Boosting website traffic is a constant struggle for any site owner or maintainer. There’s an eternal fight between staying on top of the newest methods and making sure that your content is appealing to your target audience. If only there were ways built into your web design that could give your traffic the boost it needs!
Well, you’re in luck. Today, we’re going to discuss four surefire ways to build traffic-boosting measures right into your web design. Best of all, these design choices may already be included in your current design, needing only small changes in order to really optimize your site.
Opt For Simple Design To Reduce Loading Time
It’s been said over and over, about many subjects other than web design: simple is better. In fact, year after year, simple web design has made many lists of the most popular and effective web design trends. So simple design is already a good decision for a lot of reasons, ranging from aesthetic to efficiency.
But in terms of boosting traffic, simple design has one very big perk: it will reduce loading times for your site.
As any avid user of the internet will tell you, exaggerated loading times are the bane of web surfing. What do we want? Access to the site we just clicked on! When do we want it? Now!
Higher load times result in reduced customer satisfaction, loss of conversion, higher bounce rate, fewer page views — and, ultimately, a much lower ranking on Google’s search engine. And if you want more traffic, you should definitely aim at showing up on the first page of a Google search.
So how can changing to a simple web design reduce your load time?
The more features you include on your homepage, especially if you have high levels of non-optimized visual content, videos, or a lot of extraneous features, the slower your page will load. Reducing the amount of complicated content on your homepage reduces the lag time, and contributes to visitor satisfaction and engagement, which in turn boosts your Google ranking, which ultimately feeds back into your traffic numbers.
Enhance Your Visual Appeal
We tend to think of web traffic being drawn more by effectiveness and usability than any aesthetic concern, but the fact is that what your website looks like will play a part in your visitors choosing to remain on your site, and choosing to return.
If your web design is aesthetically displeasing, cluttered, overwhelming, or far out of style, you run the risk of turning visitors off from coming back.
Effective layout plays a part in this as well. When we visit a new site, we tend to look for certain features: navigation along the top or left side, for instance. A clickable website logo or icon in the top left corner which allows us to return to the homepage. Contact information in the footer. So taking those common assumptions into account when putting together your layout will boost the user experience, which will in turn help your traffic.
Make Your Site Responsive
This is a huge consideration in today’s day and age. Increasingly, we see internet users turning to tablets and smartphones to surf the web, which means that the day of strictly web browser-based design has passed. If your site is only optimized for a laptop or desktop, you’re likely missing out on a significant portion of your potential visitors.
Responsive websites are designed to adapt to the platform on which they are being viewed. Let’s take a look at some potential differences to illustrate why responsive sites are helpful for
traffic.
Browser-only web design:
- Viewed on a laptop browser, the site looks fine. Everything is functioning as expected.
- Viewed on a tablet, the site is spaced oddly. Many of the visuals are not fully visible, and the layout is awkward.
- Viewed on a smartphone, the navigation is almost impossible to use, the font is illegible unless the viewer zooms in, and some of the images won’t load at all.
Responsive design:
- Viewed on a laptop browser, the site looks fine. Everything is functioning as expected.
- Viewed on a tablet, the site is a slightly more stripped-down version, with layout and visuals adapted.
- Viewed on a smartphone, the site has an even more stripped-down appearance, with navigation adapted to the smaller screen, and the most important features made easy to locate.
Again, this goes back to the importance of increasing engagement and stay rate in order to enhance your Google ranking. If your visitors have a good experience and stay on the site, it will feed back to your ranking and increase traffic. On an individual basis, as well, a satisfied visitor is much more likely to return.
Optimize Your Navigation
Navigation sees almost as many trends come and go as web design itself. This isn’t surprising, because navigation is an integral part of good design, and there are plenty of options for optimizing and upgrading your nav.
To boost your traffic, it’s important that your navigation is on point. It must make it easy for your visitor to find the information they want, as quickly as possible. Opting for visible nav, rather than hidden, and placing it in a position that is easy to locate both assist with UX.
A good UX means that your visitors will stick around for longer, exploring your site, returning again and again, and enhancing your traffic numbers.
There are a lot of ways to boost your traffic, and a lot of methods that deserve attention. But these four ways are helpful because you can build them right into the design, and they will continue to work for you, elevating your site into something better.
Author Bio
Alice Scott is a passionate writer and blogger who specializes in topics related to digital branding, blogging, and online business. She loves having Churros with her cat Chubby and morning walks.