Websites can be complex to manage with hundreds of pages, different products and services to showcase, and constant news that needs to be shared. Businesses either get it right or lag behind with outdated websites that don’t impress. Does it take a whole marketing team to get it right, or are there strategies that you can adopt to help you ace it?
Effectively managing a website consists of two main stages: understanding your website data and then implementing continuous strategies for improvement.
A. Know the data behind the website
B. Actionable steps for continual improvement
Now that you better understand your audience and how your website is performing, let’s look at the day-to-day actions you can take for improvement:
1. Regularly update content
Website maintenance is best done on an ongoing basis rather than every few months. Put together a schedule for checking all your content systematically.
Over and above keeping content current and correct, it’s also important that you add new content to your website so that search engines see it as up-to-date. This can be done through news pages, blogs and expanding on your current content.
2. A/B Split Testing
Have you ever wondered if a different page layout would work? Often people change their website without having actual data on whether the changes they make are better. A/B Split Testing serves one version of a web page to half your audience and another version of the web page to the other half so that you can compare which version works better. Split testing is a significant first step before diving into structural changes, especially for pages asking people to take action, like putting in an enquiry. You can split test page elements such as opt-in button locations, wording and colouring. You can perform split testing through Google Analytics or use software (for example, Optimizely).
