As we approach the last quarter of 2024, now’s a great time to evaluate your current digital strategy and see what you can do to set up for success in 2025. According to the United Nations, “Digital technologies have advanced more rapidly than any innovation in our history – reaching around 50 percent of the developing world’s population in only two decades,” and is pervasive in the entire developed world, transforming societies across the globe (www.un.org/en/un75/impact-digital-technologies). It is predicted that the pace of technology is only increasing, with individuals and organizations becoming more and more dependent on technology and the interconnectedness it brings. With the incredible pace of digital change, ensuring your website is up-to-date is crucial for maintaining a competitive edge.
If you’re nearing your 2024 financial year-end with spare budget-change jingling in your pocket, or are thinking about where to invest some of your 2025 budget, putting your money strategically towards your website can be a great use of your company capital and give you a jumpstart for the coming year. In this post, we’ll walk you through ideas for key improvements you can make to your website and how to get the most bang for your tech-spending buck.
Why Website Improvements Are Crucial
Before diving into specific improvements, it’s essential to understand why updating your website is so important. Your website is often the first (and sometimes the ONLY) interaction customers have with your brand. A well-designed, user-friendly website can build trust, enhance user experience, start conversations, and drive conversions. On the other hand, an outdated or poorly functioning site can deter visitors and negatively impact your brand’s reputation.
In 2025, your digital presence will be more important than ever. With consumers expecting seamless, fast, and personalized online experiences, a modern and optimized website is no longer a luxury—it’s a must-have.
Key Areas for Website Improvement
Here are several areas where you can focus your efforts to improve your website for 2025:
- Mobile Optimization
Mobile optimization has been crucial for years, and its importance continues to grow. With more users accessing websites via mobile devices and fewer people using desktops and laptops for their web-surfing experiences, ensuring your site is mobile-friendly is essential. A mobile-optimized site provides better user experiences, faster loading times, and can improve your search engine rankings.
How to Optimize for Mobile Devices
- Responsive Design: This means that your website automatically adjusts to any device screen size that a potential customer might be using.
- Fast Loading Times: Optimising images and using efficient coding practices help to reduce load times on desktop, laptop, and mobile devices.
- Mobile-Friendly Navigation: Related to responsive design, simplifying navigation menus and making sure buttons and links are easy to click on smaller screens can not only help optimize your website, but in turn dramatically improve your user experience (UX).
- User Experience (UX) Enhancements
User experience (UX) is all about making your website easy and enjoyable to use. Good UX can reduce bounce rates, increase time spent on your site, and improve conversions.
How To Improve User Experience and Boost Conversions
- Streamlining Navigation: Make sure your site is easy to navigate with clear menus, a search function, and a logical page hierarchy.
- Improving Content Readability: Use clean fonts that are an appropriate size for potential users and for devices being used (relates back to Responsive Design), adequate spacing, and visual contrast to ensure your content is easy to read. Add in calls to action buttons between content, as a clear area of focus.
- Simplifying Forms: If your site includes forms such as Contact or Intake forms, make them as simple as possible by minimizing the number of fields and enabling auto-fill features.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is critical for ensuring your website appears in search engine results when potential customers are looking for your products or services. SEO involves optimizing your website’s content, structure, and coding to make it more attractive to search engines like Google and Bing. Digital Tea provides comprehensive SEO service packages to suit businesses of all sizes and budgets. Take advantage of our FREE SEO Audit today and see how we can help!
How To Improve Your Website SEO
- Keyword Optimization: Updates your content with relevant keywords that reflect your products and services, the latest trends, and common search behaviours.
- Meta Tags and Descriptions: Ensures all pages have optimized meta tags, including title tags and meta descriptions that incorporate your most important keywords.
- Technical SEO: Improves your site’s loading speed, fixes broken links, and ensures your site is secure, both for you and your users (use HTTPS).
- Content Refresh
Fresh content not only keeps your website appealing to visitors but keeps search engines intrigued as well. Regularly updating your website’s content keeps the digital face of your business relevant, engages your audience, and gives you lots of opportunities to improve your SEO.
How to Create Engaging Web Content
- Update Existing Content: Reviewing and updating information on your site that may have become stale is important and ensures that your content accurately reflects your products and services as well as the latest industry trends and insights.
- Add New Content: Consider adding new blog posts, case studies, or customer testimonials. You could also explore adding multimedia content like videos, infographics, and podcasts to appeal to a wider range of potential customers.
- Optimize with fresh new imagery: The adage “a picture says a thousand words” exists for a reason! You have precious few seconds to make an impression on new customers visiting your website, and one of the best ways to get them engaged and staying longer is with beautiful photos. Even better is when those beautiful photos are of your actual business and your site aesthetic doesn’t rely completely on stock photography. Contact Digital Tea today to inquire about photography and videography for your website!
- Security Enhancements
As cyber threats, fraud attempts, and deep fakes run wild, website security is more critical than ever. An insecure website can lead to data breaches, loss of customer trust, and severe legal consequences.
