If you’ve noticed that traffic at your website has been falling off but you’re not sure why, here are a few easy improvements that you can make to help your website be more successful.
- Improve Your Site Speed - It’s no secret that overall website speed is a big factor in determining how well your site will perform, so making adjustments to provide a faster site will undoubtedly improve your website metrics and make for a better user experience. If you’re website is hosted on slow or outdated servers, consider a new webhost that offers cloud based infrastructure.
- Limit Your Advertising Space - It’s natural for websites and blogs to offer advertising at their sites, but too many ads can be problematic. If your site is pulling advertising code from 15 different ad servers you’re impacting your website speed and forcing visitors to wait for your ad codes to display. Furthermore, ineffective ad code could be offering your advertisers free branding opportunities -  especially in the case of “media rich” ads that don’t require a click-through and a URL that can be easily entered into your search bar.
- Update Your Website - If your website looks the same way it did 3 years ago, it’s time for an updated look! Web Design programs such as Dreamweaver and FrontPage have been bettered with SaaS web building solutions that make creating a professional and attractive website easier than fooling around with outdated web design programs. Further, they offer clean and modern code that is easy to render.
- Use Multiple Media - If your current website doesn’t offer pictures or videos, you’re missing opportunities by not having Image or Video search traffic. Just ask yourself - what are your favorite text based websites that offer no images or video?
- Add Social Sharing Tools - This builds on #3. If your site doesn’t offer any kind of social sharing tools it makes it more difficult for your visitors to “share” your website with their friends and followers list. According to Alexa’s traffic rank, Facebook is the #2 most popular website on the Internet, Youtube is #3, Twitter is #9 and LinkedIn is #12. By offering easy-to-use social sharing buttons to your visitors you can improve the social aspect of your site considerably. If you don’t offer your visitors a way to “share” then chances are they won’t!
Luckily, none of these “capital improvements” are difficult to do and can vastly improve your website metrics. By offering a little less advertising you can make your website faster. An updated site offers a “fresh face” on your outward pointing image and is more interesting to visitors and search engines alike. Multimedia helps to improve metrics such as time on site and can pick up extra image and video search queries. Social Sharing tools make your site more compatible with today’s popular social destinations such as Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, DIIGO, FriendFeed and many others.
If after reading this you’ve decided to improve your online web presence, please consider MostHost’s Web Presence Builder as an easy to deploy DIY solution for revamping your website in the cloud.