How to evaluate website effectiveness
Overview
In the era of the Internet, websites are the medium to demonstrate your services and products to the world. Your website will be the first impression showcasing your work and offers. In our article, we will have a look at the key factors involved in making websites effective. We will also see how to improve the performance of websites.
Effectiveness can be determined by how a website performs and communicates with end users. B2B websites need to be effective in terms of accessibility, intractability, and usability. The goal should be to attract visitors and convert them into leads.
Factors involved in determining the quality or effectiveness of a website.
Below you can see a few points that should be kept in mind while designing a website.
Customer/Client Perspective:
While designing a website, we should examine and view it from the perspective of a potential customer in mind. What will they think about it? Or what will they be looking for on a website? You should find answers to these questions if you want to generate potential leads. We should make our website about the customer and not only about the company. Also, there should be an easily accessible call to action for customers so that they have the possibility to proceed further and contact you.
Website Content:
Website content should include long-tail keywords to boost on-page SEO. You can also hire professional copywriters to impress customers with great content and engaging sales pitches. Website content should creatively define the value proposition (benefits of the company’s products or services over competitors), it will help your business to stand out from the row.
Website Design and Performance:
Many recent studies have shown that more than 50% of online traffic now comes from mobile devices. With the mobile revolution, it is now mandatory to make your website mobile-friendly. The design of the website should ensure easy navigation between the pages. Pages should be well-organized to facilitate intuitively clear interaction with your website. They can include images, infographics, and custom videos. Infographics and custom videos establish a sense of connection and trust. Thanks to such formats, customers can better understand what a company has to offer.
Website performance plays a major role in diminishing bounce rates. Customers should not feel overwhelmed while the website is loading. Websites need to load swiftly to improve end visitors’ experience. Website load speed also boosts SEO to rank it higher in searches.
Quality of a website:
User-friendly communication, SEO, consistency, and performance together constitute the quality of a website. Appropriate fonts, color combinations, and pictures help in ensuring a good user experience.
Why optimize your website?
Your website is the door to new opportunities. It communicates externally to customers, investors, and stakeholders. It portrays the company’s image to the world. Hence, optimizing the website must be taken as a priority. Getting valuable traffic and funneling leads should be the key goals of any B2B website. Performance or page speed plays a major role in improving the overall experience of end users.
Check out a case study from our practice: Web site modernization for a sportswear retailer.
Methods to improve the performance of websites
In today’s busy world, no one has time to WAIT. Everyone expects instant results and wants everything at the tip of their fingers. Websites are publicly available for users. Numerous users may interact with web pages at the same time doing the same activity. It may result in poor performance of your web pages if multiple user activities are not handled properly.
Performance is the most important factor for user interactions that will help in gathering traffic.
We will now discuss a few methods that will help you in improving your website performance:
- Image Size
Images are a vital part of a website. eCommerce websites need to use very high-quality images for displaying their products. Using images of large size may affect the performance of your website. So, image compression techniques may help you. Also, it is recommended to use HTML responsive images.
- JS and CSS files
Javascript and CSS files are part of website source codes. However, due to bad coding practices, developers may forget to remove/delete unnecessary JS and CSS files. This leads to the slowness of the website. It is very important to clean the files before the deployment of the website.
- Plugin optimization
Plugins are necessary for adding features to the website. Plugins should be updated with time. As the website grows, we need to add/update/remove the plugins when it is required. However, removing unused plugins is mandatory since they use a lot of resources which may affect the performance of the website.
- Hosting
There are many companies offering hosting services. To make the right choice, we should check their server reliability. Also, it is sensible to opt for hosting servers that are geographically close to your end customers. If a major part of a customer base is from a specific region, you should choose servers located close to that region.
- CDN
A Content Delivery Network is a network of servers placed at different locations for providing services to specific regions. In this case, the request/response is handled by servers based on the location, whereas a standalone server has to respond to all the requests as it is the only server available for services. In such a situation, the time for processing requests may increase. Thus, a CDN is a better option to increase the performance of the website.
Conclusion
A website gives the first impression of your company. The success of a website is measured by the way it supports the business of the company. In our article, we have shared some tips on making your B2B websites better in terms of aesthetics, performance, and client conversion.
