You’ve probably been to a busy, dizzying website with intruding interstitials, clunky layouts, slow load times, outdated fonts, conflicting colors, and more which can make or break the experience of your users. We’ve put together a guide to walk you through refreshing and improving your website design to help you gain more customers, conversions, and improve your site’s overall user experience.
Focus Area 1. Auditing Your Site
Creating a positive user experience for potential customers on your website
is important for any online business. Before you begin to change elements of your website, one of the first steps is to check out what you have so far in order to approach your redesign with a fully informed eye.
Investigate the Front End
First, investigate the front end of your website. Click through the different pages and elements of your site and see what pops out at you. Is there a block of text that can be written more concisely? Does your image in the top right not seem
to match as well with the rest of your content? Make a list of all the things that come to mind as you deep dive into the front-facing part of your site. Check out this blog that talks about how to perform a thorough content audit for your site if you’re looking for help making a start!
Investigate the Backend
Next, it’s time to investigate the backend of your website. The first question to ask yourself: how are you currently tracking metrics? Are you using tools like Google Analytics? If not, that’s the first place to start! Check out our blog that talks about how to integrate Google Analytics into your WordPress site.
If you’re already utilizing a tracking tool, there are a few important metrics you should look at:
What pages are most popular? This metric will help show you what is currently working well for your site.
What’s your average bounce rate? The overall goal is to avoid a high bounce rate. By looking at this statistic you can better understand if customers enter your site and immediately find what they’re looking for, or if they leave quickly to go look at another source.
What’s the most popular customer journey? Where are people dropping off and what pages are they navigating to most often? Depending on these answers, you can often tell how well your site’s UI/UX is working and whether there are places you need to edit and improve.
Some aspects that could affect this are page speed, appropriate content on each page, and how user-friendly your website truly is.
During this process, take notes on what you notice when looking at your tracking tools to help you decide what to focus on when you start your editing process.
Perform A/B Testing
Next, it may be smart to work in some A/B Testing. This is a great way to organically test whether some elements you noticed in your audit are legitimate issues or not. To perform an A/B test begin changing certain elements of your website like text size, colors, and images one at a time and see if each edit makes a difference in your conversions. By changing one element at a time, you will quickly know which elements are working and which aren’t.
Ask Your Audience What They Want
You have the best resource at your disposal: your existing customers! Set up a poll directly on your homepage or social media or even send an email or create a survey to obtain your customers’ opinion on aspects like fonts, navigation, and graphics.
See if they have any comments on how they think your site could flow better or be more appealing to a future audience!
Focus Area 2: Updating Your Look: Branding Guidelines
Now that you’ve done some research and you’ve armed yourself with areas to focus on, it’s time to start the actual editing process. The first aspect to consider is the aesthetics of your website. Having a tool like branding guidelines can establish consistency in your branding. Fonts and Sizing
First off, be intentional and strategic with your typography. Keep your font and sizing variations to a minimum. For font changes and sizing, less is more. Some strategic variations can look cool but use with discretion.
Images
An easy place to start is with obvious stock photos lurking around your website. Avoid staged pictures (i.e. portraits of individuals staring into the camera or fake group high fives). If you must use a stock photo, choose natural, realistic poses, creative camera angles, and lighting. Choose photos that align with your brand. Want to layer text over your photos? Make sure the text stands out. Here’s a guide on how to create custom graphics for your site if you decide you’re feeling creative and want to experiment with your own!
Colors
The colors displayed on your website are also important. By using colors strategically you can help guide your customers through your website, carefully choosing where their eyes go to first and the pattern of things they notice as they scan your various pages. Certain colors have certain meanings to users and there is an entire color language called Pantone. Here are some examples:
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Red: passion, anger, love, confidence
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Orange: youthfulness, cheer, warmth, hunger
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Yellow: sunshine, happiness, energy, optimism
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Green: nature, fertility, balance, cleanliness
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Blue: water, tranquility, trust, power • Purple: nobility, power, elegance,
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wisdom
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White: peace, balance, purity, simplicity, winter
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Gray: neutral, sophistication, balance, wisdom
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Black: exclusivity, modern, power, sophistication, mystery
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Brown: earth, stability, tradition, nature
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Pink: love, romance, femininity, baby girls, humanistic
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Turquoise: tranquility, clarity, compassion, healing
Logo Usage
Your logo is you. Give it top billing! Logos set the tone, value, aesthetic, and recognition of your brand. You want it to be remembered! Many companies choose to display their logo in the upper left corner of their website.
