could be catastrophic to your website.
