When you visit a new website, you want it to load quickly. For example, let’s say you’re looking for locally-sourced produce and you have to decide between two websites. Both websites match what you're looking for except website “A” loads slower (~5 seconds or longer) than website “B”(~2 seconds). It’s safe to say that you, along with a majority of people, will feel annoyed at website “A” and perhaps stop visiting the site altogether. This is the main reason website load times are crucial to improving the performance of your website.

      There are several website tools that measure the time it takes for someone to load a website; for example, GTmetrix and Google PageSpeed Insights. These websites even detail the specific elements that are causing the slowing and suggest ways to alleviate. To fix these problems one must either dive into the code and make necessary edits or one can hire someone who does page optimization from the many freelance platforms like Up work or Fiver .

      Studies have shown that at least 51% of the world’s population accesses the internet through mobile devices. In fact these numbers are expected to increase from around 50% to 72% by the year 2025. This is why it's vital that you ensure your website is properly equipped to be utilized on mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets, etc. You wouldn’t want the user’s experience with an optimized mobile layout to ruin their opinion of your site.

      Fortunately, many of the website creator tools such as: squarespace, shopify, wordpress, click funnels, and others, include built-in mobile-ready themes. If your website isn’t managed by these services or is on the older side then your solution is to either edit the code or hire someone to do so.

      Nothing is worse than visiting a new website and being met with too many things on the screen, distracting you from what you were doing and making it hard to navigate the site. An example could be you’re trying to look for a recipe and found one on google but when you visit the site, you are met with everything except the recipe (picture slideshows, animated ads, videos, etc.) and thus have to either spend time looking through the page or simply viewing another website. The solution to this is good visual hierarchy.

      This means that when the user visits the page, they can identify almost intuitively how to navigate and interpret the content. For example, if you have an article with a: title, sub-header, and text, you would want the font size of the title to be the biggest, with the sub-header being medium and text being the smallest. This ranking of the elements through font size communicates to the user the importance and relation between them. As your page is filled with more content it gets more complex but the same basic principle still applies.

      You can have a good looking website but if the user doesn’t know how to navigate or reach what they're looking for then they’ll associate their annoyance and come away with a negative opinion or your site/ brand. Let’s say you run an online store selling items that you know people want. If people visit your website but can't reach the store or product they want then you don’t get a potential sale and they are less likely to return to your store. Fortunately it’s hard to complicate navigation if you use the website managing services I listed above. If you don’t use these services then you have to redesign the navigation of your website altogether but at that point it might be safer for some to migrate to one of the website services.

      The color choice of your website can truly make or break it. For one, if there are too many colors without reason then the visual hierarchy of the site can be broken, especially if some of the colors don’t mix well. Another example is when text is unreadable because the background color is too close to the text color, thus making the text appear too light. All these things rely on good color choice to be effective.

      In these instances it's better to stay as simple as possible; for example, only using color when necessary to emphasize or contrast specific elements on your site, increasing their visual hierarchy. A good example of how you can use color choice to your advantage is The Hill’s website https://thehill.com/ . Their main color (blue) is utilized in different ways to draw attention while not being over stimulating. They also use dark red and black in their navigation bar to give importance to different things they want people to notice. In the end, a good balance is really what you should look for.

      All of these things, as well as various others I didn’t mention in this blog, are vital and when done correctly work together to increase how well your website performs.