You think your website is up to date and doing well? You think it appeals to the up and coming new generation of consumers? You think you cannot make more money with your current site? Think again.

If you look at important metrics for your website, the chance is good you’ll find it lags behind in one performance indicator or another. For example, about 47 percent of consumers surveyed by KissMetrics expect a web page to load in less than 2 seconds. Another finding reveals that some 40 percent of consumers will abandon a website that loads in more than 3 seconds.

Loading Times Are Getting Shorter

The loading time of your website is very important. Sites burdened with slow-loading imagery are something of the past. Even if you need to develop a website that features lots of images, use an image compressor to reduce the size of the uploaded photos and graphics. This is just one of the methods to boost loading time on desktop and mobile browsers.

Look at the average loading time of websites on Android phones and iPhones:

Loading time averages 2.1 seconds with Android and 3.2 seconds with iPhone. If your site is markedly slower when loading through one of the two leading mobile operating systems, you are probably losing visitors and leads.

Optimize Your Site for Mobile

If you think this is nonsense that concerns only a fraction of online consumers and that your site fails into a category where people do not care about site speed, look at the figures below. According to a report by StatCounter and Statista, about 53 percent of the global web traffic in August 2017 is on mobile devices. Mobile traffic share is 65 percent in Asia and 63 percent in Africa but North America is also moving to mobile-first Internet traffic with close to 43 percent. The share of mobile traffic in Europe is 37 percent.

Hence, half to one-third of your visitors are coming to your website from a mobile device. And lacking optimisation for mobile is like having a taxicab without the taxi sign — no one knows you are out there.

Entire industries now rely on mobile online visitors to retain their websites live and profitable.

Industry verticals like news and retail sectors have half to one-third of their website visits realised through mobile devices. One-fifth of people who visit travel and automotive websites are also on mobile.

Optimisation for mobile is mandatory if you are to survive the growing pressure from mobile-first peer websites. A retail site that responds one second slower than average will witness conversion rates going down by 7 percent, the KissMetrics report reads. So if you make sales worth $1,000 a day on your site, you will lose some $25,000 in sales annually.

Improve Your Content

The Internet is burdened by low-quality content and having one of these low-quality sites does not help your business. Low quality refers to not only grammar and spelling across your website copy and blog posts. Low quality is if you post content that can be found on zillions of other websites. It is also the use of unoriginal imagery and website templates without making the slightest effort to tweak the theme and make it look original.

Creating content without a content strategy is also unadvisable. You must know your audience and create unique content for your readers. Former Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile says that most visitors will read a blog post for 15 seconds on average. You must also bear in mind that 47 percent of buyers tend to view 3–5 pieces of content before they even consider giving you a call, a report by HubSpot reads. Apparently, you need great content to convince your visitors it is worth making that call.

Use Social Media to Boost Site Rankings

You can rarely improve your site rankings without using external channels to promote your content — when you have content worth promoting, of course. But opting for a social media account and social exposure for the sake of it barely pays off in the long term.

Content marketing is not just posting on social channels; you need a strategy and need to attain social media exposure in a natural way while retaining visitors. Promoting a slow and unprofessional site through great content will not help you retain visitors. Furthermore, not all social networks are created equal and content that is suitable for one platform would not work at all on another social channel.

Boosting your website’s social media exposure can help you grow any business but can also cost you dearly in terms of time and money if you select the wrong strategy. LinkedIn is good for B2B while Facebook is more appropriate for B2C. Promoting your site on Twitter can help you grow as an authority in a certain field but can easily ruin your brand reputation through a single tweet.

Did you notice that we use statistical data from Statista to support most statements across this article? This is not because we want to promote their service but because at the moment there is no alternative to their service. Citing them will boost their ranking a little but it also boosts ours, providing valuable information to our readers in the process. The same applies to your outdated content and social media strategy; you should use only the best methods and use them in the best possible way.

Get Rid of Banal Designs

We assume you are not making a personal blog but a website that should make money one way or another. Then get rid of that banal design as soon as possible. Myriads of online stores look all the same and you need to work hard to find a truly original one.

Look, there are plenty of apps available that consumers can use to compare prices and land on the site that provides them with an offer that best suits their needs. Placing that large discount stamp won’t work when automated search and AI is used to find your site. Direct traffic to your site will increase only after you re-design the site for speed, mobile, and originality.

Forget about 3D shadows and bevels, and reduce the number of popping-up forms to a minimum. Use flat and material design wherever possible and make white space dominate. Minimal design is what you need in the second decade of the XXI century although it will not save your site if it looks unprofessional and you lack great content that supports great design.

Any detail in website design matters. It is very tempting to select that option which makes a built-in chat pop up when I visit your site. This is not original, though. Moreover, it is intrusive and shifts the visitor’s attention from your core product offering. I can find your chat if I need it, but can I find this great service offering that you need to position perfectly on your site and make it distinguishing through the means of colours, size, and call to action. What is your call to action — to have a chat or to sell a great service or product?

If you do not tweak your website with such details in mind, it will always look outdated and unprofessional.

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