Website optimization introduction – How to make a better website

Published Jan 13, 2010 | Matt Dunlap | Optimization

Optimizing a website for better conversion rates involves a lot of testing, monitoring, and tweaking. It is a never-ending process that can prove the difference between success and failure.

In order to properly optimize a website you must first know who your are targeting and what you want that target market to do on your website. Do you want them to subscribe to your newsletter, buy a product, or get more information about your business.

Remember to keep it simple. The more choices you offer the website visitor, the harder it is to test your website. The most effective websites usually have about 3 option.

Website visitor can:

Buy a product or service
subscribe to a newsletter and blog feed
leave with no interaction.

These simple and effective websites are often referred to as squeeze pages, stealth sites, or satellite websites. These types of websites can be very effective for use in the real estate or mortgage industry.

Testing a website

The first step to optimizing a website is to test different theories on what will work. Colors, positioning, fonts, call to actions all get taken into account when a website owner makes choices as to what he thinks will work.

Every website is different and therefore is no set standard on what works and what doesn’t, you have to test.

You should also “Always be testing”. A simple example would be to create two styles of newsletter subscription forms. One form is bright red, while the other is dark blue. Use Google’s website optimizer to make the forms “compete”. Test for a about 1,000 website visitors and then which ever form got more subscribers is the form you use.

Only test one section at a time. Meaning don’t test your subscriber form and website fonts at the same time. Also, only have competitions between two styles.

Monitoring a website

Using analytic software you can see where people come from, what people do and where people leave from your website. You must have some sort of analytic software in use for your website even if you don’t plan to spend a lot of time testing and tweaking.

Even after you find a winning style you can them make another style of make it compete with the winner… this is where “always be testing” comes into play.

Tweaking a website

Again, once you find your winning newsletter subscription box, tweak it a little and monitor again. Maybe tweak the fonts or the text. Your not making tweaks so that you are testing apples to oranges, you’re making tweaks to test green apples to red apples… Does that make sense?

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