How to Give Your Website a Performance Boost
In today’s world the official website is an important part of any business model. This is why there is a lot of talk about boosting the performance of a website. With the search engines taking the lead in how people find and consume online content, a website’s profitability has become more dependent on a scientific approach than on luck.
Since digital marketing and web development and design have become too complicated, many business owners don’t know where to start. Therefore, we are here. We will help you identify the key areas of your website and provide you with practical advice on how to boost their performance.
Establish Clear Goals
Website performance is a very broad category that covers too many goals. Since every business is unique, you will have to devote some time to establish clear business goals and determine how to achieve them. These goals will reflect your website performance goals, and what’s even more important, they will give your website performance boost strategy a much-needed structure.
These are the most common goals:
- Increase sales of products or services
- Increase the number of people who subscribe to your mailing list
- Increase engagement of people reading your blog posts
- Increase traffic
- Improve customer satisfaction by delivering great customer support
- Improve overall user experience
We also have to stress the importance of understanding that website performance does not equal website loading speed. Website load speed is just one of the key areas you can improve to boost overall performance, especially in the website traffic, customer experience, and satisfaction areas.
Understand Your Traffic
After you have established your goals, you will have to understand your traffic. In other words, you will have to analyze it. This is really important because it will help you sort out the best performing areas of your website from the ones that don’t perform as well. On top of that, you will also be able to assess the efficiency of your digital marketing strategy.
The thing is that your website visitors come from a variety of places – some of them convert, others don’t. By analyzing your website traffic you will be able to determine:
- Where the traffic originates from.
- Which sources generate customers.
- Which sources generate visitors that bounce off your website.
This is will put you at a significant advantage. Since you will determine which sources generate high-quality leads, you can now expand your digital marketing strategy to get more of those coming. On the other hand, you can identify the pages that cause the visitors to bounce off, and make relevant changes to nurture those leads.
This is not hard to assess. You can use one of the best tools on the market, which is also free – Google Analytics. Here is a great guide if you want to learn how to use this tool to find traffic sources for each page on your website.
Learn How Visitors Use Your Website
The next thing you need to do is to learn how your website visitors are interacting with your website. This will help you learn how to leverage your website to increase lead generation and conversion. Ask yourself the following questions:
- Why are my visitors spending time on my website?
- What pushes them away? Why do they leave?
- What are they looking for?
- Is there something they ignore?
If you don’t know the answer to these questions, then you need to devote some time and get them answered. The best tool for this purpose is heatmaps software. Within just a couple of days of embedding this tool on your website, you will be able to discover a lot of interesting facts about your visitors’ behavior and your website.
After all, maybe you have all the important elements in your website layout, but they are improperly positioned. Your visitors can’t find them and drift off to a better place.
These are the three most important heatmaps:
- Hover heatmap – this one will help you identify the areas where the visitors hover their mouse cursor. These are also called interest maps, because they point out the areas of your website that are most interesting to your visitors. More importantly, they will show you the areas that are not, and that’s exactly what you will have to optimize.
- Click heatmap – as the name suggests, these maps will show you the often-clicked areas on your website. What should you address? If people are clicking on the unclickable elements, you have to fix it and give them what they want.
- Scroll heatmap – with these maps, you will see how far users scroll down. This can help you determine the preferable content length and proceed with optimization accordingly.
Consistency is The Key
If you want to achieve your goals, you have to give your best to continuously improve your website’s performance. This is why we suggest that you incorporate the above-mentioned practices into an ongoing website performance boost strategy. This is the only way to ensure long-term results.
Furthermore, online habits and behaviors change, and you will have to stay current with the best practices to meet the growing expectations of online content consumers, i.e. your potential customers.
Once you know your goals, it becomes easy to maximize the output of your current website and identify new opportunities for improvement. Using the proper tools and being consistent in the optimization process will help you leverage your online presence and reap the benefits of a well-performing website.