How to make your website work for you during lockdown and beyond!

If you’ve invested in a website for your business, then well done! As we all increasingly live our lives online, it’s important for businesses both large and small to have a website. This becomes especially important during lockdowns when people turn to online shopping and services to replace the face-to-face interaction they can no longer have.

Don’t agree with us? We’ve blogged quite a bit about this subject, and you can read one of those blogs here. We might just change your mind! For those of you who do already have websites, either a shiny new website or a one that you’ve had for a few years, we want to make sure you’re making it work as hard as possible for you. You’ve gone to all that effort to pull together branding, images, copy and paid for it to exist, so you want to make sure you’re getting sales or leads from it. It will take a little effort and you’ll need to put in a few hours, but if you start making more money from it that’s got to be a good thing, hasn’t it? We’ve put together a checklist to run through to get you started

Make sure your website is secure

Do you know if your website has an SSL certificate? If you copy the full URL does it have http:// at the beginning or https://? The latter indicates that you do have an SSL certificate (a data file in your website’s origin server) which is good news! This means that your website is secure and enables encrypted connection, essential for websites where people enter their personal details or bank details. Google will now rank websites without an SSL certificate lower than those with one, so it’s important to have. Chat to your hosting company or website designer if you don’t think you have one.

Ensure your website is mobile-optimised

A mobile optimised website is one which will display properly on a smartphone or tablet as well as a computer screen or laptop. This is essential as the split between people browsing in the internet on a smartphone and laptop is now around 50/50. If your website isn’t mobile optimised it won’t display properly to people on phones or tablets, and that’s now going to be around half your visitors (or more depending on your sector!).

Stick the link to it everywhere!

Make sure all your social media profiles have the up to date URL pointing to your website in the bio or About Us page. Yes, this one might seem basic, but you would be astonished at how many times we see brands who haven’t done this simple thing to help people easily turn from follows into prospects. Make sure it’s on your business cards and any other marketing collateral too.

Check that your website works properly

Don’t assume it’s working as it should or that your potential customers will tell you if it isn’t. If you sell goods on your website, then make a test purchase to check it is working properly and that any automated emails your customers should receive arrive. If you rely on people filling in forms or downloading content, when was the last time you checked they all work as they should? If potential customers are diligently filling out forms but you never get their details, then you will be losing sales. Broken forms or e-commerce platforms shouldn’t take long to fix if you know how to, but you need to know they are broken first!

Keep the content on your website current

Google loves websites which have new and fresh content so make sure you upload new blogs (once a month is good, once a fortnight is even better!). You can also refresh the copy on your ‘about’ or ‘services’ pages periodically, making sure to include keywords as much as you can without making it sound strange or rendering it totally unreadable… If you don’t have a blog or news area on your website, then drop us a line and we can advise you on the next steps.

If you would like us to take a look at your website and work with you to make sure it’s working hard for you this lockdown then why not drop us a line? We can add help with all website optimisation queries and offer a no obligation chat to see what you need. Call today on 01793 210 045.

Find out more about Black Nova Designs HERE!