The Purpose Of A Website Is To Make Money.
Specifically, the purpose of a website is to make enough money to justify its existence. If you spend $100 a year on your website, your website should make $100/year for your business. If you spend $100 a month, it should make $100 a month. If your website isn’t making money for your business, it’s losing money for your business.
Luckily, there’s a way to know if your website is making money for your business. Money is measurable, and that means you can measure how much money comes in because of your website.
- If you run a B2B business, you can track how many visitors become leads for your website. You can track how many of those leads become clients. Then you can know if your website is an effective marketing tool.
Setting up basic analytics on your site allows you to see just how much money your website makes for you.
The key is finding a way of tracking your website’s effectiveness. Then you can make an informed decision about whether or not your website is making you any money.
In most instances, your website helps to make your business money. But if your website isn’t making you much money, don’t put much money into it. If your website just serves as a way for customers to get information and you don’t get any leads or sales from your website, don’t sink thousands of dollars into a sexy new website with the latest web technologies.
If your website is not making your business money, read the tips below on how to make a few basic adjustments to start turning things around.
These easy to fix problems often cripple websites:
1. Add Basic Contact Information
The first and most important thing any website should do is allow people to get in contact with your business. If people can’t get in contact with you, they can’t give you money. Add a support email and/or a contact form to your website. Add links in an easy to reach place, such as a contact menu or in the footer.
2. Poor User Experience (UX)
One big reason people don’t use your website might be because it’s poorly designed. If your website is too difficult to read because of bright colors or poorly chosen colors, people stop reading the website and the website doesn’t make any money.
If people say your website is poorly designed, the fix is to clean up the graphic design. Reduce the number of colors, pick calm colors which go with each other. Make text big and easy to read.
3. Confusing Content Layout
The way your content is laid out on your website is important. If people can’t find what they’re looking for on your website, then they aren’t going to make any money. Make sure that it is easy for visitors to navigate your website without any help.
If people say your website is hard to read, then reduce the amount of content on your website. Organize things so that users can easily find what they need. Put the most commonly accessed content in the front of the website.
4. Irrelevant website content
When your website is filled with information users don’t need, they have trouble finding the information they do want. Your website could be failing to make money because users are not able to find what they need and end up abandoning the website.
The fix is to remove content that people don’t need. Take anything that users don’t read and remove it from the website. You can use tools like Plerdy’s Heatmap to see what users do and don’t read.
5. Poor loading times
One of the big reasons a website might be losing money is because visitors can’t load the website. If your website is slow, visitors won’t be able to visit from mobile devices or slow internet connections, then you lose their business. If your website crashes, then you lose their business. In short, your website needs to be fast.
You can test the speed of your website at Pingdom. If your website is slow, there are things you can do to make it faster.
Whatever the case with your website, it’s important that you make sure your website works for you, and not the other way around.