9 quick website improvements you can make today

We've all been there before.

As you sit back with your post-lunch cup of coffee, you start to think to yourself, “boy, I should really de-clutter my desk today," or, “I've been meaning to re-label those boxes in the back room. I've got a few minutes—I'll go attack that."

But we all know those things aren't going to move the needle for your business.

But they are easy wins, and they feel good.

But what if—and hear me out—what if there was a way to get some easy wins that do move the needle?

Clear your schedule, because the next 30 minutes of your day will impact your business's ability to generate revenue for years to come.

The following are 9 quick website improvements you can make today that will drive measurable, incremental gains in the performance of your website as a revenue generation tool for your business.

Mobile cleanup

You're aware that over 60% of web traffic in 2024 is on mobile devices, right?

Cool.

So why is your the mobile version of your website an afterthought?

Here's your top quick fixes as part of you website's mobile optimization.

1. Avoid side-scrolling

There's nothing worse than a mobile website that allows (forces) you to scroll sideways.

How do you avoid it?

A fancy little piece of code for your CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) file that prevents it.

Here it is — if you're on WordPress, go to Site > Customize > Additional CSS, and paste it there.

@media only screen and (max-width: 768px){
html,
body{
width:100%;
overflow-x:hidden;
}
}

2. Fix your font sizes

If you have your site properly structured with H1 / H2 / H3 tags for your headers (and if not, why?), make sure that they're not massively over- or under-sized on your mobile site.

Tip: If H1 /H2 / H3 sound confusing, read this. You own a website; you should know what they are.

For reference, these are the basic guidelines we follow for a basic site for headline copy:

Image cleanup

Images are great—when they're used properly.

Massive image files, poor titles/alt tags, and hover actions can make them less useful or even harm your site performance.

3. Compress those images

When building a website, image files should be as small as possible without distorting or compromising the view-ability.

This means that raw, 8 MB file you use for your background isn't ideal.

Why?

It requires a lot of bandwidth for users to load your site, and if you have multiple large image files, the issue compounds.

This slows down sites and ultimately harms your SEO performance.

The fix, in a perfect world, would be to compress the images prior to uploading them to your site using, say, a free image compression tool like this one.

But if you already have a site up (and you're on WordPress, and you don't want to re-upload everything you already have), you can use a handy free tool like Smush to compress all the images on your site.

Voilà.

Big improvements have been made.

4. Add image titles and alt tags

To be fair, image titles don't matter a ton.

But they certainly make it a nicer user experience if someone downloads an image from your site and it's not called “Screenshot 2024-07-17 at 12.32.40."

Plus, creating an image title structure makes it easy to update photos or graphics in the future.

Think something like, “clickex-home-hero-mobile-device-mockup-1000x600px."

It let's you know what site, what page, which section, a brief description, and the size of the image.

All without opening it up.

5. Remove “title on hover" feature

On WordPress, one of the baked-in site characteristics is that you will see “title" text displayed when you hover on an image with your mouse.

This just looks bad, and quite frankly, and little bit careless.

We can easily remove that with a bit of code, though.

If you don't know how to add code snippets to your site, grab the free snippets plugin here first.

Then, this is the code you will want to add:

<script type="text/javascript">jQuery(document).ready(function($) {
$('img[title]').each(function() { $(this).removeAttr('title'); });
});</script>

Well done.

No more titles when you hover over images.

Form cleanup

For most small businesses, inbound business is the holy grail.

You definitely want clients phoning, emailing, or submitting the form on your site for a quote or appointment.

So why is your form not a major highlight on your site?

6. Add your form to the right places

Yes, your contact page is great, and people expect to find a contact form there.

But what about at the bottom of service pages?

Or even your blogs or articles for that matter?

Do the heavy lifting for your prospective customers and give them an easy way to get in contact with you on all the major pages of your business.

From experience, only about 50% of contact form submissions from client sites actually come in from the contact page.

7. Make sure your form sends a confirmation email to both the sender and to you

This one is easy, but often neglected.

There's no worse feeling that submitting a contact form and then...

...nothing happens.

“Did it send?"

“Did they get my message?"

A confirmation email to the sender, perhaps even recapping what they wrote in the form, is a polite way of saying, “we have received your message and it's important to us."

This can be enough for prospects to mentally check a box saying, “I've done my part – submitting a contact form," and preventing them from continuing to browse competitors' sites.

Confirmation is a powerful tool.

Professional presence cleanup

These last tips don't apply to every small business, but they apply to enough that it's important to make sure you're not also making these mistakes.

8. Use a professional email on your website

When you're about to make a high ticket purchase, do you feel comfortable sending your enquiry and your patronage to “[email protected]" or would you rather deal with “[email protected]?"

The answer is almost unequivocally the latter, so why are there so many businesses using a Gmail or internet provider email domain for their business email?

If this is you – go now and get a cheap Google Workspace account set up and purchase a professional email using your domain.

It's a few dollars a month, but will be a determining factor in many thousands of dollars of won or lost revenue.

There's nothing worse than seeing a small business website and realizing the owner won't even splash out $5-6/month on a professional email for themselves.

9. Give some love to your footer section

Maybe you've never really thought about the footer of your website.

Did you know it can be an excellent place to add some structure and professional polish to your brand and website?

Take a look at your footer and make sure you have these elements:

• Logo with a transparent background (don't settle for a white rectangle around your logo because the file you have is too dark for your dark background—source a white-coloured version of your logo or otherwise change the background to a lighter colour)
• Statement about your business—if you have an ideal SEO keyword you want to win for, this would be a great place to include it
• Quick links to popular pages on your website
• Links to more administrative pages on your website (eg. Careers, Member Portal, Policies, etc.)
• Social profiles
• Major memberships or awards
• Hours
• Contact information
• If you have it—a signup to your newsletter

If you structure the above nicely, it really puts a nice touch on every page of your website and makes it feel like even the smallest of details were considered.

For a business looking to compete with more established players, this can be a significant gap and opportunity to shine.

Your next steps

The 9 improvements outlined above should take you less than an hour to complete, and could potentially be the difference between won or lost business in some cases.

A site that loads too slowly (because of large image files) or a non-business email address are real issues we see often on small business websites that can be improved with minimal cost and time investment.

Once you've cleaned up these areas of your website, it's probably a good idea to look at your traffic and see what you can do to start earning more traffic from Google through SEO...