When looking for ways to improve your company website, straight answers are very hard to come by. This is because there are a lot of variables, often involving higher-level coding and website optimization. Despite this, it is possible to improve your company website in 7 quick ways.
The top three ways to improve your company website involve cleaning it up, increasing the speed, and updating dated content. After this, you can begin to optimize images and themes. Below, we give 7 quick ways to improve your company website.
1. Clean It Up
WordPress does an excellent job of telling you when you need to do something in its backend. This can involve when to perform updates and information about the functionality of its plugins and themes. If you don’t address these issues, you will have a cluttered dashboard full of dots and banners asking you to solve the given issues.
Start by deleting or approving comments and pingbacks. Next, uninstall any old themes or plugins that are not being used. Finally, the ones that are in use should be updated.
After this, update the core WordPress feature if it needs it. WordPress does offer auto-update in its latest version. However, we would advise against setting any WordPress theme, plugin or core updates to run automatically. It might seem a quick fix, but it often results in errors or issues due to plugin developers not being able to test for every eventuality or compatibility with other plugins you might have. You should always have a recent backup and, ideally, test updates before running them live on your site. Here at ThriveWP, we do all of this for you on our care plans.
2. Test Your Speed
Testing your speed is a quick task that can reveal a lot about what may be slowing your website down. You can conduct it using Google’s own speed test. Pay attention to both your desktop and mobile speeds.
Speed is vital for many reasons. First, search engines, notably Google, use it to measure SEO. A slow loading time means you will drop further down the search engines results page.
Slow loading times also cause people to leave your website and go elsewhere. This measure of time spent on a website is known as the bounce rate. It is a factor that will be used in SEO. If people leave your website quickly, it tells the search engines your content is not relevant and penalizes you.
Google’s speed test won’t fix the speed for you. Instead, it will give you a list of jobs to do that improve website performance. This makes it a valuable tool.
3. Update Old Content
One SEO mistake many business owners make is creating keyword-rich content, posting it online, and leaving it. Unfortunately, even evergreen content will get stale, as search engines favour newer material as part of their algorithms. To combat this, you have two options.
The first is to create brand new content, which takes time and money. Alternatively, you can go through your previous posts and see which can be updated.
4. Address Security
With so many third-party applications available, it is no surprise that WordPress sites are very susceptible to hacking. This does not mean your plugins and themes may be insecure as a given, but you do need to keep them protected.
Start by introducing an automatic site backup. Add some security tools if your hosting provider has not already given you them. By doing this, you are preventing attacks, and if they do occur, you can at least return to a previous point in the website history.
After this:
- Look to your accounts used on the site.
- Don’t have any content that has been created by the admin, even going as far as deleting it and creating a new user.
- Make sure your passwords are extremely strong, using different characters and numbers.
5. Address Your Theme
Your theme is not just about the business website design. It also has a significant impact on speed. While your theme may have worked in the past, it may now be outdated, and a change could be on the horizon.
Start by making sure your theme is responsive. These themes adapt to the device being viewed on. They will change images sizes, fonts, and navigation menus. Primarily, this is, so the theme is functional for mobile users.
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After this, make sure the theme is easy to navigate for your users. For example, one website design trick is to ensure users can find anything on your site within three clicks. If you have to add new search bars and menus, then do so.
If this seems too much and you begin to get lost, switch to a one-page website. When you are not selling products but just want a point of contact, they are easy to manage and can look highly professional.
6. Optimize Images
Images can slow websites down considerably. You can rectify this by installing an optimization plugin. Some of them will even come for free, or you can pay a small fee for the more efficient ones.
Note that some WordPress speed plugins will include image optimization within them. Check this before you get a new plugin, as they can conflict and cause issues on the site.
7. Address Your Hosting
It can make sense to get the cheapest hosting available when you start. Like anything, you often get what you pay for. Many of your website problems may be attributed to your hosting, including speed and security.
Shop around for a new provider, looking at long terms plans. Many places offer dedicated WordPress hosting, which will be a massive benefit if you don’t already have it.
Improving Your Company Website
Not all of these will apply to your company website. However, just implementing two or three will have a marked improvement. They should not take much time and take little effort in return for big rewards.
For all your WordPress needs, Thrive should be your first stop. We offer maintenance and web design, so you can get on with running your organization. Click here to contact us and discuss your needs.
