Attracting visitors to a website can feel like a never-ending challenge, but there are a number of ways to get people to come to a site and convert them into new customers. One approach is to focus on simple website design tweaks that can attract new visitors and improve the experience they have on the site. Let’s take a look at five website design ideas that can quickly attract new customers.
1. Get Analytic
Every modern website should have a quality analytics package embedded right into its design. These systems track a wide range of data points regarding visitors, and they can help you develop a clearer picture of what’s going on. If visitors are being directed to orphaned pages, a good analytics package will identify this and notify you, allowing you to fix them or remove links to them. You can also use the information gathered to see what pages are attracting visitors and where they originate. This allows you to tailor your new content toward ideas that attract and interest readers.
Analytic packages should tell you a number of basic things about your site’s audience. This should include demographic data, such as approximate age, gender and location. If a site is trying to attract customers from the United States, but its traffic is mostly coming from India, its operators may need to rethink what type of content is on offer. Analytics can allow you to discover these gaps between your target audience and your current visitors, and that makes taking corrective action much easier.
2. Improve Your Site’s Speed
The speed of a website can help attract new visitors in a number of ways. First, website load time is a critical part of how search engines rank different websites against each, so it’s a good idea to find the best website hosting available in order to obtain a good page load time. Second, visitors themselves are less likely to stay on a site if it loads slowly. A visitor who leaves is much less likely to ever come back and convert into a customer. Third, by finding the best website hosting that you can, you can focus on building your site, rather than struggling to keep it up and running.
Hosting is just one part of improving site speed, however. You may also wish to look into subscribing to a content delivery network in order to offload some of the burden of displaying some elements of your site. This can be especially helpful for sites that are heavy on images and videos.
A speed boost may also be gained by digging into the nuts and bolts of the code running your website. For example, bloggers running WordPress often find that they’re running unnecessary plug-ins. By identifying wasteful plug-ins, they can reduce the time that a blog takes to load. A similar audit of JavaScript snippets running on a site can also yield surprising improvements in load times.
3. Play Nice Wit the Mobile Devices
Mobile-friendly design is another approach that yields more benefits than you might anticipate. The big search engines, such as Google, place a lot of emphasis on how mobile-friendly a website is, and they tend to avoid providing search results that include pages that aren’t suitable for those devices. This means that mobile-friendly design is as much a part of search engine optimization as it is user interface design.
One question that will have to be addressed along the way toward making your site play better with mobile devices is how to achieve that goal. Some sites opt for building concurrent mobile and desktop versions of their content, and then they redirect users according to the headers that their devices send to the server. A process known as responsive design, however, is increasingly considered a best practice. This approach entails serving content from a single design, and then making the design respond automatically to fit the format of the device that’s pulling it up by using CSS and JavaScript tricks.
4. Modernization
Sometimes a design just looks old and ends up driving off potential customers. If a site is still using standard browser fonts instead of web fonts, users can see this. They don’t always know what they’re seeing or why it bothers them, but they just know that a site looks like it crawled out of the year 2005. If that’s the case, then you may wish to go through the main design of the site and determine where this can be quickly addressed.
Changing the fonts that are referenced in the CSS files is a fast way to modernize a site. You can also look at the color choices and the basic layout. A modern layout for a website tends to be fairly sparse, and the colors are typically subtle and light. The customer’s eye will catch these changes, and the novelty alone may stimulate new interest.
5. Navigation
The navigation structure of a website can lead to more customers abandoning a site than many operators expect. It’s a good idea to run user tests with people who weren’t involved with the design in order to see how people interact with it. A navigation system that feels intuitive to the person who built it might seem weird and cumbersome to a new visitor. By running these tests, you can identify where visitors are dropping out and remedy the problem quickly.
Conclusion
It doesn’t take a full redesign of a website in order to attract visitors. In many instances, you can tweak certain elements of a site in order to make it play better with visitors, search engine bots and mobile devices. These improvements can lead to a boost in search rankings and also keep visitors on-page longer. A visitor who is impressed with a site is more likely to share it through social media or link to it through a website or blog that they own. Those effects can quickly compound, helping to stoke interest in your site and turn more visitors into customers.
