Wordpress e Wix, são as duas plataformas mais conhecidas para criação de sites.

No entanto, apesar de serem ambas ferramentas para criação de sites, estamos a falar de dois tipos de plataforma completamente diferentes e é importante, antes de mais, clarificarmos as diferenças fundamentais entre elas.

O Wix é considerado um construtor de sites, ou seja, oferece ferramentas para que seja possível criar um site sem ser necessário mexer em código em nenhuma fase do processo. A construção faz-se com base em elementos visuais, como “blocos”, que os utilizadores podem adicionar ou modificar. Nos últimos anos, a popularidade da Wix aumentou justamente por permitir criar sites sem ser necessário ter conhecimentos de programação. No entanto, existem algumas limitações quando recorremos a esta plataforma, que vamos ver mais à frente.

Por outro lado, o WordPress é um sistema de gestão de conteúdo (CMS), ou seja, é uma ferramenta que permite a gestão e criação de um vasto catálogo de conteúdos, juntamente com uma série de ferramentas para criar sites. Atualmente mais de 35% da internet é criada em WordPress.

Assim, a principal diferença entre a Wix e o WordPress é que o primeiro é um construtor de sites e o segundo é um CMS.

Isso também significa que na Wix (que é uma plataforma hosted), o site criado vai ser automaticamente armazenado nos servidores da própria Wix, enquanto o WordPress (que é uma plataforma self-hosted) implica a contratação de um servidor para podermos colocar o site no ar.

Se é verdade que esta segunda opção pode dar um pouco mais de trabalho, também é verdade que dá muito mais controlo sobre a gestão, segurança e otimização do site.

Utilizadores iniciantes geralmente exploram a Wix antes de tentar o WordPress, atraídos pela simplicidade que a empresa anuncia.

De qualquer forma, o WordPress é a opção mais robusta para a gestão de conteúdo, pois oferece funcionalidades mais avançadas para construção de páginas, integração com outros serviços, melhorias em SEO e monitorização de dados, todos pontos indispensáveis para o marketing digital.

Vamos comparar as duas plataformas ponto por ponto:

A successful brand strategy is more than just deciding what shade of blue to use for the logo, or what tone to adopt when posting and commenting on Facebook.

As the term suggests, a brand strategy is a long-term plan that affects all facets of your business.

A brand strategy considers factors such as consumer demand, emotions and the competition. It’s arguably even more important than your company’s name.

If you remove your company’s logo and name, brand strategy might seem like it’s barely there. For the most successful brands, though, it pervades all aspects of the company’s operations, from high-level decision-making through to the shipping and handling of products.

If you are still confused about what really makes a brand, you’re not alone. This is why we’ve broken down the science of brand strategy into seven essential components. Take care of each component, and your brand will be around for a long time.

1. Purpose

While a name and a logo are important, they both pale in comparison to your brand purpose. This is what makes you and your employees wake up in the morning. It’s what keeps you going throughout the day. Your purpose is the one thing that sets you apart from your competitors.

There are two kinds of brand purpose:

Functional: This focuses on success at the financial or commercial level. That is, to sell products, make money or provide value to your stakeholders
Intentional: This has more to do with how your brand works and the why. In other words, its big ambitions and the larger role it plays
Microsoft, for example, defines its mission as “to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more”. Notice that it wants to play a role in every person’s success, whether that person is an investment banker on Wall Street or a community organizer in Soweto.

Microsoft’s choice of image is also very telling. It shows a tent pitched under the night sky, the Milky Way looming high in the background. The imagery is supposed to show that the company wants to extend its reach to the remotest corners of the planet and even to outer space. The tech giant is focusing on developing solutions that are accessible to everyone, like its cloud-based storage and application platforms.

When you define your brand’s purpose, remember that it should not just be about making money, unless you’re an investment firm, in which case it probably should. However, even then there should be something more that defines it. The thing that differentiates you from the competition.

It is imperative to keep your business’ purpose front of mind at all times, as it is what informs everything that the business does and every decision you make.

2. Emotion

Your brand’s purpose should be something that resonates with your customers. In other words, it should appeal to their emotions.

Customers don’t always make purchasing decisions based on what’s cheaper or what provides better value. Whatever your company sells or manufactures, chances are there are other companies with similar products, but with more features or at a lower cost.

Of course, providing value to your customers is important and you should strive to give them more of it. Your customers will develop a loyalty to your brand when you give them more for their dollar. But long-time customers can develop an emotional attachment to your brand for other reasons. This might be a positive post-sales experience, aesthetic value of your product, or the feeling of belonging to a community.

Apple users were once known as a small and tight-knit community, starting from the introduction of the Apple I. Even though the company has diversified its product line and more consumers choose Apple over other brands, there is still a mystique that surrounds Apple and Apple users. To use an Apple product means you put a premium on quality and you don’t put a price tag on the user experience.

They have built a brand that goes beyond the price point of their products. Tapping into emotions will help to both attract customers who are on the fence about your product and retain existing clients. Which leads us to the next component of your brand…

3. Customer Loyalty

If you’ve succeeded in building a customer base that loves your brand, your products, and what you stand for, you need to nurture that love and pay it back. This is where customer loyalty comes into play.

Customer loyalty is worth more to your company than all your endorsement deals combined. The people who constantly purchase your products and tell their friends about their experience with you act as ambassadors for your brands.

Recognizing loyal customers will help maintain their loyalty and keep them coming back for more. It doesn’t take much to recognize loyal customers. Something as simple as a personalized thank-you note can already mean a lot. You may also feature their business on your website (this is particularly applicable to B2Bs).

If you want to be a little extra, you can offer them membership to an exclusive club that provides rewards. Membership in loyalty programs grew by more than 1000% from 2014 to 2016, and 63% of customers will not commit to a brand that doesn’t have a loyalty program. If your brand doesn’t have one, you’re missing out on a lot of repeat business. Plus, all of those purchasing insights you get from a loyalty program.

Customer rewards will give both new and existing customers an idea of what they could expect if they stay loyal to your brand. Fostering brand loyalty shouldn’t be confined to just your customers, though. You should also strengthen brand awareness among those who work for you.

4. Employee Engagement

It’s important for your employees to feel like they’re part of your brand, not just cogs in a machine. If you involve them in deciding what your brand stands for, they are more likely to act according to branding, both online and offline.

Your employees should not just promote your brand, but also live up to what it stands for. This could include values like excellent customer service, diversity and a commitment to continuous improvement. Your employees should also reflect what you put out there. It doesn’t make sense if your social media accounts sound playful but your customer service representatives aren’t much fun to talk with!

Nike has taken steps to ensure that its employees live up to its brand name. The sprawling Nike corporate headquarters in Oregon boasts world-class sports facilities specifically for employees’ use. Many Nike workers bike to work instead of driving. The company provides employees with sports attire, including athletic shoes, which they are encouraged to wear to work.

Engaging your employees is a key way of building your brand. It is a clear sign that your company is striving to live up to the lofty targets it has set for itself. It also attracts and retains the best available talent. This in turn helps you to make more sales, develop better products and continue to grow.

