The day that you’ve been waiting for has finally arrived.
After months of hard work, consultation and development your brand new website is now live. The design is superb, the beautifully-crafted content reads like a dream and the navigation is flawless. It’s abundantly clear that your website is going to prove irresistible to every new visitor and blow your competition out of the water.
At this point it would seem perfectly reasonable to resume investing your energies elsewhere in the business. Wouldn’t it?
It’s easy to assume that your website is now a finished product. However, much like gardening – or indeed growing a successful business – running an effective website is a long-term commitment requiring regular improvements.
This misunderstanding can actually be heightened by search engine marketing. Whilst this can be an effective way to increase the volume of site traffic, it doesn’t necessarily guarantee that your conversion rate will increase. Working hard to improve user experience will help to ensure that more visitors respond positively to your website, multiplying the impact that a subsequent increase in traffic will have. This is exactly why regularly testing and improving your website is so important.
Testing can be a very simple process. You might regularly read through your content to ensure that it has been updated. Your website statistics – particularly landing/exit pages, bounce rates and average visit duration – will give an accurate indication of how effectively it is performing.
You can also test the technical performance of your website. This might involve looking at your site’s cross-browser and cross-device compatibility, particularly if it’s a responsive site. A speed test will indicate how long the website takes to load, which is particularly crucial for e-commerce sites. Finally, watching people visit your site – user testing – will clarify how functional it is.
It really is essential that you take the opportunity to regularly test and improve your website. The results will speak for themselves.



