COVID-19 has spread around the world and is beginning to affect the normal operation of business for the majority of people. Here in the UAE, we have seen the closure of a number of businesses such as schools, nurseries, training centres, gyms and more. But what can you do to ensure your business survives the effects of COVID-19 when it comes to web design?
We have put together a list of the top 5 tips to help your business survive through COVID-19 by a web design & website development expert, Brad Standish from Standish Services.
1) Optimising Your Website for Speed
When it comes to user satisfaction, one of the most important metrics is the speed of your website. It’s typically said that from the moment a user connects with your website, you have around 3-5 seconds to capture their attention before they decide to continue using your site or whether they will go with one of your competitors. Those 3-5 seconds can be some of the most crucial aspects of building and designing a website because they include the loading time of your site.
If your website takes 5 seconds to load in the first place, you have already used up the potential attention span of your visitors and you could be losing a majority of customers.
Some key aspects of optimising your website for speed can include:
- Uploading images that have been scaled offline, instead of relying on the server resources to scale down larger images
- Serving images in an optimised format that suits the purpose (jpeg vs png)
- Pre-optimising your images using software
- Utilising a Content Delivery Network
- Utilising browser caching
- Minifying CSS, HTML & JavaScript
- Optimising the delivery of CSS & JavaScript
2) Adding E-Commerce Capabilities
E-commerce has become such an integral part of our lives with the popularity of Amazon, which is great news for you. If you sell a physical product, you have probably already considered e-commerce but even if your products or services are intangible you too can benefit from creating an e-commerce platform on your own website.
E-commerce provides an easy way to customers to find your business, learn about your products or services and make a purchase, all without any input from you. E-commerce websites can be an excellent method of creating a 2nd revenue stream or passive income.
Your web design company should be able to add e-commerce capabilities to your existing website without much issue, especially if your website was built onto a CMS like WordPress, or you can find some affordable e-commerce website creation solutions to build a new purpose-built e-commerce website for you.
3) Maintaining Your Website
Web design & development doesn’t just stop when your website is finally finished. Ensuring your website is kept up to date should be a high priority and the next few weeks could be the most important time of your business’ life so far to maintain your website.
You should be sure that all updates, upgrades & backups have been confirmed and processed so that your website not only runs and performs at its best but also so that any security patches and upgrades are being properly implemented.
Maintaining a website can be incredibly cost-effective and can have huge impacts on the performance of your website. Some platforms lend themselves to being user friendly and intuitive, so you could even begin maintaining your website on your own without the help of a professional.
4) Capitalising On Increased Online Users
All around the world, more and more people are practising social distancing, self-isolation and self-quarantine. While this means foot traffic to physical stores is dropping, it also means that there are now huge numbers of people spending more time online.
You could be capitalising on the massive increase in online users by ramping up your online advertising, putting more of your budget into Search Engine Optimisation and by encouraging visitors to convert into customers. Offering a discount, referral schemes or deals on products and services throughout this period can result in increased sales and long-term loyalty to your brand or service.
5) Increasing Search Engine Optimisation, Search Engine Marketing & Social Media
Search Engine Optimisation & Search Engine Marketing are two topics that the majority of users struggle to understand. By nature, SEO and SEM are difficult to conceptualise because they are dictated by Search Engines (like good old Google) using secret algorithms and mechanics that we can never truly know the inner-workings of. The reason Search Engines like to keep their mechanisms and algorithms secret is so that people can’t take advantage of them and artificially inflate their rankings.
However, by utilising tried & tested techniques and by always evolving our approach to Search Engine Optimisation, your web design or SEO agency can help you to rank higher and perform better online. You can utilise a combined approach across your website & social media to build a powerful SEO profile online. Your online presence will be incredibly important during the next few months, so it’s definitely worth allocating a higher budget to or, if you haven’t already, putting some money aside to dedicate to SEO.
Standish Services is a British owned and operated web design & development agency in the UAE. Established in 2017 by Brad Standish, Standish Services has been offering affordable high quality and responsive websites to individuals, start-ups, small businesses, larger companies and even MNCs. We have a holistic and ethical approach to pricing our web design process, charging only for our time without adding any premiums or additional costs. We are upfront, honest and transparent about our pricing policies and in 99% of our web design projects we have delivered a website for the total cost of the original quote or less.
Email us now at contact@standishservices.com to get a quote for any of the topics mentioned in the above article. Mention the article and you can receive a 15% discount on web design, optimisation or maintenance and 10% discount on SEO, SEM or Social Media Marketing.
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