A website is one of the most important marketing assets for every business. Whether you want to sell or products/services or just display company information, you need an awesome looking website to boost your brand’s online visibility. You can use it to attract your potential customers, convert them into leads, and ultimately, compel them to buy your products.
The good news is that building a visually stunning and high-performing website isn’t rocket science. With content management systems like WordPress, you can easily design an outstanding website without delving into the intricacies of coding. You can even select from a wide array of eye-catching themes and use plugins to improve your website’s functionality.
Having said that, there are more than 1.8 billion websites on the internet right now. Your target audience likely visits plenty of websites every day. Therefore, you can’t just design an average website and expect it to make a lasting impression on visitors. Unless your website is fast, secure, seamless, and easy on the eyes, it’ll fail to rise above the competition.
While you can start building a website using WordPress in minutes, you need experience and insight to make it one-of-a-kind. In this blog, we’ll outline a few ways in which you can improve your website’s layout and performance to ensure that it attracts and retains the right audience. Let’s get started.
1. Declutter Your Website
Here’s the unsaid rule of web design – don’t include anything on a web page that won’t provide any value to your audience. In other words, don’t add text, images, videos, graphics, and other elements just for the sake of it. Sometimes, leaving a web page blank with just a line of text can be more useful than filling it with irrelevant content.
Take a look at every web page and analyze what value individual elements are offering. Don’t shy away from removing pictures, sidebars, text, etc. if you think they’re redundant on unnecessary. The last thing you want is to distract your visitors with too many elements on a web page. It’ll take their attention away from the actual reason you wanted them to check out your website in the first place.
2. Create a Visual Hierarchy
Now that you’ve decluttered your website, it’s time to emphasize the most important aspects of each web page. Make judicious use of colors, font sizes, bold fonts, and italics to draw your audience’s attention to different parts of a web page. It’ll create subtle visual cues that tell your visitors how they’re supposed to navigate your website and what actions you want them to take.
This is also a good time to take a look at your website’s color palette. No one wants to read a wall of grey-colored text on a black background. Make sure you use contrasting colors that align with your brand identity. Also, use prominent CTAs (calls-to-action) to draw a visitor’s attention and compel them to take the desired action.
3. Prioritize Speed and Security
Who loves to stare at their computer screen while waiting for a website to load? Absolutely no one. That’s why it is crucial to ensure that your website loads fast. Start by removing large media files and optimizing images using the right image optimization plugin. Next, take a look at your website’s source code and remove unnecessary blank spaces, characters, etc.
While you’re at it, make sure you judiciously choose a theme that doesn’t deliberately slow down your website. Also, you can use a tool like Google Page Speed Insights to find out more ways to improve site speed.
Next, you also need to ensure that your website is secure. This involves adding features such as an SSL certificate, malware protection, and DDoS protection. Most likely, your web hosting service has already provided you with a ton of essential security features. You just have to implement and configure the right ones.
4. Utilize APIs and Plugins
APIs or application programming interfaces facilitate communication between different software applications. They let you add various features to your website without manually writing lengthy codes. From adding social sharing buttons on your blog to facilitating secure payments on your e-commerce websites – APIs have a wide array of applications.
For instance, if you’re developing a travel booking app, you’ll want to provide your users with weather-related information for their upcoming trips. You can always spend sleepless nights writing the necessary code.
Or you can simply use APIs that provide temperature, air quality, cloud cover, precipitations, and other data to improve the usability of your platform. The good news is that you’ll find a plethora of alternatives for APIs that provide easily understandable weather data.
Likewise, if you’re developing your website on WordPress, you can use various pre-built plugins to improve its functionality. Whether you want to add a video player on your website or optimize it for search engines – finding the right plugin won’t take you too long.
5. Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
Did you know that there are more than 3.5 billion smartphone users in the world today? Chances are, your target audience will use their phones or tablets to access your visit. That’s why you must ensure that your website is mobile-responsive. Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test Tool to find out where your website stands in terms of responsiveness and how you can improve it.
Do you have any other tips and tricks for creating awesome websites? Share your suggestions in the comments section below.