WordPress Themes
Using an updated WordPress theme is an essential part of any WordPress website. WordPress themes can even impact the loading times of your whole site. Browse the many free themes available to you in case you decide your site needs a complete refresh.
Focus Area 3: Enhancing Your Website User Experience
At the end of the day, how your users interact with your website can be the difference between a conversion and a missed opportunity. The user interface and user experience, better known as UI/UX, is an important thing to consider when committing to redesigning and refreshing your online presence! Below are some ways you can make sure yours is working in your favor rather than against you.
Simplicity/Spacing
Using white space, also called negative space, can help you bring attention to details of your site that are most important. Spacing around titles can even improve your customers’ experience by 20%. More white space helps separate sections and guides your customers’ eyes down the page. Less white space can indicate that elements of your site are supposed
to go together. Through the yin and yang of content and spacing you can control how your user experiences every part of your page.
Website Navigation and Menu
Another important element of website design is your navigational system. The most important thing to remember when building your website’s navigation is that your users need to be able to find what they are looking for quickly and easily. Make sure your search tools stand out (normally located in the upper right corner) and that your colors are working together for readability.
Your menu should be located at the top of the page and should have no more than seven items (not including dropdowns). There should be ample space in between menu sections for aesthetic reasons. It can be helpful to use a fixed navigation bar as well so if your customers want to move to another section of the site they don’t have to scroll all the way back to the top of the page. A good rule of thumb for your overall design is that users should be able to access any point in three clicks or less. This ensures both efficiency and lack of confusion.
Mobile Responsive and Optimization
In 2021 it’s important your website is both mobile-friendly and responsive.
On average, 80% of users are searching on their smartphones so speed is vital. Though WordPress automatically makes sure your page is responsive (scales up and down with screen size changes and various browsers) it can be helpful to place buttons in the middle of your page for optimum mobile use. It’s also important to ensure a similar experience on both mobile and desktop viewing. This will help with consistency and return customers.
Hosting Choice
53% of people will navigate away from a page that takes more than
3 seconds to load. This means who you choose to host your website will have a major impact not only on your speed, but also on your website storage, uptime, and responsiveness to any future problems. That’s why we recommend going with Hosting.com. Not only do we have a 99.9% uptime guarantee but our Turbo plans can increase your load times by 20x! This will improve your bounce rates, SEO scores, and conversions.
Speed
Explore these steps for a faster user experience with your chosen host:
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Optimize images
Reduce plugins
Clean up your themes -
Use a CDN
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Check as you grow to make sure you don’t need more resources (VPS Hosting can help!)
Selling Yourself and Your Website
Now that you have cleaned up the look and feel of your website and optimized your site for speed, it’s important to make sure you’re selling yourself and converting your customers! Below are helpful considerations.
Blog Posts and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Today, the way to win the web is through quality content and proper SEO procedures. Good blog posts keep your customers engaged and eager for more content. To achieve this, a solid SEO foundation is necessary. Start by targeting keywords to move your site up the ranks on Google searches. You want to generate as much traffic as you can and build credibility within your chosen industry. Check out our guide to SEO-Friendly blog formatting to see what you can do to improve your next post! Plus check out these three SEO mistakes to avoid.
Social Sharing
At the end of each blog post (and preferably at the bottom of your website), there should be links for social sharing. This will allow your followers to share your valuable content on different social media platforms. This is critical to help you build your following and to create an easy way for people to find your site.
Social Proof
You should also have areas of social proof somewhere on your website. This can be anything from written reviews to videos of customer feedback. These areas of true customer engagement lend your brand and your site credibility. They help potential customers trust that you will do what you say you do based on the positive feedback of others. We recommend you try and implement videos because these are a great way to keep your customers engaged with your website and fortify/strengthen human connection.
Calls to Actions
Finally, calls to action are where you close the deal and help your website convert potential customers into customers for life. Make sure they are
strategically placed in places like the top of your navigation, below sections that specifically require action, and at the bottom of the web page. They can be in banners, buttons, or whatever form you like the most! Some good examples include:
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Sign up for our email list!
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Shop in our store!
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Fill out your own lead form.
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Click for more info.
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See pricing.
Conclusion
Refreshing your website can be a long process, but we hope with the help of this guide it’s both easy and successful. Make sure to check out Hosting.com for great hosting plans for your website and subscribe to our newsletter for future helpful content.
