Your website is the best way for potential customers to learn about you. It needs to attract their attention and work smoothly, so they’re not turned off by weird glitches or error messages. Here are 5 items you need to check on your WordPress website to make sure it’s running at peak efficiency and will convert site visitors into customers.
1. Bring Your Website Design Up to Date
There are still websites out there that look like they were built in the late 90s or early 2000s. Yours shouldn’t be one of them. Use an open design with lots of white space so it’s easy for viewers to read your text. Include video to catch their attention. Make your contact information easy to find. Put your menu at the top of the page and make it sticky so it stays visible as your readers scroll down the page.
2. Review Your SEO Strategy
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art of making sure the search engines find your site and display it high in the search engine results pages (SERP). This is done through several methods, including adding keywords to your content and meta descriptions and using backlinks to increase your “SEO Juice.” All of this matters because you need organic traffic as much as you do the paid traffic you drive to your site through your online and offline advertising. The stronger your SEO strategy, the more organic traffic you’ll get.
3. Check Your Plugins
Most WordPress sites use a lot of plugins. However, you have to keep your plugins updated to make sure they’re functioning correctly. Plus, if you install a new one, you want to confirm that it doesn’t conflict with other plugins, or with other aspects of your website. There’s nothing worse than having a glitch on your website that drives potential customers away. Check your plugins regularly to see if they need updating and deactivate any plugins you no longer use.
4. Make Sure Your Website Has Been Moved to HTTPS
Does your website URL start with “http:” or “https:”? This matters a lot now that Google is punishing non-https sites by making them less visible in the SERP. This is a simple task, which has been made much easier by most major web hosts adding HTTPS and a module called Let’s Encrypt to their hosting plans. Confirm that your website URL starts with “https:” and if it doesn’t, go into your cPanel to change this.
5. Fix Broken Links
Broken links on your site, whether internal or external, can cause your website visitors to see an error message, which can result in them clicking away to a competitor. They can also prevent website crawlers from indexing your site properly for the search engines, resulting in your site being downgraded in the SERP. Follow and fix all broken links on your website to make sure your site works well for your users and the search engines.
Joni Mueller has been designing web sites for hire since 2003, when she first blew up her web host’s server by insisting on running Greymatter. Since then, Joni has designed for Blogger and Movable Type, TextPattern, WordPress and CMS Made Simple. She lives with her cat and shoe collection in a bucolic old section of Houston called Idylwood. For some strange reason, Joni likes to refer to herself in the third person. When she’s not working on web design, she’s ordering lawyers around. And blogging about it. Or both.
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