An effective website is the balance of many things, but you need to ask yourself which is the most important? Is it the functionality, its accessibility, its search engine results or its cost effectiveness?

But in recent times, most business websites are not effective as they can be in attracting customers and generating new business. The key strategies to consider to make your website more effective are:

  • Understand your users.
  • Use Call to actions.
  • Analyze results.
  • Website Speed.

Understand your users.

Your website is dependent on your users and their ability to get what they want out of your site. The first step in understanding your users is to ask your user’s questions and develop a profile which will help you identify your ideal customer’s demographics, interests, salary and location. It essentially tells everything else that is put onto your site. I recommend that you ask yourself the following questions before you continue.

  • Who are your users?
  • Why are they visiting your site?
  • What do they want to find out?
  • What do they want to do when they find it?
  • How will you help them do it?

Using Flash animations or big pictures with a text that reads “Welcome to the world of tomorrow” can be eye pleasing but can take minutes to load so there is a chance that Web surfers will leave your site before they had a chance to view your home page. It is also important that if you use a Flash based intro as your index page, chances are that your site will not show up on search engines.

Using call to actions

It’s important to think of every page as a potential landing page. The home page is not necessarily the first place where visitors will land on your website, so you should make sure that you include clear call-to-actions on every page. These will focus the user and also help you measure your effectiveness. You need to ask yourself how you can persuade the user to perform these calls-to-actions. The answer is simple: just make it easy for them by providing clear links or buttons. Explain what it is you want them to do and what will happen once they click and finally reward them with confirmations such as ‘Thank you for subscribing’.

Analyze your results

Google Analytics provides you with the ability to know how visitors behave on your site. It gives you the opportunity to see where your visitors are coming from, how your visitors found your website and how long they are spending on your site. It will show you if visitors found your site directly from search engines or from another websites. Data from Google Analytics can determine which social media site delivers the most traffic to your site, what pages your visitors are looking at and what page they leave on. Crazy egg will show you a heat map of your site details where your users are clicking.

Website Speed

Optimizing speed on your website is a major factor in making your website more effective. Installing plugins is another way to boost the speed of your website. The Lazy Load Plugin will load images to improve the load time of your webpages while the WP Smush it plugin will reduce the size of images and improves the overall performance of your site. Load Impact to checks how your site will perform under intense strain.

The bottom line is that there is no point in measuring the effectiveness of your website if you are not going to do anything about it. By making small changes to your website over time rather than doing it all at once is better for your users. The important factor to remember is that your website effectiveness starts and ends with your users.

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