Is Your Outdated Website Costing You Money?

Your website might be the only asset that works for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days of the year. But have you ever measured its performance? A bad website can cost you clients, slow down your growth, and repel new job candidates.

What are your website goals?

Have you taken the time to decide what you want from a website? Is your company’s website simply an online business card or would you like it to do more? Does your current website truly represent your business? It is important to have clearly defined objectives for what you want from a website. A few examples are:

• Grow your email subscriber list – What is the number one thing many of us do first thing in the morning? Check email is probably a common answer. Growing your subscriber list allows you to pitch potential clients and keep you in your customer’s mind.
• Show up for certain search terms – Are you showing up in search engine results for the queries your customers are entering? It’s not enough to assume you know what search term your customers are using. A professional can help you find out what search term converts best for you and should be targeted.
• Get leads – Are customers contacting you through your website? If they are contacting you, are you hearing from as many of them as you could?

How do you know if your website isn’t performing?

The best way to find out if your website is underperforming is to gather and dissect user data. There are many tools and ways to accomplish this. Hotjar is a service you can add to your website that allows you to see your user’s behavior, and create heat maps and recordings of real website visitors navigating your site. This is valuable data that can help you identify website weakness and improvements. Google Analytics is a free solution that can show you information like bounce rate, behavior flow, and user acquisition.

What can cause your website to lose money?

Not working on mobile

Most people now visit websites on their mobile devices. Without having a mobile-friendly website, you could be alienating over half of your website visitors.

Long contact forms

Long contact forms with a lot of fields to fill in lead most people to leave a page. Data shows shorter forms convert better. See the below image of a long website form. Now see the Google Analytics data for this page. In the above example, almost 60% of users leave the website when encountering this form. Out of the 941 visitors who made it to this page, only 50 visitors filled out the form. In the above example you can see visitors bouncing back and forth between the homepage and the contact form but ultimately leaving the site. The purpose of this form is for visitors to contact the company, but visitors are ultimately discouraged by the lengthy contact form. Does your website have a way for visitors to easily contact you?

Cheap Hosting

Everyone loves saving money. But did you know that your $5 per month web hosting could be affecting your search engine results? Pages with a longer load time tend to have higher bounce rates and lower average time on page. Research by Moz has shown that Google looks at time to first byte (TTFB) as a ranking factor for search engine results. The optimal server response time is under 200ms. Use a tool like WebPageTest to measure your TTFB.

No Call to Action

Do your web visitors know what they should be doing once they reach your website? Use calls to action to direct your website visitors to the desired behavior. An effective call to action should tell readers that clicking on a link or image will get them what they want or need.

What do the best websites do differently

• They make their value clear – Take care to make sure your main headings (H1) and marketing copy clearly show visitors what you do and how you can help them. First impressions are formed quickly. Have a clear headline, and test results.
• They tend to have short forms – Limit your contact form to only the essential fields. Respect your user’s time and sanity. Nobody wants to fill out 20+ fields just to hear back from you. Your user wants to contact you. Make it as easy as possible for them to do so.
• They take mobile visitors seriously – With mobile visitors making up over 50% of site visits, many sites are now making decisions with mobile visitors first in mind. If you aren’t giving customers what they want while on their phone or tablet, you’re losing them to brands that do.
• They hire a professional – Not everyone knows how to parse through user data and run heatmaps, and most people don’t stay up-to-date on the latest web trends. Not everyone can hire a full-time employee to manage these things. That’s why many websites rely on an experienced web agency like TheeDigital to help them realize their full web potential, identify improvements, and make more money. Your website might be losing you business, when it should be one of the most valuable tools in your business.

Tags: Digital Marketing • Web Design