Website Review

Websites are supposed to be a member of your team you can rely 24/7.

You’ve paid money to have someone create your site for you – but your site still isn’t performing how you expected it to.

It’s frustrating and demoralising to say the least.

Why is this happening?

You might be experiencing one (or many) of these things happening:

• The visitors just aren’t coming
• Visitors are coming to your site, but they’re not staying long
• Visitors are spending time on your site, but they aren’t buying
• Your site doesn’t work properly on mobile.

The symptoms you’re noticing on your site will give me a clue as to what area needs attention.

Every website is different, so for now, I’ll quickly give you an overview of what may be happening on your site.

The visitors aren’t coming

In 2018 it’s not enough for your website to just look pretty – that’s the easy part with an abundance of good looking and well coded themes available.

Do people actually know your site exists?

There are two ways you need to approach this:

1. You sharing your website by creating a marketing plan (e.g. writing and sharing blog posts, email marketing, social media marketing)
2. Google sharing your website

Wait! What? Google?

Yes, Google can help market your website.

You need to have some basic search engine optimisation (SEO) happening on your site. e.g. Site title, site description, page titles and page descriptions.

Then you need to have some Google services set up (Google Analytics and Google Search Console) to help speed up the process of Google finding your site, crawling it and indexing it.

Once Google knows what your site is about, it can share it with the right people – i.e when someone types a search term into their search engine, if your site contains relevant information, it should come up in the search results.

And that is how you’ll get people actually visiting your site.

The visitors are coming but they’re not staying long

The only way you’ll know how long visitors are staying on your site is if you have Google Analytics set up on your website.

Then you’ll be able to see where they’re coming from, what pages they’re visiting, how long they’re staying on each page and how deep they’re going into your site and much more.

If they’re coming and then leaving quickly, there are two possible reasons:

1. Your site doesn’t have the information they’re looking for
2. Your site is taking too long to load – visitors are sitting waiting for your website to appear on their screen and if they have to wait too long, they’ll click away

Lets talk about site speed

This one metric can easily take you down a rabbit hole that you’ll never find your way out of.

That’s not to say it’s not important to pay attention to, but with so many variables out of your control, you need to make sure you do the best with what you have access to.

And I’m here to help keep you focussed on what’s important and what’s within your control.

What parts of your website do you have control over that affects speed?

• Your hosting company – not all hosts are equal and sometimes, cheap hosts just don’t have the best speed capabilities,
• The theme used for your site –  some themes may look great but not have great underlying code and this will slow your site down,
• The number of plugins you have on your site – the more plugins, the more time it takes for your site to load when someone visits your website,
• Your website images – the hero images that are part of your site design and also your blog post images – big images (both in physical dimension and file size will grind your website to a halt in some instances.

All of these areas you have control over and I will review what you have and provide you with recommendations on where things can be improved.

And as you can see, you can’t just “install a plugin” to boost your site speed (like I’ve seen people recommending). A caching plugin may help, but the above factors can’t be fixed with just a plugin.

The visitors are spending time on your site, but they aren’t buying

There are many factors involved in a person making a decision to purchase:

1. Is the copy on the page laid out in a manner that tells a story and leads the potential customer to the logical end of buying your solution? (If you’ve had a copywriter work on your site, the copy should do this)
2. Does the customer have to click through too many pages to get to what they want? (And if you have slow website loading speed, this will hamper the process even more)
3. The purchase process is too difficult or confusing – while online shopping is well and truly embedded in our culture now, people still have apprehensions about giving you their credit card details unless you have a number of trust signals to put them at ease (one of the biggest ones being an SSL certificate – i.e. does your web address show https instead of http?)
4. Have you addressed all of their potential concerns so that they feel comfortable in their decision to buy?
5. Are you making sure people see your offers multiple times? It’s well documented that people rarely buy the first time they see your offer – often they will need to see it up to 7 times before finally making the decision to buy. What are you doing to make sure they keep seeing your offer?

What about mobile visitors?

This is an area that unfortunately is still falling to the bottom of the pile of things to do for website owners

Despite Google implementing search penalties a few years ago if your site wasn’t mobile friendly, there are still many websites that haven’t come up to standard.