5. Competitive Intelligence

In much the same way that knowledge of your brand makes it stronger, competitor knowledge is also a valuable source of insight. After all, you are often competing for the same customers by offering similar products. Watching what your competitors do and determining what works for them can help you make smarter decisions about what to do and what to avoid.

As part of the 1992 USA men’s basketball “Dream Team”, Michael Jordan played with what has been called the greatest collection of athletes in history. Jordan used his experience at the Olympics to figure out his teammates’ weaknesses, defeating three of those teammates in the NBA finals following his return to basketball.

Observing your competitors, or even collaborating with them, will help you stay on top of where the market is heading. However, once you see what your rivals are doing, you have to craft your own strategy. You need to reinforce your unique selling proposition to set your brand apart from the rest.

Your brand purpose is unique. Whenever you make a move based on competitive intelligence, always have that purpose at the front and center of your strategy.

6. Consistency

The key to having a strong brand is being consistent in its application. This means making sure everything you do aligns. Let’s say you use a landing page software for a product you’re promoting. You have to ensure that whatever software you use, the colors, images and messaging are consistent with your brand.

If your corporate colors are blue and white, using teal and yellow on your landing page will at best confuse your potential customers. At worst, using the wrong color combinations will turn off your would-be buyers.

IBM is one company that has been very consistent in its branding. Ever since the iconic 8-bar logo was introduced in 1972, the company also known as “Big Blue” – a nickname gained thanks to its ubiquitous blue computer boxes – has used it on all of its products, including servers, PCs and laptops.

IBM no longer produces personal computers and has shifted its core business to focusing on consulting and cloud computing. The logo, however, is still a symbol of the company’s reputation for stability, innovation and leadership. IBM fiercely guards against the unauthorized use of its logo, fearing that any misuse can lead to the company being associated with mediocrity and poor quality products.

Your company might not be as old or as famous as IBM. However, establishing a brand and sticking to its key elements will help you build a good reputation and a loyal customer base.

7. Flexibility

While consistency is one of the keys to establishing a successful brand strategy, a bit of flexibility never hurts either. This is particularly the case when you’re trying to enter new markets. While consistency sets the standard for your brand, flexibility allows you to adjust according to market demands and to distinguish your company from its competitors.

An effective brand identity is both identifiable and adaptable. As consumer preferences change, your brand must also keep up with the times. Otherwise, it runs the risk of becoming irrelevant.

A good example of a business not being flexible with its brand is Mattel. The toymaker, most famous for its Barbie line of fashion dolls, sued MCA Records and the band Aqua for copyright infringement in 2000 after the latter released a song titled “Barbie Girl.” The lawsuit was dismissed by a U.S. court in 2002, with the judge famously ruling, “The parties are advised to chill.”

The brand realized later, of course, that the lawsuit was ill-advised. In 2009, it featured a modified version of “Barbie Girl” in an advertising campaign to promote a new line of dolls. It seems both parties have, indeed, decided to “chill” and set their differences aside.

Bringing all the strands together

In this guide, we covered a couple of different elements of a brand strategy. I thought it would be nice to have it as a visual takeaway.

A brand strategy is something that every business should have, regardless of its size. There are numerous studies that show the link between a strong brand and good business results. Putting together a successful brand strategy requires a mix of introspection, knowledge of the competition and the guts to try out new things.

When you do brand strategy well, you can take your business further than you’ve ever imagined. Be sure to cover all of the brand components we discussed today, and you won’t miss out on any opportunities to grow your business.

See the full article in Just Creative

A successful brand strategy is more than just deciding what shade of blue to use for the logo, or what tone to adopt when posting and commenting on Facebook.

As the term suggests, a brand strategy is a long-term plan that affects all facets of your business.

A brand strategy considers factors such as consumer demand, emotions and the competition. It’s arguably even more important than your company’s name.

If you remove your company’s logo and name, brand strategy might seem like it’s barely there. For the most successful brands, though, it pervades all aspects of the company’s operations, from high-level decision-making through to the shipping and handling of products.

If you are still confused about what really makes a brand, you’re not alone. This is why we’ve broken down the science of brand strategy into seven essential components. Take care of each component, and your brand will be around for a long time.

1. Purpose

While a name and a logo are important, they both pale in comparison to your brand purpose. This is what makes you and your employees wake up in the morning. It’s what keeps you going throughout the day. Your purpose is the one thing that sets you apart from your competitors.

There are two kinds of brand purpose:

Functional: This focuses on success at the financial or commercial level. That is, to sell products, make money or provide value to your stakeholders
Intentional: This has more to do with how your brand works and the why. In other words, its big ambitions and the larger role it plays
Microsoft, for example, defines its mission as “to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more”. Notice that it wants to play a role in every person’s success, whether that person is an investment banker on Wall Street or a community organizer in Soweto.

Microsoft’s choice of image is also very telling. It shows a tent pitched under the night sky, the Milky Way looming high in the background. The imagery is supposed to show that the company wants to extend its reach to the remotest corners of the planet and even to outer space. The tech giant is focusing on developing solutions that are accessible to everyone, like its cloud-based storage and application platforms.

When you define your brand’s purpose, remember that it should not just be about making money, unless you’re an investment firm, in which case it probably should. However, even then there should be something more that defines it. The thing that differentiates you from the competition.

It is imperative to keep your business’ purpose front of mind at all times, as it is what informs everything that the business does and every decision you make.

2. Emotion

Your brand’s purpose should be something that resonates with your customers. In other words, it should appeal to their emotions.

Customers don’t always make purchasing decisions based on what’s cheaper or what provides better value. Whatever your company sells or manufactures, chances are there are other companies with similar products, but with more features or at a lower cost.

Of course, providing value to your customers is important and you should strive to give them more of it. Your customers will develop a loyalty to your brand when you give them more for their dollar. But long-time customers can develop an emotional attachment to your brand for other reasons. This might be a positive post-sales experience, aesthetic value of your product, or the feeling of belonging to a community.

Apple users were once known as a small and tight-knit community, starting from the introduction of the Apple I. Even though the company has diversified its product line and more consumers choose Apple over other brands, there is still a mystique that surrounds Apple and Apple users. To use an Apple product means you put a premium on quality and you don’t put a price tag on the user experience.

They have built a brand that goes beyond the price point of their products. Tapping into emotions will help to both attract customers who are on the fence about your product and retain existing clients. Which leads us to the next component of your brand…

3. Customer Loyalty

If you’ve succeeded in building a customer base that loves your brand, your products, and what you stand for, you need to nurture that love and pay it back. This is where customer loyalty comes into play.

Customer loyalty is worth more to your company than all your endorsement deals combined. The people who constantly purchase your products and tell their friends about their experience with you act as ambassadors for your brands.

Recognizing loyal customers will help maintain their loyalty and keep them coming back for more. It doesn’t take much to recognize loyal customers. Something as simple as a personalized thank-you note can already mean a lot. You may also feature their business on your website (this is particularly applicable to B2Bs).

If you want to be a little extra, you can offer them membership to an exclusive club that provides rewards. Membership in loyalty programs grew by more than 1000% from 2014 to 2016, and 63% of customers will not commit to a brand that doesn’t have a loyalty program. If your brand doesn’t have one, you’re missing out on a lot of repeat business. Plus, all of those purchasing insights you get from a loyalty program.

