Your website needs to be successful and popular in order to achieve the goals that you have set for it and for yourself. If you sell products online, you need it to sell as many products as possible. If you create content, you want people to view it as much as possible so that you can benefit from advertising dollars, and so on. The first step to achieving this success is to improve your website so that it looks great, works great, and is engaging to all your users.
Use Google Analytics to Determine What Your Problem Areas Are
The first step to improving your website is to understand what your website’s problems are. You can do this using a few different methods. You can try to have your friends and family conduct a series of tasks on your site and rank how easy it was, for example, but to truly understand your website’s faults you will need as much data as possible. To obtain this data, all you need to do is sign up for Google Analytics. If your bounce rate is high, then you have a problem with a certain page. If users keep dropping off after putting their items in their checkout cart, then the problem is with your checkout process, and so on.
Conduct a Website Audit
Google analytics is not the only step you need to take to determine what your problem areas are. You need to conduct a website audit to ensure that there are no broken or useless pages, broken links, or other structural issues that you need to address to improve the user experience on your site. Other audits you will need to conduct on your site include SEO and content. Only by completing a full website audit can you understand what issues your site has, and more importantly, how to fix them.
Take Note from Successful Websites in Your Niche
The next step is to understand what your competitors are doing right, and comparing it to your own website. Look at the top Shopify stores, make comparisons, and write down a list of components you want your own website to have. This will help you make improvements that have been guaranteed to work in the past. Take the best from the best, and you can make your website into the best looking and functioning site possible.
Deciding What Improvements You Need to Make
When deciding what improvements, you need to make, you need to be smart. If your site is already up and running, then having downtime could cause more problems than it would solve. Instead, use Google analytics to make changes on areas that matter most, and then work your way through your audit list from there, and implement the changes you want to make. Generally speaking, working from the framework up is the best way to go, so that you can deal with structural issues first, and aesthetic issues last.
Websites become outdated quickly. Between technological changes, like the switch from HTML to XML, and aesthetic trends, not updating your website regularly will be your downfall. Always analyze, improve, and offer a better website to your users than the one you had yesterday.