A strong online presence can go a long way for businesses.
Establishing your business on social media is a good place to start, but a business website adds professionalism and provides other marketing opportunities.
Google processes over 40,000 searches every second and it’s designed to help people find answers to their questions.
Creating a site that provides those answers can get more eyes on your business and help you scale it. If you’re just getting started, there are a few helpful business development tips you can learn to help you grow.
1. Make Your Website Faster
If you have a slow website, you could lose prospective customers in a matter of seconds.
In 2017, the average load time for a website was 3.21 seconds. However, Google actually recommends that you cut this time down to less than 2 seconds.
A slow website increases the chances of turning away potential customers, or “bounce rate.”
Generally, websites load slowly for a variety of reasons. An overload of site users is a common problem because it strains site bandwidth.
Your site could also have internal issues such as unoptimized content demands more rendering time.
To fix this, you can use caching plugins that comb through each layer of your site for these issues. Auto Optimize is one of the best plugins to use for WordPress sites and other standard hosting platforms. Constantly perform website monitoring to make sure your website stays up and fast.
2. Implement Plugins for Email Opt-ins
Email is one of the most reliable resources you can use to market your business. It brings the highest ROI compared to other channels of advertising.
Building your email list increases customer retention and enables more promotion for products and services. In order to get your emails straight to your customers’ inboxes, you’ll need a web tool designed to collect and respect that confidential information.
There’s a wide variety of email marketing plugins that can help you automate building your list. Some of the top plugins and apps include:
- OptinMonster
- Mailchimp
- HubSpot Email Marketing
Email marketing has its difficulties. Mastering email deliverability is one of them. You’ll need to establish a positive sender credibility reputation so that customers can even receive your emails. There are some tools to help you increase your deliverability, such as Litmus.
3. Make Your Website Mobile Accessible
In 2020, the percentage of mobile users on the web exceeded 48% and the number of desktop users.
Clearly, mobile access to your site has some benefits to website traffic.
If you’re in the process of creating your site, look for building themes that say “mobile-responsive.” In 2021, most website builders offer themes with this feature and allow you to preview your site on mobile.
If you’ve already built a site without mobile accessibility, you can use plugins. WordPress is another go-to source for mobile optimization. With the WPtouch plugin, you can make your website mobile accessible and add new mobile-centered content.
4. Improve Customer Experience Through Business Web Development
Customer service is essential to any business. You can find tools to help you manage your customers and build a good reputation.
Businesses that receive a large volume of customer requests can use ticketing system plugins. These help you track and manage the requests in an orderly fashion.
For instance, Sola Support Tickets provides support tickets for each customer request. It also has a variety of notification prompts that you can match with customer actions. Sola Support Tickets also offers you mobile support notifications and “thank you” texts for customers.
Your email marketing service may include some of these customer service features, so be sure to check those resources first. Email marketing platforms have standard “no-reply” emails that thank customers or confirm orders with receipts.
If you want to improve your customers’ overall experience look for tips on session replay. Session replay allows you to view your customers’ interaction with your site so you can identify and fix its weak points.
5. Draw Your Customers in with Visual Tools
Sliders allow you to organize the content on one page so that you won’t clutter the rest of your site. There are lots of different slider styles but all of them display a limited amount of information on a slide-like space.
Not only can you present text, but you can use buttons, images, and videos.
Since sliders present bits of information at a time, you can use multiple slides that visitors can flip through. This adds a presentation-like style to your site and helps you sequence important information in a clear format.
Sliders are one of the most innovative and simple design tools you can add to your site. However, simply adding more images to your site can further capture your customers’ attention.
If you choose to add more images, you’ll need to meet the bandwidth requirements that they demand. The best way to do this is to compress your image files without distorting the image. WP Mush is one tool that can help you resize images and maintain their quality.
6. Use SEO Optimization
SEO is often a buzzword in web development, but it’s an important part of your website’s success. SEO (search engine optimization) determines how high your site ranks on search engines.
Optimization consists of a combination of factors including:
- Crawling
- Keyword Usage
- Bug and link fixing
- Loading speed improvement
- Backlinking
This can be a lot to keep track of all at once. So you may need to prioritize certain features over others.
To start, you should conduct keyword research to find the most trending phrases in search engines. When potential customers search questions, your site is more likely to appear in search if it provides the answers to those trending questions.
Then, you can start using tools like Auto Optimize to identify and fix bugs or broken links. This improves the quality of your site for your customers and boosts your rating with search engines.
Once you’ve polished the content on your site, visit Google Console to have your site evaluated, or “crawled.”
Improving Your Business Web Development Skills
Some business web development issues just need a simple plugin to help manage a specific feature. The best way to learn how to improve your site is to simply start with the tools you have.
Looking for more ways to improve? Check out more articles on the site!