Customer rewards will give both new and existing customers an idea of what they could expect if they stay loyal to your brand. Fostering brand loyalty shouldn’t be confined to just your customers, though. You should also strengthen brand awareness among those who work for you.

4. Employee Engagement

It’s important for your employees to feel like they’re part of your brand, not just cogs in a machine. If you involve them in deciding what your brand stands for, they are more likely to act according to branding, both online and offline.

Your employees should not just promote your brand, but also live up to what it stands for. This could include values like excellent customer service, diversity and a commitment to continuous improvement. Your employees should also reflect what you put out there. It doesn’t make sense if your social media accounts sound playful but your customer service representatives aren’t much fun to talk with!

Nike has taken steps to ensure that its employees live up to its brand name. The sprawling Nike corporate headquarters in Oregon boasts world-class sports facilities specifically for employees’ use. Many Nike workers bike to work instead of driving. The company provides employees with sports attire, including athletic shoes, which they are encouraged to wear to work.

Engaging your employees is a key way of building your brand. It is a clear sign that your company is striving to live up to the lofty targets it has set for itself. It also attracts and retains the best available talent. This in turn helps you to make more sales, develop better products and continue to grow.

5. Competitive Intelligence

In much the same way that knowledge of your brand makes it stronger, competitor knowledge is also a valuable source of insight. After all, you are often competing for the same customers by offering similar products. Watching what your competitors do and determining what works for them can help you make smarter decisions about what to do and what to avoid.

As part of the 1992 USA men’s basketball “Dream Team”, Michael Jordan played with what has been called the greatest collection of athletes in history. Jordan used his experience at the Olympics to figure out his teammates’ weaknesses, defeating three of those teammates in the NBA finals following his return to basketball.

Observing your competitors, or even collaborating with them, will help you stay on top of where the market is heading. However, once you see what your rivals are doing, you have to craft your own strategy. You need to reinforce your unique selling proposition to set your brand apart from the rest.

Your brand purpose is unique. Whenever you make a move based on competitive intelligence, always have that purpose at the front and center of your strategy.

6. Consistency

The key to having a strong brand is being consistent in its application. This means making sure everything you do aligns. Let’s say you use a landing page software for a product you’re promoting. You have to ensure that whatever software you use, the colors, images and messaging are consistent with your brand.

If your corporate colors are blue and white, using teal and yellow on your landing page will at best confuse your potential customers. At worst, using the wrong color combinations will turn off your would-be buyers.

IBM is one company that has been very consistent in its branding. Ever since the iconic 8-bar logo was introduced in 1972, the company also known as “Big Blue” – a nickname gained thanks to its ubiquitous blue computer boxes – has used it on all of its products, including servers, PCs and laptops.

IBM no longer produces personal computers and has shifted its core business to focusing on consulting and cloud computing. The logo, however, is still a symbol of the company’s reputation for stability, innovation and leadership. IBM fiercely guards against the unauthorized use of its logo, fearing that any misuse can lead to the company being associated with mediocrity and poor quality products.

Your company might not be as old or as famous as IBM. However, establishing a brand and sticking to its key elements will help you build a good reputation and a loyal customer base.

7. Flexibility

While consistency is one of the keys to establishing a successful brand strategy, a bit of flexibility never hurts either. This is particularly the case when you’re trying to enter new markets. While consistency sets the standard for your brand, flexibility allows you to adjust according to market demands and to distinguish your company from its competitors.

An effective brand identity is both identifiable and adaptable. As consumer preferences change, your brand must also keep up with the times. Otherwise, it runs the risk of becoming irrelevant.

A good example of a business not being flexible with its brand is Mattel. The toymaker, most famous for its Barbie line of fashion dolls, sued MCA Records and the band Aqua for copyright infringement in 2000 after the latter released a song titled “Barbie Girl.” The lawsuit was dismissed by a U.S. court in 2002, with the judge famously ruling, “The parties are advised to chill.”

The brand realized later, of course, that the lawsuit was ill-advised. In 2009, it featured a modified version of “Barbie Girl” in an advertising campaign to promote a new line of dolls. It seems both parties have, indeed, decided to “chill” and set their differences aside.

Bringing all the strands together

In this guide, we covered a couple of different elements of a brand strategy. I thought it would be nice to have it as a visual takeaway.

A brand strategy is something that every business should have, regardless of its size. There are numerous studies that show the link between a strong brand and good business results. Putting together a successful brand strategy requires a mix of introspection, knowledge of the competition and the guts to try out new things.

When you do brand strategy well, you can take your business further than you’ve ever imagined. Be sure to cover all of the brand components we discussed today, and you won’t miss out on any opportunities to grow your business.

See the full article in Just Creative

A website for your business is no longer a luxury — it’s a necessity. But, just because you invested in a website doesn’t mean that it’s effective in connecting with your customers and ultimately improving your sales. While there could be numerous reasons why your website isn’t effective, here are 10 of the most common explanations for website fails.

1. It’s not mobile friendly

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to most of us, but for the first time ever mobile and tablet usage surpassed desktop usage. As the mobile revolution continues to grow around the world, this trend toward “on the go digital,” will continue. In other words, internet consumption is moving away desktops and in to the portable devices territory. This means that your business’s website has to be optimized for mobile users.

Unfortunately, there are still lots of websites that aren’t mobile-friendly. This is just bad for business since it can lead to penalties from the Big G (Google), decrease conversation rates and deliver your customers a poor experience.

To make sure that your site is ready for mobile users, make sure that you use a responsive design, have large buttons and due your due-diligence on a/b testing, keep your layout simple and again, test it using tools like Google’s Search Console Mobile Friendly Test.

2. Contains too much jargon

I understand that you’re an expert in your field and that you want to demonstrate your knowledge and authority. But unless you’re talking to directly to your fellow industry experts, your average customer isn’t going to understand the technical language or industry jargon that you use to describe your business throughout your website.

Avoid the jargon and use simple and straight-forward language that your customers can easily understand.

3. Lacks content

Your customers have a problem. And they’re turning to your website to help them solve said-problem. That’s why your website needs to contain fresh and valuable content that answers real-life questions.

Remember, that doesn’t mean that they’re searching for your exact business. For example, our blog contains useful information for freelancers and small business owners. If a person is searching for advice on invoicing and processing payments, they could also land on our site because that’s the type of content we’ve been producing, as well.

In short, start a blog and keep writing awesome content. This will also help boost your SEO and content marketing efforts.

4. Hides essential information

Besides looking for information that will make their lives better, if customers are looking for your specific business, they want to easily locate information like:

• The address of your business. If you have a brick and mortar business, include a map link.
• Contact information, specifically a phone number and email address.
• Social media plugins.
• Hours, pricing and an “about us” page.

You’d be surprised at how many businesses still don’t have this information on their websites. And, if you’re like me, you may tend to stay from those types of businesses over security or legitimate concerns.

And, there’s really no excuse for forgetting this information. These additions are easy-to-integrate onto your site and usually free as well.

5. Loads too slowly

Customers expect a website to load quickly. In fact, 47 percent of consumers expect a website to load in just 2 seconds or less. And, that’s important to remember because an astounding 79 percent of shoppers who don’t enjoy their website experience less likely to ever return to that site again, nor buy from that site again.

