Spring Cleaning for Your Website: Six Simple Steps to Clean Out the Cobwebs and Boost Performance

As winter finally releases its icy grip and spring sweeps in with its sunny days and warm breezes, we all feel the urge to refresh our homes, from scrubbing the floors and windows to touching up paint and washing down siding.

Just as the cold months of winter can take a toll on your house, they can also have an effect on your website. From the busyness of the holiday rush to year-end tax planning and new-year forecasting, by the time spring arrives, your site may well be showing the signs of neglect as a result of your preoccupation with other areas of your business.

But as they say, there’s no time like the present, so why not take up your virtual broom and clear out the cobwebs? Here are six quick fixes you can implement today to give your site a boost in performance that will benefit your business for months to come:

1. Publish a new press release or blog article.

If the date on the last new piece of content published to your site was six months ago or more, that’s a glaring red flag to visitors that your site has gone stale and there’s no fresh information for them to find there. But in just a few hours’ time, you can eliminate that red flag by updating your company news section and publishing some interesting new content to your blog.

2. Update the copyright statement.

While you may not have given a second thought to the copyright statement on your site since it launched, don’t underestimate the impact this seemingly small detail can have on visitors’ perception of your site.

If your copyright statement is a year or two out of date, this is a glaring sign that indicates to a new visitor (whether accurate or not), that this site hasn’t been touched in ages. And, following that logic, they’ll question why they should bother to delve further into your site if you can’t even be bothered keep it current.

Bringing your copyright statement up to date won’t take more than a few minutes, but it will make a big difference in convincing visitors that the site is current.

3. Change the home page image.

In the world of website design, large, visually rich images are en vogue these days. This trend, however, is a bit of a double-edged sword. While these large images make a strong first impression, for repeat visitors, they can cause design fatigue and lose their impact altogether.

Don’t worry, though. You don’t need a complete redesign to breathe new life into your site. Simply replacing the primary image on the home page can make your site feel rejuvenated and prompt visitors to view its content with fresh eyes.

4. Visit the site on a mobile device.

How well does your site work on a mobile device? Better yet, when was the last time you actually tried to use your site on a phone or on a tablet?

Many website owners do not visit their own sites on mobile devices with any regularity – but your customers certainly do. In fact, industry experts predict that over 50 percent of all web traffic will come from mobile devices by 2015 (yes, folks, that’s next year!). Is your site ready to handle this influx of mobile traffic and provide a consistently good experience across a wide range of devices and screen sizes?

The only way to be sure is to visit your site on a few different mobile devices to get a feel for what your customers see. If it’s hard to navigate from one page to the next, if the text is difficult to read or if certain content elements (such as videos) don’t work at all, now is the time to start making plans for how you will adapt and evolve your site in order to accommodate this rapidly growing percentage of mobile visitors.

5. Install Google Analytics.

Do you know how many visitors are coming to your site each month? Do you know how long they stay on the site and how many pages they view before they leave? Do you know which pages are being visited most often?

This information and much more can be found simply by adding analytics software to your site. While there are a number of different options available, Google Analytics is an industry standard tool that is both free to install and intuitive to use. You can even set up automated reports so that you receive a consistent stream of data on your site’s performance and the traffic it is generating for your business.

Setting up a Google Analytics account and installing it on your site is a quick and easy process, but it does require adding some code to your site, so it’s best to seek the assistance of your web developer in the initial set-up. Once it’s up and running, however, you’ll have a wealth of useful information at your fingertips at the cost of $0.

6. Run a performance test.

How quickly does your site load for your visitors? Website performance is one of the most often overlooked aspects of a site’s success when, in fact, a site that loads quickly not only provides a better user experience for your customers, it can also help boost your site’s search engine rankings.

Pingdom offers a free website speed test that will give you invaluable information on how quickly your site loads, how large it is, how its performance stacks up against other sites and which elements of your page are the largest (and thereby have the greatest impact on load time). Based on the results of this test, you may be able to identify certain items, such as large images or videos, that could be compressed or eliminated entirely to give your site’s performance a much-needed shot in the arm.

Each of these six steps will take just a few minutes or, at most, a few hours of time to implement, but if you seize the day and do them now, you’ll reap the benefits for months to come of a site that’s fast, up-to-date and easily accessible to users regardless of device or screen size.

Let’s Talk Turkey: The Five Most Important Things Visitors Want from Your Website

What do your visitors want from your website?

The answer to this question depends on a number of factors, including the nature of your business, the type of person who typically visits your site and what they hope to accomplish while they’re there. However, there are certain basic needs and expectations that transcend these specific circumstances and are universal to all visitors.

Over the past few months, I’ve conducted an informal survey of clients, coworkers, friends, family and others that I’ve encountered, asking them this one simple question:

“What do you want when you visit a website?”

While there were many different responses to this question, there were five that I heard again and again. Each person I spoke with mentioned at least one of these five, and many cited more than one.

Let’s take a look at these five critical elements that visitors want from your website:

1. Ease of use

Without a doubt, the most common answer I heard was that people want websites to be easy to use, and this makes perfect sense. After all, it’s 2014. We’re all well versed in using the Web to conduct the business of our day-to-day lives. There’s no reason your website should require a learning curve just to get from point A to point B. Yet, far too many sites are guilty of presenting visitors with an experience that’s confusing, frustrating and completely unsatisfying.

