Is your website working for you: a checklist

---

Our checklist will help you decide what changes you need to make to your website from a design, audience and technical perspective. Here are some more thoughts to consider: 

Design

Your website should always represent your brand, as this showcases your professionalism and builds trust with your customers. 

Try not to focus too much on what you or your colleagues like or dislike. Instead, your design should reflect how you want to present your brand to your audience, thinking carefully about how your design changes will impact your user’s experience. Likewise, you don’t want ad-hoc changes without thinking about the site as a whole – so don’t insert elements of your new brand into an old theme, for example. Ideally, websites should continuously evolve as you receive insights and feedback from your customers, but remember to think about the cost of these changes you’re making against the value you expect them to return.

Audience & action

The marketing activities taking place away from your website, like organic or paid search engine campaigns and social media campaigns, are largely responsible for bringing in the right audiences to your website. So before you start making changes to your website, it’s wise to investigate whether these activities are still relevant to your marketing goals and strategy. 

However, if potential clients are visiting your website but aren’t converting into a lead, they may be confused, can’t find what they’re looking for, or are switched off by vague and unhelpful calls to action.

So, when making website updates to improve your relevance and conversion rates, you’ll want to firstly get an understanding of who’s visiting your website – and why. Knowing this will help you plan how to modify content across your site to better get your message across, rather than making one-off, ad-hoc changes in the hope that any problems will be solved. 

One way to do this is to add tracking functionality (such as Google Tag Manager tags) to every ‘Call To Action’ button to make sure you understand where users are interacting or leaving the website. Continually monitor the changes you decide to make from these insights, to gauge what effect each has had.

Technical

Technical difficulties are often the strongest reasons why your website isn’t performing well. They’re also usually the issues that are left at the bottom of many businesses to-do lists, as they rely on other marketing to bring in leads. However, when they’re not corrected, they can have the biggest effect on your brand reputation too, not to mention negatively impacting the discoverability of your website from search engines. 

Ensure the ongoing health of your site by regularly monitoring and improving your performance. When doing this, don’t just rely on your view of your website. Use tools available to you to help you review domain issues, on-page errors, and page speed problems, like Google Search Console and Google PageSpeed Insights. Most importantly, if you’re not sure what to do, don’t try to fix everything yourself. Instead, get an expert to fix significant issues, and explain how to resolve simpler ones. 

---

More help

Remember, whatever changes you decide to make to your website, they should be measurable and strategic. Every change should relate to at least one of your marketing goals and should be trackable, so you can assess its impact immediately and over time. 

Base Creative specialises in creating and optimising websites, whether it’s a simple change or a complete redesign. We’ll evaluate the challenges your business is facing, where your website performance is lacking and recommend the options that will have the most significant effect.

If your website is no longer doing its job, email me at [email protected].