You can test the speed of your site using tools like Pingdom and GTmetrix. These tools provide insights and advice on how to speed your site-up too.

6. Doesn’t have clear calls-to-action

You don’t want to leave your visitors in the dark by making them guess what you want them to do next on your site. So, give them clear instructions by creating a call to action button or hyperlinked text that is front and center.

HubSpot has 31 call-to-action examples that you should review if you need some inspiration. For instance, Dropbox has a blue “Sign up for free,” call-to-action button that stands out from the rest of the page.

Remember, without these buttons, your potential customers won’t move forward with the services or resources that you’re offering. When that happens, you won’t get those all-important business conversions.

7. It’s outdated

Webpages that are maintained and have a current design build trust and credibility. That doesn’t mean that you need to update your site every month. But, if it’s been years since you’ve had a major website design overhaul, then it’s time to find something more contemporary. The last thing that you want is to have a site that looks like a Geocities page from the late 90s.

8. It’s annoying and cluttered

Believe it or not, that are still businesses that insist on having websites that have music or videos play automatically once your enter the site. Even worse, these sites are also full of banner ads, bright colors and flashy text. These sites are just plain annoying and end-up slowing the page down because it’s so cluttered.

So, how many people are going to ever click on that site again at work — or anywhere else?

Keep in mind that a bulk of your visitors are browsing your site on mobile devices too. This means that you’re site should be clean and organized. Keep information to a minimum and use sub-headings, bullet lists and graphic elements so that visitors can digest this info in smaller chunks.

9. Shopping cart or payment platform is broken

Unless you’re relying on a third party payment gateway or shopping cart, then it’s your responsibility to frequently check to make sure that everything is working properly. You won’t be able to make a sale or receive a payment if your cart or payment processor is busted.

10. You don’t guide users to different pages

A lot of businesses send all their traffic to their website’s homepage, as opposed to relevant links that their customers actually want to land-on. This could be because service pages and other pages of the site are just an afterthought when designing a website. But, the fact of the matter is that the home page isn’t as important to general web traffic and the overall design.

Instead, start creating specific landing pages for the various types of potential customers you encounter and where they are in the sales funnel.

See the full article in Entrepreneur

A website for your business is no longer a luxury — it’s a necessity. But, just because you invested in a website doesn’t mean that it’s effective in connecting with your customers and ultimately improving your sales. While there could be numerous reasons why your website isn’t effective, here are 10 of the most common explanations for website fails.

1. It’s not mobile friendly

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to most of us, but for the first time ever mobile and tablet usage surpassed desktop usage. As the mobile revolution continues to grow around the world, this trend toward “on the go digital,” will continue. In other words, internet consumption is moving away desktops and in to the portable devices territory. This means that your business’s website has to be optimized for mobile users.

Unfortunately, there are still lots of websites that aren’t mobile-friendly. This is just bad for business since it can lead to penalties from the Big G (Google), decrease conversation rates and deliver your customers a poor experience.

To make sure that your site is ready for mobile users, make sure that you use a responsive design, have large buttons and due your due-diligence on a/b testing, keep your layout simple and again, test it using tools like Google’s Search Console Mobile Friendly Test.

2. Contains too much jargon

I understand that you’re an expert in your field and that you want to demonstrate your knowledge and authority. But unless you’re talking to directly to your fellow industry experts, your average customer isn’t going to understand the technical language or industry jargon that you use to describe your business throughout your website.

Avoid the jargon and use simple and straight-forward language that your customers can easily understand.

3. Lacks content

Your customers have a problem. And they’re turning to your website to help them solve said-problem. That’s why your website needs to contain fresh and valuable content that answers real-life questions.

Remember, that doesn’t mean that they’re searching for your exact business. For example, our blog contains useful information for freelancers and small business owners. If a person is searching for advice on invoicing and processing payments, they could also land on our site because that’s the type of content we’ve been producing, as well.

In short, start a blog and keep writing awesome content. This will also help boost your SEO and content marketing efforts.

4. Hides essential information

Besides looking for information that will make their lives better, if customers are looking for your specific business, they want to easily locate information like:

• The address of your business. If you have a brick and mortar business, include a map link.
• Contact information, specifically a phone number and email address.
• Social media plugins.
• Hours, pricing and an “about us” page.

You’d be surprised at how many businesses still don’t have this information on their websites. And, if you’re like me, you may tend to stay from those types of businesses over security or legitimate concerns.

And, there’s really no excuse for forgetting this information. These additions are easy-to-integrate onto your site and usually free as well.

5. Loads too slowly

Customers expect a website to load quickly. In fact, 47 percent of consumers expect a website to load in just 2 seconds or less. And, that’s important to remember because an astounding 79 percent of shoppers who don’t enjoy their website experience less likely to ever return to that site again, nor buy from that site again.

You can test the speed of your site using tools like Pingdom and GTmetrix. These tools provide insights and advice on how to speed your site-up too.

6. Doesn’t have clear calls-to-action

You don’t want to leave your visitors in the dark by making them guess what you want them to do next on your site. So, give them clear instructions by creating a call to action button or hyperlinked text that is front and center.

HubSpot has 31 call-to-action examples that you should review if you need some inspiration. For instance, Dropbox has a blue “Sign up for free,” call-to-action button that stands out from the rest of the page.

Remember, without these buttons, your potential customers won’t move forward with the services or resources that you’re offering. When that happens, you won’t get those all-important business conversions.

7. It’s outdated

Webpages that are maintained and have a current design build trust and credibility. That doesn’t mean that you need to update your site every month. But, if it’s been years since you’ve had a major website design overhaul, then it’s time to find something more contemporary. The last thing that you want is to have a site that looks like a Geocities page from the late 90s.

8. It’s annoying and cluttered

Believe it or not, that are still businesses that insist on having websites that have music or videos play automatically once your enter the site. Even worse, these sites are also full of banner ads, bright colors and flashy text. These sites are just plain annoying and end-up slowing the page down because it’s so cluttered.

So, how many people are going to ever click on that site again at work — or anywhere else?

Keep in mind that a bulk of your visitors are browsing your site on mobile devices too. This means that you’re site should be clean and organized. Keep information to a minimum and use sub-headings, bullet lists and graphic elements so that visitors can digest this info in smaller chunks.

9. Shopping cart or payment platform is broken

Unless you’re relying on a third party payment gateway or shopping cart, then it’s your responsibility to frequently check to make sure that everything is working properly. You won’t be able to make a sale or receive a payment if your cart or payment processor is busted.

10. You don’t guide users to different pages

A lot of businesses send all their traffic to their website’s homepage, as opposed to relevant links that their customers actually want to land-on. This could be because service pages and other pages of the site are just an afterthought when designing a website. But, the fact of the matter is that the home page isn’t as important to general web traffic and the overall design.

Instead, start creating specific landing pages for the various types of potential customers you encounter and where they are in the sales funnel.

See the full article in Entrepreneur

We have prepared a selection of key trends in graphic design for 2020. From the article you will learn what will be at the peak of the wave, and what goes into the past. So, what will be the graphic design tomorrow:

Templates and textures

Today, there is a noticeable increase in the use of templates and textures, but there is no need to use them like competitors. The trend for 2020 is to combine several patterns in one design, in several parts.