Problems here show up in a variety of ways:

• The website shows up as just a mini, squished version of the desktop site with visitors having to pinch and zoom to even be able to read the content,
• Website owners using a plugin to show a mobile version of their site – this removes all branding because it’s just a plain base template and while the functionality is fine, it’s not doing your business any favours (especially if you’ve paid for specific branding for your business),
• Your site is mobile responsive and it has your branding but it’s still difficult to read because the website coding hasn’t taken into consideration the need for larger fonts and different spacing when you’re on a mobile device.

Your Google Analytics can show you what proportion of your visitors are using mobile devices.

Also be aware that if Google detects that you don’t have a mobile version of your website, when people search on mobile devices, your website may not even come up in the search results – pretty hard for people to find you if Google isn’t even listing your site as an option.

Where to from here?

I’ve given a really brief overview of what your website needs to make it a hard working and efficient member of your team.

You might have been checking your website as your read through this page and found some areas you could improve on straight away.

Fantastic!!

Even small, incremental improvements to your website can lead to big, positive results for your business.

If on the other hand you feel you need help identifying what needs improving, a Business Boosting Website Review is the first step in getting your website moving in the right direction.

Business Boosting Website Review

I will tell you exactly what is working on your site and what is not.

And, unlike most site reviews, I’ll not only be looking at what your visitors see, I’ll also be looking at how your site is set up in the back end .

What exactly do I mean by “back end” set up?

• Your website hosting and how it’s configured
• The plugins you have, what you need and don’t need
• Making sure the plugins you have are configured correctly and actually working (I’ve seen too many sites where the Backup Buddy plugin has been installed by a developer but not configured – meaning no backups actually happening.)
• Security settings
• If SSL is set up correctly with your hosting company
• Basic SEO configuration (page titles and descriptions)
• Are Google Analytics & Google Search Console set up
• Is your website mobile friendly

and more, depending on what your site needs.

And I’ll leave you with specific actions to improve your site, directly aimed at improving visitor engagement and your bottom line

How Does It Work?

Once you sign up you’ll be sent to booking page to select a time for us to get together on a video call.

I will thoroughly review your site before the call, both from a visitor’s perspective and from a back-end (technical) perspective. That way I will know where to focus during our time together on the live call.

Yes, you get direct access to me and my extensive website knowledge – this is way too important to outsource to some cheap, automated resource that spits out a pro-forma report!

On the session we will go over your site with a fine tooth comb. I will tell you exactly what my first impressions are, what works, what doesn’t and what I think needs to be improved to help your website meet your business goals.

The whole process will be recorded, and you will be provided with a copy of the recording after the call. This will allow you to concentrate and participate in the call, without having to worry about trying to take notes. You can review the recording as many times as you want to get all of the juicy nuggets.

I will also provide a checklist of actions you need to take to improve your site, so you won’t be left guessing.

Who Is This For?

• You’re serious about getting the best out of your site.
• You want to get more visitors, get more sign ups to your list, make more money.
• Your business results are your top priority
• It doesn’t matter if you built your site yourself, or had someone build it for you, this is still for you.

This is not for you if:

• You’re not prepared to make changes – e.g moving to a new host, deleting unnecessary plugins or switching to more effective plugins,
• you don’t have additional funds to invest in making the changes (the website review is to show you where the issues lie, the fixes are different for every website and is a separate piece of work we will quote on),
• you are not 100% committed to making your site the best it can possibly be.

Are you ready to get started?

Great – fill in the form below to get started.

We look forward to helping you make a real difference with your website!

Who am I & why am I the right person to help you and your business?

Hi I’m Warren.

I’ve been working as a Business Analyst on technical projects for over 20 years with multi-billion dollar Australia companies – ANZ, NAB, Telstra, Sensis, AGL, Origin Energy, TRU Energy, Sustainability Victoria, Transurban, NBN and many more.

I’ve developed a knack for seeing the issues that exist and moulding available technologies into the needed business solutions.

I bring this targeted business thinking and solution finding into all the work I do for solo business owners at a fraction of the price I charge these big companies.

As a WordPress Consultant, I’ve spoken at WordCamps in Melbourne, Sydney & Brisbane (Australia) and WordPress Meetups in Melbourne.

I’ve been working with WordPress, creating websites for solopreneurs and small business owners and fixing technical issues that arise for over 10 years.

I’m ready – Review my site!