Our blog, along with many others, are full of advice and instructions of things to add to your website. These often include:
start a blog
,
monitor social media
, or
optimize your site for search engines
. While all of these things are important, today I would like you to do something completely different: think about things you should stop doing.
When we add ideas and actions, websites become more complicated. Complication creates confusion and often translates to lower effectiveness. So today instead of telling you to add new things, we offer a few suggestions on things to remove from your
business website
.
1. Complicated Animations - Flash-based animations can be bad for search engine optimization , but they can also complicate the website experience for visitors. Remember that when users visit your website, they looking for something specific. Animations can often be slow to load, which slows down the user and can make them abandon your website. Perform a test. Remove your animation for a set period of time and see how it impacts metrics like lead conversion and time-on-site.
2. Industry Jargon - Your website should be written for your customers. Assuming that potential customers know and understand industry terminology is a mistake. Look through your website and highlight terms that are not commonly used outside of industry circles. If you aren’t sure if a word should be removed, ask one of your customers if they are familiar with it. Delete the highlighted words and replace them with more common explanations.
3. Images - Images are important. Images help to tell a story. However, many websites have too many images. The problem with having too many images is that they can drastically slow down the load time for your website in a web broswer. Search engines also take into consideration page load times when ranking websites. Websites that have been around for a while can often collect lots of images, and some of them no longer go with the content of the site. Keep some images, but go through and remove all images from your website that don’t help tell your company’s story.
4. Long Pages of Text - Research has shown that Internet users don’t like to scroll. Having a product page that is full of text and graphs that takes several scolls to reach the bottom is asking for your information to be ignored. The truth is that if you have long text pages of your website, you are probably trying to communicate too many ideas on that page. Read through and ask yourself, “Is this all about one topic?” If the answer is “no,” then divide that page into a couple short pages that each contain a single idea. This type of simplification will make it easier for your visitors and search engines to understand what your site and business is aobut.
5. “Contact Us” Form - Contact us forms don’t work. Instead of qualified leads, they mostly attract spam. Having your business contact information as part of your website is critical. However, when it comes to using forms, use landing pages. Landing pages provide a dedicated form that is connected to a lead generation offer. For example, if you have a form connected to a free assessment, you clearly know that submissions from that form are related to potential customers who want a free assessment. You don’t have this clarity with a contact us form, and response rates for dedicated landing pages are much higher.
Do you Agree? Which of these will you be deleting from your website?
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