Virtual network users are faced with a deficit of texture and volumetric images. For this reason, the full immersion format is becoming increasingly popular.

Graphic design has picked up trends in recent years. The triumph of gradients is replaced by the triumphant return of realistic textures. Contours and graininess make you want to touch what you see. For this reason, you need to find a really good developer, to convert PSD to HTML. This allows us to speak about the future of this trend, especially in the field of graphic design.

Colour solution 2020

Specialists from the Pantone Color Institute proposed to call the main color of 2020 – a shade of blue. It is listed under the number 19-4052. Its other name is “ClassicBlue”.

According to representatives of Pantone, this shade can be described as “an encouraging presence that can cause confidence, calmness. This blue color will be associated with stability, constancy, which is lacking in the modern world. People are always in a hurry, tired of the excess of information received. They lack trusting communication, honesty. The classic blue color will help to calm down, to gather thoughts.

Specialists of the color institute decided to make a real gift for people. They wanted consumers not only to learn about the main shade of the year but also to experience multi-sensory experience, which will be associated with the classic blue color. Thematic images with soundtracks were created, thematic aroma and special fabric were invented. Cooperation with representatives of world companies allowed inventing even a tea mixture, as well as multimedia installation in honor of the main color of the year.

It is important to mention that the institute of color has been selecting the main shade of the year for 20 years. Experts’ predictions are based on the analysis of many social trends that can have an impact on different industries, including design and fashion.

Isometry

The creation of three-dimensional objects in two-dimensional measurement is a trend that has been actively developed this year. Designers can touch the miracle of making an entire universe in a small space. It will take some time to explore all the details of this universe.

The picture seems clean and simple. It won’t take much time to study it. Specialists note the presence of depth, which can not boast a flat design. The isometry will help to show all possibilities of the general view of the terrain, any program. The isometric design will not conflict with most trends. The picture shows a simple gradient of violet and blue colors. If you add some futuristic elements, the appearance of the structure will change. This picture will attract consumers’ attention.

Conclusion

The most important feature of the trends of 2020 is that they can be combined and you can choose something of your own. This, in turn, makes it possible to create something unique, something new in 2020. The year 2020 is a time of artistry, creativity, and fantasy.

In 2020, we will have to combine heterogeneous aspects from past and future, organic and geometric, artificial and real. Specialists have taken into account the current trends and moods of people. Everything will start with electrification, therefore, this must be remembered.

See the full article in Designer Daily

One of the questions that we often get asked is: Why should I use WordPress? Isn’t my old site good enough? Why do I need to switch to WordPress from another platform? If you’re asking these questions, then you’re at the right place. In this article, we will share 6 important reasons why you should use WordPress. We will also cover all the different type of websites you can create with WordPress as well as showcase popular sites that are using WordPress.

Note: Throughout this article, when we say WordPress, we are talking about WordPress.org also known as self-hosted WordPress. Please do not confuse this with WordPress.com which is a hosting service. For details, see our comparison of WordPress.org vs WordPress.com.

One of the most common misconception about WordPress is that it is just a blogging platform.

It is not.

While WordPress started as a blogging tool, it has evolved throughout the years into a powerful website builder and a robust content management system (CMS).

The best part about WordPress is that it’s easy to use and flexible enough to make different types of websites. That’s the main reason why WordPress has grown so much in popularity. According to a recent survey, WordPress powers 32.3% of all websites on the internet.

Due to it’s robust features, many of the top brands use WordPress to power their websites including Time Magazine, Facebook, The New Yorker, Sony, Disney, Target, The New York Times, and more.

Let’s take a look at why you should use WordPress to make your website.

1. WordPress is Free as in Freedom

WordPress is a free software. It means you are free to download, install, use and modify it to match your needs. You can use it to create any kind of website. To learn more, see our article about why is WordPress free?.

While the WordPress software itself is free, you need a domain name and web hosting to install it.

A domain name is the address of your website on the internet. This is what your users type in their browser’s address bar to access your website (for example, wpbeginner.com).

Web hosting is your website’s house where all your website files are stored.

2. WordPress is Easy to Customize with Themes and Plugins

A large portion of people using WordPress are neither web designers nor programmers. As a matter of fact, most folks start using WordPress without any prior knowledge of designing websites.

For non-tech savvy folks, WordPress is the perfect solution because there are thousands of free website templates (themes) that you can choose from. There is a perfect WordPress theme for just about every kind of website (whether it’s a blog, business site, or an online store).

WordPress themes are easy to customize because a lot of them come with their own options panel allowing you to change colors, upload logo, change the background, create beautiful sliders, and truly customize it to your needs without writing any code at all.

You can also add custom functionality to your WordPress site by using plugins. WordPress plugins are like apps for your website that you can use to add advanced features like analytics, contact forms, membership area, and more.

Just like themes, there are thousands of free and premium plugins available for you to use. To learn more, see our article on what are WordPress plugins and how do they work.

3. WordPress is SEO Friendly

WordPress is written using standard compliance high-quality code and produces semantic markup. In non-geek terms, this makes Google and other search engines love WordPress.

This is why WordPress sites tend to rank higher than others in search engines.

By design, WordPress is very SEO friendly out of the box. You can also use WordPress SEO plugins to further optimize your website. For complete step by step instructions, see our ultimate WordPress SEO guide to properly optimize your website.

4. WordPress is Easy To Manage

WordPress comes with a built-in updates management system. This allows you to update your plugins and themes from within your WordPress admin dashboard.

WordPress also notifies you when there is a new version of WordPress available, so you can update your site by simply clicking a button.

To protect your data from any accident or hacking, you can easily use a WordPress backup plugin to automatically create backups and store them safely on a remote location.

You can also manage your WordPress site on the go with WordPress mobile apps.

5. WordPress is Safe and Secure

WordPress is developed with security in mind, and it is considered to be a very safe and secure platform to run a website. However, just like the real world, the internet can be an uncertain place.

There are intruders out there who want to get their hands on as many sites as they could. To protect your WordPress site, there are a few simple things that you can do to make it even more secure.

6. WordPress Can Handle Different Media Types

WordPress is not just limited to writing text. It comes with a built-in media uploader to handle images, audio, and video files.

WordPress supports oEmbed enabled websites which means you can embed YouTube videos, Instagram photos, Tweets, and Soundcloud audio by just pasting the URL in the WordPress post editor.

See the full article in wpbeginner

One of the questions that we often get asked is: Why should I use WordPress? Isn’t my old site good enough? Why do I need to switch to WordPress from another platform? If you’re asking these questions, then you’re at the right place. In this article, we will share 6 important reasons why you should use WordPress. We will also cover all the different type of websites you can create with WordPress as well as showcase popular sites that are using WordPress.

Note: Throughout this article, when we say WordPress, we are talking about WordPress.org also known as self-hosted WordPress. Please do not confuse this with WordPress.com which is a hosting service. For details, see our comparison of WordPress.org vs WordPress.com.

One of the most common misconception about WordPress is that it is just a blogging platform.

It is not.

