Getting A Website Ready To Grow

For a business or for a personal brand, the website is one of the most powerful tools for maintaining an identity in the online world. Like a business, it evolves and it grows in time. Sometimes, you just want to get current. Other times, you want to be able to expand it to new areas and new depths. If you want to grow your site, you need to ask yourself the following questions.

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Shake off the mistakes

Having a goal to develop your website, a key focus of how you want to make it better, is a good idea. However, it doesn’t hurt to take the time to do a little housekeeping, either. Now is the time to identify all the cases of bad navigation, of overloaded pages, and anything that gets in the way of the site’s usability. Now is the time to weed them out.

Grow in the right direction

If you want to grow the site but you’re not entirely sure how you can make it better, then now is the time to look at the analytics. Analytics can show you not only which pages get the most traffic and could benefit from a bit more focus. They can include heat maps that show you exactly where on each page a visitor’s attention is going. You can find the elements that work and expand on them throughout the rest of the site. Or you can use an area that gets a lot of attention but is being underutilised, adding calls-to-action and the like where there was little before.

Make sure you can support the weight

If you start off with a host that deals specific with small, amateur web operations, you’re going to soon find out that they might not be able to support the site as you grow. You need to look at options like PAC Web Hosting and how they offer different packages for sites with different needs. Otherwise, you won’t be able to scale the site up as much as you would like. Meaning you will forever be limited in just how you can grow it.

Grow it outside the site

If you want to improve the traffic of a site, then the site alone isn’t enough. You need to focus on how you can attract and retain more people. Attracting them might mean using appealing landing pages with social media campaigns or improving your search engine positioning. Retaining them can be a lot easier if you make use of remarketing tactics like those used by Clickity. Remarketing can have your site appear to past visitors in their social media, for instance, giving them ample incentive to check back with your site. This can work in either keeping old visitors informed of new content that might appeal to them or to encourage repeat customers.

Updating a site for the purposes of keeping it fresh isn’t a bad idea. But when you’re updating it, take the time to answer the questions above. Get as much from your update as you can and watch your traffic data as you reap the benefits.