Every business needs a fully functional, fast, and effective website if they are going to generate leads and create sales. A shoddy website will instantly turn any potential customer off, as they would rather spend their money somewhere else where the company seems to care about the user experience. A bad website, therefore, makes it seem as if you can’t be bothered, and that does not exactly bode well for the rest of the business and products. These days, websites should be seen as being a virtual shop window. They must be discoverable, logically laid out, quick and efficient, informative of the good inside, and enticing. If you fail to attract your visitors, you will lose huge revenue, which will have a hugely negative impact, as your competitors will begin to out-sell you. Fortunately, software engineers have been working on helping people like you create the best website you can. That means there is a lot of software to help you create, optimize, and speed up your website.
Web Design Tools
If your website is particularly slow and unattractive, perhaps it is time you go back to the drawing board and create a new one from scratch. Web design is an evolving animal with things constantly changing and adapting. New functionality and abilities are being created constantly, and if you don’t keep an eye on it, you may fall behind. There is a shift away from users needing to generate code to create their websites with a more popular and user-friendly drag-and-drop option. Web design tools are, therefore, becoming more and more flexible, and they are beginning to outcompete each other with their all-in-one solutions. Here are some of the best and most popular web design tools you could use to create your new website:
- WordPress is one of the most popular web design tools. It offers thousands of themes to choose from and a huge level of personalized customization.
- WIX: This is a very user-friendly site that is good for beginners. It has drag-and-drop elements and can even use its AI software (Wix Artificial Design Intelligence) to create a site based on your criteria.
- Ghost: this is a simple but effective professional publishing platform. It contains a blogging feature, a minimalistic and powerful editor, optimized site speed, and a user-friendly Content Management System (CMS).
- Webflow: this is a great tool that allows you to build interactions and animations right into your website with unstyled drag-and-drop HTML boxes. It has built-in features such as sliders, tabs, and even background videos. If you want to improve the site, Webflow can generate code for you to send to a developer to ensure it is as functional as it can be and also allow you to launch a site on its own subdomain.
- Statamic: this piece of software has everything included without having to download plug after plugin. It is very easy to customize, and it is ultimately extremely simple to use.
Website design tools can be great to achieve a professional look without too much effort or struggling with code. However, you may want to do some shopping about to see which site offers the best features at the best package deal. Before choosing a host, you need to know what your website needs to do and ensure the web design can accommodate that. Most hosts have a great eCommerce solution either included or as a plugin, for example, depending on the package you buy. That means you should be able to get all the functionality you need with a web design tool.
Tools to Improve Your Websites Speed
If you have a slow page speed, you can usually pick this up yourself without too much effort. Ensure you check on various browsers and devices to see if there is a particular problem in one specific area. You may also want to use a tool to measure the speed of the pages on your site, such as Pingdom Website Speed Test, Google Chrome – Inspect Element, or Google Analytics. Anything slower than a maximum of two seconds is considered too slow and needs improvement. Slow websites will cause high bounce rates, so you definitely can’t have a slow website if you are looking to attract customers. Once you know a page is slow, you must understand where it is slow and how to improve the site. Tools that can help you with this include:
- Google Page Speed Tools look in the PageSpeed Insights sections. It gives suggestions on both mobile and desktop.
- The Chrom Extention: PageSpeed Insights: This heading appears in a tab with an analyze button [reyy clear beneath the top tab].
- Google Analytics also has a speed suggestions section for improvements to be made.
So how do you actually optimize the speed in certain sections? Often, websites are slowed down by improper use of images. Here are a few ways you can improve image speed:
- Simply resize (make smaller) an image using Photoshop Paint or some other image editor software.
- Image compression tools that remove any unnecessary junk within the file are available: Photoshop, Kraken.io, TinyPNG, etc.
Your site may also need some technical optimization. Something like W3 Total Cache can optimize pretty much every detail of your site. If you use WordPress, it is a plugin option that can greatly improve your site’s speed. Something like Cloudflare CDN can reduce the distance between the server and the user, improving speed.
There are also tools that can reduce the amount of code within your site. There is often useless space in files on your website, for example, so using the right tool can condense the code itself. Minimize HTML can do this as can W3 Total Cache. Again, WordPress users, you’ll be happy to know plugins are available to minimize our code.
SEO Optimization Tools
SEO (search engine optimization) is vital for every website, but how many of you know how to use it effectively? Without it, your website will be hard to find on search engines and not fully optimized for performance. It improves the quality of the traffic that is driven to your website and impacts the user’s overall experience when on the site. Okay, so how can you improve your website SEO? Here are some tools to get you thinking:
- SE Ranking: This can accurately identify all the keywords used in search engines that are put to your site and rank where you are in the findings. It can also find the keywords your competitors use. It also comes equipped with several additional tools to help your SEO rankings.
- AgencyAnalytics is a fully in-depth marketing tool that helps identify key areas for improvement. It can monitor the performance of your campaigns in real time. It also has an SEO rank tracker and site auditor, which prioritize the biggest issues affecting your rankings and SEO effectiveness.
- HubSpot: again, this site helps identify SEO weaknesses with audit management and competitive analysis.
There are many SEO marketing tools out there to help you make the most of your website. If you want your business to grow, you need to get the website right, and once it is right, it has to be found on search engines. Without the appropriate tools, you will fall behind your competitors and struggle in an ever-changing and competitive world.
Functionality to Improve User Experience
When a potential customer arrives on your website, they will have a range of expectations that need to be met to generate a lead. The site needs to look the part. With the right content and speed issues aside, there are many other functional ways you can enable a better user experience:
- Search bar: A search bar just makes things so much simpler for the user. Without one, they may be hunting through page after page, which is likely to make them go elsewhere. Also, a search bar inside your website gives you better customer behavior analytics to work from. There are many search bar solutions from widgets within a CMS, and these are fully customizable to suit your analytical needs.
- Live chat: A great way to boost sales is a web chat service. The user can simply ask you directly what exactly they need. It is a great feature that is only growing in popularity, especially as the AI functionality becomes increasingly sensitive and accurate. click4assistance web chat software provider can easily be added to your website to improve it, and what’s more, you benefit from their wealth of experience.
- Blogs: A blog is a great way to ensure that new content is added, which helps the site stay relevant in terms of SEO. Blogs that are subject-specific and fully loaded with optimal SEO will make you more discoverable too. A blog is a relatively easy function to add to your website and serves a very important purpose.