While WordPress started as a blogging tool, it has evolved throughout the years into a powerful website builder and a robust content management system (CMS).

The best part about WordPress is that it’s easy to use and flexible enough to make different types of websites. That’s the main reason why WordPress has grown so much in popularity. According to a recent survey, WordPress powers 32.3% of all websites on the internet.

Due to it’s robust features, many of the top brands use WordPress to power their websites including Time Magazine, Facebook, The New Yorker, Sony, Disney, Target, The New York Times, and more.

Let’s take a look at why you should use WordPress to make your website.

1. WordPress is Free as in Freedom

WordPress is a free software. It means you are free to download, install, use and modify it to match your needs. You can use it to create any kind of website. To learn more, see our article about why is WordPress free?.

While the WordPress software itself is free, you need a domain name and web hosting to install it.

A domain name is the address of your website on the internet. This is what your users type in their browser’s address bar to access your website (for example, wpbeginner.com).

Web hosting is your website’s house where all your website files are stored.

2. WordPress is Easy to Customize with Themes and Plugins

A large portion of people using WordPress are neither web designers nor programmers. As a matter of fact, most folks start using WordPress without any prior knowledge of designing websites.

For non-tech savvy folks, WordPress is the perfect solution because there are thousands of free website templates (themes) that you can choose from. There is a perfect WordPress theme for just about every kind of website (whether it’s a blog, business site, or an online store).

WordPress themes are easy to customize because a lot of them come with their own options panel allowing you to change colors, upload logo, change the background, create beautiful sliders, and truly customize it to your needs without writing any code at all.

You can also add custom functionality to your WordPress site by using plugins. WordPress plugins are like apps for your website that you can use to add advanced features like analytics, contact forms, membership area, and more.

Just like themes, there are thousands of free and premium plugins available for you to use. To learn more, see our article on what are WordPress plugins and how do they work.

3. WordPress is SEO Friendly

WordPress is written using standard compliance high-quality code and produces semantic markup. In non-geek terms, this makes Google and other search engines love WordPress.

This is why WordPress sites tend to rank higher than others in search engines.

By design, WordPress is very SEO friendly out of the box. You can also use WordPress SEO plugins to further optimize your website. For complete step by step instructions, see our ultimate WordPress SEO guide to properly optimize your website.

4. WordPress is Easy To Manage

WordPress comes with a built-in updates management system. This allows you to update your plugins and themes from within your WordPress admin dashboard.

WordPress also notifies you when there is a new version of WordPress available, so you can update your site by simply clicking a button.

To protect your data from any accident or hacking, you can easily use a WordPress backup plugin to automatically create backups and store them safely on a remote location.

You can also manage your WordPress site on the go with WordPress mobile apps.

5. WordPress is Safe and Secure

WordPress is developed with security in mind, and it is considered to be a very safe and secure platform to run a website. However, just like the real world, the internet can be an uncertain place.

There are intruders out there who want to get their hands on as many sites as they could. To protect your WordPress site, there are a few simple things that you can do to make it even more secure.

6. WordPress Can Handle Different Media Types

WordPress is not just limited to writing text. It comes with a built-in media uploader to handle images, audio, and video files.

WordPress supports oEmbed enabled websites which means you can embed YouTube videos, Instagram photos, Tweets, and Soundcloud audio by just pasting the URL in the WordPress post editor.

See the full article in wpbeginner

Having trouble ranking high on Google’s search results? How much attention are you paying to the user experience of your website?

In the early days of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), you could stuff a page with relevant keywords and call it a day as you shot your way up the search result rankings. Google now looks at more than 200 ranking factors to determine which sites make it to the top of the search results page, and a site’s user experience goes a long way towards achieving that success.

SEO and user experience may seem like opposites, but in reality, one without the other will lead to poor performance. Both share the common goal of getting relevant information in front of users. To put it simply, SEO targets search engines and leads users to your site, whereas the user experience helps answer the user’s questions once they’re there.

If you want your website’s visitors to spend more time on your site and increase valuable conversions while ranking higher in search results, apply these five important user experience goals that should be part of your SEO strategy.

1. Make your site mobile-friendly

It can be easy to overlook one of the most important ranking factors for a site, as most people will design their entire website from a desktop computer. More than half of all web traffic is now performed on a mobile device. With the number of mobile devices forecasted to reach 16.8 billion by 2023, if you haven’t made your website’s mobile-friendliness a top priority, now is the time.

Your site’s mobile performance and structure are also the most important versions of your site in terms of ranking on Google.

Back in 2015, Google made mobile friendliness an important ranking factor, and in 2017 the search engine began the switch to mobile-first indexing for all websites.

No matter how well you’ve optimized your site’s design and SEO for desktop users, your hard work will be lost if those decisions don’t carry over to your visitors on mobile devices. When Google crawls your site, it will calculate the page’s ranking factor off of the mobile experience.

If your bounce rate is high, it could mean users visiting your site from a Google search left due to the page not loading properly on mobile, thus sending a signal to Google to lower your ranking in the SERPs.

Of course, it is still important to optimize your site for desktop users, but if you are not considering users across all devices, the likelihood of Google considering your site in a top SERP placement is quite low.

Steps to make sure your site is mobile-friendly:

• Check your website on a variety of devices, including desktop, laptop, mobile phones, and tablets. If you do not have easy access to a range of devices, most browsers have a way to simulate popular sizes, such as Chrome’s Inspect tool.
• Pay particular attention to the layout of information and the legibility of text on the screen. Is the flow of your site just as effective on mobile as it is on a desktop? Are images taking up too much space on your phone, pushing important content off the screen? Are buttons easy to press?
• Google provides a free Mobile-Friendly Test that can analyze your site’s mobile-friendliness and offers helpful suggestions on where to make improvements.

2. Make your site quick to load

Did you know that just a one-second delay in page loading time can result in 11 percent fewer visitors and a 16 percent drop in customer satisfaction? After three seconds, you could be losing close to half of your site’s visitors.

Google is not blind to this fact either and in 2018 began using a website’s mobile loading speed as a ranking factor in their search results — another reason to make sure your site is optimized for mobile.

If you’ve noticed a significantly higher bounce rate on your site, page speed could be a major culprit. This is especially true for mobile visitors who are likely on the go and are less willing to wait those extra seconds for your page to load.

When it comes to speeding up your website, many common factors could be playing a role. Some issues are easier to fix than others. If you don’t have full control over choosing your hosting provider or have limited editing ability over your site’s theme, there are still a few steps you can take to improve performance.

One of the leading culprits of a slow loading site is its images. This isn’t to say photos and graphics should be removed, but all images should be properly compressed and sized to fit its intended placement.

If you need to include a lot of images, a lazy load script that only loads images as a user scrolls down to them can vastly improve loading time.

Steps to improve your site’s page speed:

• Run your site through Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool to discover areas that can be worked on to improve page speed and performance.
• Optimize and compress your images. There are quite a few websites that can optimize your images without negatively impacting visual quality, including TinyPNG.
• Consider serving your images from a Content Delivery Network (CDN) like ImageKit.io to further optimize the delivery of your images.

