5 Website Fixes to Make Now

Is your website the best example of your business or the worst? Is it representative of your business and the ultimate resource you can send people to so they can learn as much about your business, services, products as you could tell them in person?
Or, is your business website holding you back?

Visitors arriving at your site will probably click right off within a minute. That’s the bounce rate. People know instantly if they want to check a site out further or if they need to find another site that better meets their expectations.

Here are some fixes to your business website you need to make if it’s suffering. Don’t delay – change them ASAP.

1. Speed It Up! Though we’re now enjoying the fastest internet connection speeds on average per surfer, if your site is a dog. You’ll lose more people that come to your site than if you had a fast site. Fast is always better. Drop huge Flash files. It’s annoying. It’s too large and not well implemented. Sure it’s nice to look at – but, nobody is really looking anymore.

Compress images and especially videos. For images use www.xat.com – JPEG Optimizer is an amazing program. Learn how to use it. For video using MP4 format with H.264 compression can be the best – but not everyone has the codecs installed on their computers at this time. Instead, shrink the resolution to 320×240 or 640×480 instead of trying to host larger sizes.

Never force downloads – make it optional. Don’t lock up browsers with forced loads. Oh, and label PDF files if they’re more than 1/2 MB or so so users can right click and download without left clicking and locking up their browsers as it downloads.

2. Rewrite Product Descriptions. Have a professional copywriter re-write your product and services descriptions if you haven’t already. It’s worth the money. Professional copywriters are worth their weight in gold. It’s a talent that is worth paying for.

3. Improve the Sales Process. Update your shopping cart and other payment options. Add Paypal, Google Checkout, and other payment options if you can manage them. If you’re selling internationally Western Union is one option you can use effectively. Instead of Paypal, users in the United Kingdom tend to use Moneybookers. Can you offer that?

The more seamlessly you integrate your payment option into your business site – the better. Even if you’re using 3rd party payment solutions you need to brand the pages to be just like your website pages so it looks like an extension of – or an integral part of your business website.

4. SEO Basics. If you haven’t thoroughly optimized your site for best SEO practices you need to. Targeting search engines is the single most effective use of your marketing efforts. If you don’t have a WordPress website now, consider changing your entire site over to WP. Why? Google loves it. WP sites are dynamic and feed the search engines changes through RSS feeds. WP is easily optimized for SEO. When was the last time you heard “Easy” and “SEO” in the same sentence? WP plugins optimize SEO for you to a large degree. Sure there’s a lot more to it – but, you’ll have a great start using WP for your business website.

5. Shorten Forms. For contact forms you should only be asking for the bare-bones information. Visitors to your site don’t want to share too much with you – name and email is enough in most cases – if you’re asking them to register for your newsletter. For support email forms you can ask a lot more, but if you’re asking for your own benefit – ask the minimum.