The definitive guidebook of usability, Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think, asserts that web applications must explain themselves. When a visitor looks at a web page, the next step should be obvious and intuitive. With the world of options available at their fingertips, visitors have next to no patience when it comes to dealing with sites where there are any sort of obstacles standing in their way. If they can’t figure out where to go and what to do next in as little as three seconds, it could well be a deal breaker that causes them to abandon your site – and by proxy your business – altogether.

Navigation menus that are difficult to use, important content that is buried deep in your site and nearly impossible to find or a design schema that does not provide visitors good visual cues and clear calls-to-action to direct their experience are all pitfalls that must be avoided if you want to ensure that your site meets the acceptable threshold for ease-of-use.

2. Good information architecture

Just as nearly everyone I talked with said they want a site that’s easy to use, many also said that they want information to be easy to find. The key to achieving this is by creating a concise, logical navigation structure. If your site encompasses a large repository of information and content, it’s a good idea to include a search tool that lets your visitors to use keywords to drill down to the information they’re seeking right away rather than hunting and clicking through the site page by page.

There is a long-held myth of website design that claims all content on a site must be able to be reached in no more than two clicks. While that might sound great in theory, in reality, the task of developing an effective navigational structure is rarely that straightforward.

For example, if you had a website with a hundred pages of content, you could theoretically have direct links to each one of those 100 pages right on your home page in order to allow visitors to access all of your content in only one click. Awesome, right? No – not awesome at all. While that massive menu of links might offer one-click access to your site’s entire content catalog, it will also be a confusing, gargantuan mess that provides visitors with little in the way of clear direction.

Remember, visitors to your site are making instinctive decisions in as little as three seconds. They do not want to sift through a laundry list of dozens of links in order to find the one that’s relevant to them. Rather, they want to make easy, logical choices that get them to where they want to go without a lot of guesswork and back-button clicking.

3. Fast load time

Another popular answer I heard in the course of my survey was fast load time. A webpage that takes too long to fully load is major source of frustration for visitors. After all, if they want to make a decision in as little as three seconds, and your site takes seven seconds to load, chances are good that they’re going to choose to navigate away from your site before they ever even see it. Seven seconds may not seem like a long time, but in the instant-gratification-driven world of the Internet, it’s practically an eternity.

If your site is slow to load for visitors who have a fast Internet connection, you’re really going to be in trouble with users who don’t have the benefit of a lightning-speed connection, including those on mobile devices who might be in a location where network coverage is slow or spotty.

Ensuring that your site loads quickly is crucial to providing an optimal experience for all visitors, regardless of their device or quality of connection. After all, no one has ever complained that a site loaded too fast for them!

4. No ads

Advertising is a necessary evil for many websites. If your business model depends at least in part on revenue generated by ads on your site, then removing those ads simply because visitors don’t care for them is probably not a realistic option. Still, the fact that ads offer little more than an annoyance to most visitors is something that you should be aware of.

When considering ads for your website, you must take into account not only the needs of your business but also the needs of your customers. Ads that make your site more difficult to use should be avoided at all cost, especially intrusive ads that take over the screen or obstruct areas of your content with over-the-top, in-your-face animation or video. These “take-over” ads are impossible for website visitors to ignore; they have to interact with them on some level, even if it’s just to hit the “close” icon, in order to achieve their purpose in coming to your site. Of course, the inability to disregard these ads is why advertisers love this format, but if you use them on your site, you’re running the risk that your customers and prospects will quickly tire of the hassle of dealing with them and seek out a competitor who will offer them a more user-friendly browsing experience.

Ads may be a fact of life for your website, but the types of ads you allow is well within your control. Listen to your customers, and make sure you choose advertising display options that do not compromise the overall quality of their user experience.

5. No bugs

One of the worst experiences a user can have online is when they have invested time in a site, gone through the necessary steps to complete a transaction – whether it’s to make a purchase, sign up for a membership, complete a request form, etc. – only to have the site crash and burn during the final steps of that transaction. This is a soul-crushing experience and one of the best ways to drive customers away for good!

Make sure that your website is working as expected at all times. If you’ve recently incorporated new features into your site, thoroughly test not only those new features but also all other existing subsystems within the site to ensure that no problems have been introduced along with the new code that has been added to the site.

Even if you’ve not recently added any new features or functionality, you should schedule routine testing to make sure the site is operating as expected and does not crash just as your visitors are about to cross the finish line and complete a successful transaction.

What I didn’t hear

The five elements covered in this article are ones that I heard again and again during my experiment. Of course, I heard many other answers as well, including “works well on my phone,” “good prices,” “information in Spanish” and “easy-to-find contact information.”

One of the most interesting discoveries to come out of my survey process was the answers that I didn’t hear. Not one person said that they wanted a site that “looked good” or had a “nice design.”

Nor did I hear any comments that people wanted features like “live chat” or “contact forms.” Does this mean that visitors do not want an attractively designed site or access to helpful features? Of course not – it means that those things should already be a part of a good site by default.

Great design is unobtrusive; it provides elegant yet simple visual cues that make the site easy to use and make information easy to find – two of the most commonly mentioned things that people want from a site. So, while the participants in my informal survey may not have cited beautiful design explicitly, they were, in fact, asking for it by proxy.

Great design and helpful features are not only important; they are expected.

In summary

It should come as no surprise that visitors want a site that is easy to use, loads quickly and works seamlessly. All of these should be par for the course for any site, which makes it all the more surprising to see so many sites that fail in even these most basic areas.

When evaluating the effectiveness of your site, start with these fundamentals. If your site fails the test in any one of these areas, then no amount of flashy features or advanced technology can compensate for the poor experience you’ve provided for your users. First and foremost, master the basics that visitors demand and then work up from there!