3. Make your site easy to navigate

If a visual hierarchy or proper linking structure is not in place, it will be difficult for your site’s pages to rank favorably, if at all, in search listings. Your users will also likely get lost and leave your site, resulting in high bounce rates.

Navigation

Cleaning up your site’s main navigation is an obvious first step.

Your navigation, whether it is the main navigation, Call-to-Action’s (CTA), or links in the content, should be intuitive and guide your users onto the next steps through your site. It should be clear to the user where each navigational item will take them.

A good goal is to make sure that any page a user may want to get to is no more than four clicks away.

Having too many navigation menu items not only overloads your visitors with too many options, but also it can reduce overall link authority to the rest of your site and make it harder for key pages to rank on search results.

Clear navigation also increases the likelihood that Google will add sitelinks to your site’s listing in the search results. This will make your listing more prominent, and with the added space, help push competitor listings further down the page.

Headings

While your main navigation guides users through multiple pages on your website, proper heading structure (H1, H2, H3, etc) should guide your users through the content of the page.

Proper headings make your content easier to scan and help to identify the main theme of each section.

Google and other search engines also use this heading structure to better understand the content on the page in order to serve more relevant information to potential users in the search results.

You may have a page with outstanding long-form content, but if there isn’t a visual and logical hierarchy, chances are your visitors will get lost on the page and will not find the information they are looking for.

Buttons / CTAs

CTA buttons are important touchpoints to get your visitors to interact with your site.

This user engagement is a key metric to show Google that users are interested in the content you are providing.

It’s important to understand where a user will want to go next on your site so you can offer up the relevant CTA to guide them there. However, you don’t want to overwhelm them with too many CTAs either.

If additional options are necessary, avoid exceeding more than three buttons. In this case, utilizing different styling for primary and secondary CTAs will help make the most important action stand out to the user.

4. Make your site easy on the eyes

Bad design often results in bad SEO.

Having a clean, well designed layout helps further engage your users and reduces the likelihood they’ll bounce back to the search listings to look elsewhere for their information.

Google’s RankBrain algorithm uses artificial intelligence to better understand user behavior and is designed to look at key metrics of a page where design plays a major role in influencing, such as bounce rate, pages per session, organic CTR, and dwell time.

Google is usually secretive about which factors influence a site’s ranking, but the company did reveal that RankBrain is among the top three ranking signals.

If a user can effortlessly move from one page to the next, click through relevant links, and spend a considerable amount of time on your site, Google will recognize your site as user-friendly.

But what if a user lands on your site and finds the page poorly laid out, hard to read, overly complicated, or simply just an eyesore?

Chances are they’ll return to the search results page that brought them to you and check out a competing listing. This “pogo-sticking” is not lost to the RankBrain algorithm and as a result, Google will continue to push your site lower in the rankings.

Steps to improve your site’s visual appeal:

• Pay attention to the formatting of your text. Fonts that are too small, hard to read, or in poorly chosen colors, will likely push your lead users off of your page. Keeping your text’s line length to 50-75 characters and paying attention to text alignment are important factors when it comes to creating visual appeal.
• Whitespace is your best friend in a page layout. You want to give your images and text room to breathe so that users can better focus their attention and lead to increased engagement.
• Don’t go overboard with too many links in the body of your content. Serving up too many with no clear purpose leads to the perception of clutter and will be overlooked by your visitors.

5. Make your site appear trustworthy

Unlike the previous steps you can take to improve the user experience and SEO of your site, measuring the perceived trustworthiness of your site can be difficult. However, that doesn’t mean it should be skipped because gaining a user’s trust is a key factor in ranking higher in search results.

The perception of quality can have just as much impact on your website’s trustworthiness as the quality of the content itself.

Web users have come to expect a certain level of polish and organization on the sites they visit, and if your website appears out of date or without any attention to visual detail, it will come across as untrustworthy.

Once your users form an initial impression of your site, it will be extremely difficult to change their minds down the road. Regardless of your intent, presenting a poorly designed website will make it appear as if your business doesn’t care and puts little to no effort into your work. It doesn’t matter if this is far from reality.

Steps to improve your site’s trustworthiness:

• Create a style guide for your website and make sure everything adheres to one consistent look. This may seem like an overwhelming task to complete, but just covering the basics of consistent fonts, colors, and visuals can get you on the right track.
• Evaluate your site from the viewpoint of your user. Take a step back and try to think about how they’ll read your content, navigate your site, and find the information you want them to discover. It may help to have someone less familiar with your business to use your website while you observe their actions.
• Study the websites of your competitors. While some may fall into the same trap, chances are you’ll discover a thing or two about what can be improved upon and what should be avoided.

Unlike the previous steps you can take to improve the user experience and SEO of your site, measuring the perceived trustworthiness of your site can be difficult. However, that doesn’t mean it should be skipped because gaining a user’s trust is a key factor in ranking higher in search results.

The perception of quality can have just as much impact on your website’s trustworthiness as the quality of the content itself.

Web users have come to expect a certain level of polish and organization on the sites they visit, and if your website appears out of date or without any attention to visual detail, it will come across as untrustworthy.

Once your users form an initial impression of your site, it will be extremely difficult to change their minds down the road. Regardless of your intent, presenting a poorly designed website will make it appear as if your business doesn’t care and puts little to no effort into your work. It doesn’t matter if this is far from reality.

See the full article in Aronson Advertising

Having trouble ranking high on Google’s search results? How much attention are you paying to the user experience of your website?

In the early days of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), you could stuff a page with relevant keywords and call it a day as you shot your way up the search result rankings. Google now looks at more than 200 ranking factors to determine which sites make it to the top of the search results page, and a site’s user experience goes a long way towards achieving that success.

SEO and user experience may seem like opposites, but in reality, one without the other will lead to poor performance. Both share the common goal of getting relevant information in front of users. To put it simply, SEO targets search engines and leads users to your site, whereas the user experience helps answer the user’s questions once they’re there.

If you want your website’s visitors to spend more time on your site and increase valuable conversions while ranking higher in search results, apply these five important user experience goals that should be part of your SEO strategy.

1. Make your site mobile-friendly

It can be easy to overlook one of the most important ranking factors for a site, as most people will design their entire website from a desktop computer. More than half of all web traffic is now performed on a mobile device. With the number of mobile devices forecasted to reach 16.8 billion by 2023, if you haven’t made your website’s mobile-friendliness a top priority, now is the time.

Your site’s mobile performance and structure are also the most important versions of your site in terms of ranking on Google.

Back in 2015, Google made mobile friendliness an important ranking factor, and in 2017 the search engine began the switch to mobile-first indexing for all websites.

No matter how well you’ve optimized your site’s design and SEO for desktop users, your hard work will be lost if those decisions don’t carry over to your visitors on mobile devices. When Google crawls your site, it will calculate the page’s ranking factor off of the mobile experience.

If your bounce rate is high, it could mean users visiting your site from a Google search left due to the page not loading properly on mobile, thus sending a signal to Google to lower your ranking in the SERPs.

Of course, it is still important to optimize your site for desktop users, but if you are not considering users across all devices, the likelihood of Google considering your site in a top SERP placement is quite low.

