Argh! Your website is underperforming, and you’re not sure why. Is it navigation issues? Is the design just not connecting with your audience? Maybe, but don’t seek the help of a WordPress theme developer right away.
There could be any number of reasons why you’re not seeing the results you expected. Some of them you can attempt to fix yourself, and others require a combination of specialist expertise that a WordPress theme developer won’t necessarily be able to help you with.
Signs your website is underperforming and how to fix it
- Low traffic volume
People aren’t getting to your website. You need to find ways to drive your ideal customers to your virtual environment in droves.
-
How a WordPress theme developer can help
Three letters: SEO. Developers can ensure that your website is indexed by popular search engines. Google rewards sites that are easy for their crawlers to analyze. A developer can help by using a simple architecture and making sure that irrelevant pages are not indexed. They can also help increase page speeds by minimizing code.
-
How they can’t help
Three letters: SEO (deja vu?) Search engine optimization is multifaceted. Yes, a developer can help you with some aspects of SEO, but to really make a mark, you need to come at it from all angles. These include:
- Content marketing – Research what your customers are searching and talking about, and include appropriate “keywords” into your content. You want your chosen keywords to be low competition, so this requires thinking outside of the box. You also want your keywords to appear in the meta titles and meta descriptions for all of your pages. A word of caution: make sure you don’t artificially flood your content with keywords. Google penalizes sites that overdo it.
- Website maintenance – Remove broken links, update pages that have lost their relevance.
- Social media marketing – Being present and active on social media, Reddit, and other forums spread awareness of your brand and help you to target specific audiences to draw them to your website.
-
- High bounce rate
The problem: people are arriving on your website but leaving almost immediately. If your bounce rate is above 55%, you want to investigate the reason. High bounce rates aren’t necessarily a problem – it could simply be a result of your page visitors quickly finding what they need.
-
How a WordPress theme developer can help
Page speeds – Developers can help to streamline your code and make other changes to your website so that it loads more quickly, preventing people from leaving your site due to slow page speeds.
Navigation – Developers can also work to ensure that your page is easy to navigate on all devices. Visitors should be able to quickly find out where they need to go to find the information they’re after.
-
How they can’t help
Design – Does the visual language of your virtual environment reflect your business? It could be that your visitors arrive at your website expecting to see something different. If your visitors don’t feel like they belong on your page, they’ll leave prematurely, long before they’re able to discover that you have the product or solution for them.
Content strategy – Does the content of your website resonate with your audience? Is it easy to scan? Is it helpful, educational, or entertaining? If the answer to any of these questions is a big no, then you need to address this immediately.
-
- Low page visits
Generally speaking, if a customer visits multiple pages on your website, they are more engaged and therefore more likely to convert to sales.
-
How a WordPress theme developer can help
Layout and navigation – Make sure that your pages all link together in a way that makes logical sense and optimizes the user journey. A good developer can help you develop a coherent structure.
-
How they can’t help
Content marketing – Your content should be engaging, and easy for your target audience to understand. Within your website’s content, you can also include internal links to lead your visitors on a journey through your website.
-
As you can see, maximizing the value of your website is a multifaceted effort that requires a team of experts in various fields. The most important thing is to accurately diagnose the problem before seeking a contractor to help you. Be realistic about how much can be achieved by an individual, or specialists in just one field of online marketing.
At jdp we put the focus on analyzing your existing virtual environment and diagnosing the areas where your investment can make the most impact. From there we suggest a strategy that may include any of the things mentioned above.
At the risk of calling you a special snowflake, each case is different. We never make presumptions about what’s best for your business until we’ve taken a good look under the hood. Remove the guesswork, and get in touch for a full audit of your business and your virtual environment.