Enhance Your Website Security
- SSL Certificates: If you don’t already have one, it’s highly recommended that your website gets an SSL certificate. SSL (or Secure Sockets Layer) certificates are standard technology for securing an internet connection by encrypting data sent between a website and a browser. SSL certs are also must-haves for SEO and user trust.
- Regular Updates: Keeping your website’s software, plugins, and themes up to date helps protect you against vulnerabilities.
- Backup Your Website: Regularly backing up your website can help you avoid data loss in case of a security breach or any accidental or unwanted edits (I’m pretty sure we’ve all made one or two of those before).
- Accessibility Improvements
Website accessibility means making your website usable (and hopefully enjoyable) for everyone, and involves improvements such as adding alternative text for images for visually impaired users, allowing for keyboard navigation for users with mobile/dexterity challenges, and using clear fonts and labelling for users who may have trouble reading or are using screen readers. Accessible websites make the internet friendly for all, and accessibility is becoming a legal recommendation (if not a requirement) in many regions.
Improve Your Website’s Accessibility
- Alt Text for Images: Ensure all images have descriptive alternative text added for users who utilize screen readers.
- Keyboard Navigation: If your site can be navigated using a keyboard alone, users with motor disabilities can move through your site with greater ease.
- Accessible Forms: When designing forms that can be used with screen readers, accessibility can be improved by including clear labels, larger and easy-to-read fonts, and straightforward error messages.
- Analytics and Tracking
To measure the success of your website improvements, you need to track key performance indicators (KPIs). Analytics tools can provide valuable insights into how your potential and current customers interact with your site and where further improvements can be made.
Track Your Success with Analytics
- Set Up Google Analytics 4 (GA4): If you haven’t already, set up Google Analytics to track traffic, user behaviour, and conversion rates. It gives a lot of great information about how your website is used.
- Monitor User Flow: Analytics can also be utilized to monitor how people navigate your website, identify any bottlenecks or drop-off points, and see how you can improve the flow and usability of your site.
- Set Goals and Track Conversions: Define specific goals for your business, such as form submissions or product purchases, and track your site’s performance against these goals.
How to Use Your Technology Budget Effectively
Whether you’re using up your 2024 budget or planning ahead for 2025, here are some ideas on how to allocate the money effectively to maximize your website improvements:
- Prioritise High-Impact Improvements
Focus your budget on areas that will have the biggest impact on your business. For instance, if your website isn’t mobile-optimized, allocate funds to mobile optimization first, as it can dramatically improve several areas including user experience and SEO.
- Invest in Professional Services
If you lack the time or expertise to implement the improvements you want to pursue, consider hiring professionals (ahem, like us!). Web designers, programmers, SEO specialists, and content creators can provide the skills needed to make your website shine. Investing in expert services can save time and ensure the job is done right. And it just so happens that Digital Tea offers all of these services and more!
- Upgrade Hosting and Security
If your website’s performance or security is lacking, use your budget to upgrade your hosting plan or invest in additional security measures. Faster loading times and robust security features can improve user experience and protect your site and users from cyber threats. Contact us today to discuss local hosting and how we can improve your site security.
- Content Creation
If your content is outdated or lacking a certain lustre, why not allocate part of your budget to content creation? This can include updating existing content, writing new blog posts, creating videos, or designing infographics. Fresh, high-quality content can drive traffic and improve SEO and customer experiences. Get an idea of where you can improve your current website content with our FREE SEO Audit.
- Run a Paid Advertising Campaign
If you have funds remaining after making essential website improvements (or consider paid advertising your essential improvement), consider running a paid advertising campaign. Platforms like Google Ads and social media ads can drive immediate traffic to your website, helping you reach new audiences. Talk to Digital Tea today or check out our PPC Audit for ideas on how to get the most out of your paid advertising.
- Training and Development
Once you’ve made your essential improvements, investing in training for your team can ensure they are up-to-date with how to maintain and continue to optimize your website through 2025. Digital Tea offers in-person or online training following the completion of projects to ensure you have the confidence to fly on your own, and that the transition to your new/improved site is as smooth as possible. Don’t have the time or expertise to manage your site on your own? We also offer maintenance packages! Contact us today to learn more.
- Future-Proofing
Finally, consider future-proofing your website by investing in technologies that will keep your site competitive in the coming years. This could include integrating artificial intelligence (AI) tools, adopting new web development frameworks, or enhancing your site’s accessibility features.
Conclusion
As 2024 enters the last quarter, setting aside the time (and budget) to improve your website can leave you positioned for success in 2025. By focusing on key areas such as mobile optimization, user experience, SEO, and security, you can enhance your site’s performance and user satisfaction. Strategically using your tech budget can ensure that you’re not only making necessary updates but also investing in your business and your website’s long-term success.
A well-maintained and updated website is a powerful piece of your digital marketing toolkit. It can help you attract more visitors, convert leads, and ultimately grow your business.
So get a jump on the competition and start planning for a successful 2025!