Steps to make sure your site is mobile-friendly:

• Check your website on a variety of devices, including desktop, laptop, mobile phones, and tablets. If you do not have easy access to a range of devices, most browsers have a way to simulate popular sizes, such as Chrome’s Inspect tool.
• Pay particular attention to the layout of information and the legibility of text on the screen. Is the flow of your site just as effective on mobile as it is on a desktop? Are images taking up too much space on your phone, pushing important content off the screen? Are buttons easy to press?
• Google provides a free Mobile-Friendly Test that can analyze your site’s mobile-friendliness and offers helpful suggestions on where to make improvements.

2. Make your site quick to load

Did you know that just a one-second delay in page loading time can result in 11 percent fewer visitors and a 16 percent drop in customer satisfaction? After three seconds, you could be losing close to half of your site’s visitors.

Google is not blind to this fact either and in 2018 began using a website’s mobile loading speed as a ranking factor in their search results — another reason to make sure your site is optimized for mobile.

If you’ve noticed a significantly higher bounce rate on your site, page speed could be a major culprit. This is especially true for mobile visitors who are likely on the go and are less willing to wait those extra seconds for your page to load.

When it comes to speeding up your website, many common factors could be playing a role. Some issues are easier to fix than others. If you don’t have full control over choosing your hosting provider or have limited editing ability over your site’s theme, there are still a few steps you can take to improve performance.

One of the leading culprits of a slow loading site is its images. This isn’t to say photos and graphics should be removed, but all images should be properly compressed and sized to fit its intended placement.

If you need to include a lot of images, a lazy load script that only loads images as a user scrolls down to them can vastly improve loading time.

Steps to improve your site’s page speed:

• Run your site through Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool to discover areas that can be worked on to improve page speed and performance.
• Optimize and compress your images. There are quite a few websites that can optimize your images without negatively impacting visual quality, including TinyPNG.
• Consider serving your images from a Content Delivery Network (CDN) like ImageKit.io to further optimize the delivery of your images.

3. Make your site easy to navigate

If a visual hierarchy or proper linking structure is not in place, it will be difficult for your site’s pages to rank favorably, if at all, in search listings. Your users will also likely get lost and leave your site, resulting in high bounce rates.

Navigation

Cleaning up your site’s main navigation is an obvious first step.

Your navigation, whether it is the main navigation, Call-to-Action’s (CTA), or links in the content, should be intuitive and guide your users onto the next steps through your site. It should be clear to the user where each navigational item will take them.

A good goal is to make sure that any page a user may want to get to is no more than four clicks away.

Having too many navigation menu items not only overloads your visitors with too many options, but also it can reduce overall link authority to the rest of your site and make it harder for key pages to rank on search results.

Clear navigation also increases the likelihood that Google will add sitelinks to your site’s listing in the search results. This will make your listing more prominent, and with the added space, help push competitor listings further down the page.

Headings

While your main navigation guides users through multiple pages on your website, proper heading structure (H1, H2, H3, etc) should guide your users through the content of the page.

Proper headings make your content easier to scan and help to identify the main theme of each section.

Google and other search engines also use this heading structure to better understand the content on the page in order to serve more relevant information to potential users in the search results.

You may have a page with outstanding long-form content, but if there isn’t a visual and logical hierarchy, chances are your visitors will get lost on the page and will not find the information they are looking for.

Buttons / CTAs

CTA buttons are important touchpoints to get your visitors to interact with your site.

This user engagement is a key metric to show Google that users are interested in the content you are providing.

It’s important to understand where a user will want to go next on your site so you can offer up the relevant CTA to guide them there. However, you don’t want to overwhelm them with too many CTAs either.

If additional options are necessary, avoid exceeding more than three buttons. In this case, utilizing different styling for primary and secondary CTAs will help make the most important action stand out to the user.

4. Make your site easy on the eyes

Bad design often results in bad SEO.

Having a clean, well designed layout helps further engage your users and reduces the likelihood they’ll bounce back to the search listings to look elsewhere for their information.

Google’s RankBrain algorithm uses artificial intelligence to better understand user behavior and is designed to look at key metrics of a page where design plays a major role in influencing, such as bounce rate, pages per session, organic CTR, and dwell time.

Google is usually secretive about which factors influence a site’s ranking, but the company did reveal that RankBrain is among the top three ranking signals.

If a user can effortlessly move from one page to the next, click through relevant links, and spend a considerable amount of time on your site, Google will recognize your site as user-friendly.

But what if a user lands on your site and finds the page poorly laid out, hard to read, overly complicated, or simply just an eyesore?

Chances are they’ll return to the search results page that brought them to you and check out a competing listing. This “pogo-sticking” is not lost to the RankBrain algorithm and as a result, Google will continue to push your site lower in the rankings.

Steps to improve your site’s visual appeal:

• Pay attention to the formatting of your text. Fonts that are too small, hard to read, or in poorly chosen colors, will likely push your lead users off of your page. Keeping your text’s line length to 50-75 characters and paying attention to text alignment are important factors when it comes to creating visual appeal.
• Whitespace is your best friend in a page layout. You want to give your images and text room to breathe so that users can better focus their attention and lead to increased engagement.
• Don’t go overboard with too many links in the body of your content. Serving up too many with no clear purpose leads to the perception of clutter and will be overlooked by your visitors.

5. Make your site appear trustworthy

Unlike the previous steps you can take to improve the user experience and SEO of your site, measuring the perceived trustworthiness of your site can be difficult. However, that doesn’t mean it should be skipped because gaining a user’s trust is a key factor in ranking higher in search results.

The perception of quality can have just as much impact on your website’s trustworthiness as the quality of the content itself.

Web users have come to expect a certain level of polish and organization on the sites they visit, and if your website appears out of date or without any attention to visual detail, it will come across as untrustworthy.

Once your users form an initial impression of your site, it will be extremely difficult to change their minds down the road. Regardless of your intent, presenting a poorly designed website will make it appear as if your business doesn’t care and puts little to no effort into your work. It doesn’t matter if this is far from reality.

Steps to improve your site’s trustworthiness:

• Create a style guide for your website and make sure everything adheres to one consistent look. This may seem like an overwhelming task to complete, but just covering the basics of consistent fonts, colors, and visuals can get you on the right track.
• Evaluate your site from the viewpoint of your user. Take a step back and try to think about how they’ll read your content, navigate your site, and find the information you want them to discover. It may help to have someone less familiar with your business to use your website while you observe their actions.
• Study the websites of your competitors. While some may fall into the same trap, chances are you’ll discover a thing or two about what can be improved upon and what should be avoided.

Unlike the previous steps you can take to improve the user experience and SEO of your site, measuring the perceived trustworthiness of your site can be difficult. However, that doesn’t mean it should be skipped because gaining a user’s trust is a key factor in ranking higher in search results.

The perception of quality can have just as much impact on your website’s trustworthiness as the quality of the content itself.

Web users have come to expect a certain level of polish and organization on the sites they visit, and if your website appears out of date or without any attention to visual detail, it will come across as untrustworthy.

Once your users form an initial impression of your site, it will be extremely difficult to change their minds down the road. Regardless of your intent, presenting a poorly designed website will make it appear as if your business doesn’t care and puts little to no effort into your work. It doesn’t matter if this is far from reality.

See the full article in Aronson Advertising