Today, your website is probably the most important tool for your marketing efforts. As technology is constantly changing, you will often find yourself in a situation when your site feels outdated and performs in a less effective manner. However, with modern methods and constant improvements in web application development, you can keep your website up to date and functional according to contemporary standards. Here are 7 tips on how to keep your website in shape.
Use WordPress

WordPress is the best solution for running your website for various reasons. It is very user-friendly, comes with a lot of customization options and has a large community of developers and buffs that support it.Since it is free and open source,there is a large number of plugins that follow up on the continuously advancing web application development, which can help you improve your website in many ways, from appearance to functionality. It is also important to mention that WP is written using standard compliance high quality code, and its semantic markup makes it extremely SEO friendly.

Optimize your content

For starters, you need to work on what you already have before adding new content. One of the most basic solutions for improving your website is to start from the little things. Go through your existing content and incorporate some on-page optimization methods, such as adding alt and title tags to your images, using appropriate headings for main titles and subheadings, writing meta-descriptions for your pages, and the like. Such small details can go a long way for your performance and SEO optimization.

Use images wisely

If you want to perfect your UX, you should avoid using generic stock photos. Today, people on the internet are pretty observant when it comes to your website using stock images that resemble the non-personal style of stock photography.You need to use images that convey your own brand, services and products. However, on the technical side, if you have a lot of images, it is essential that you optimize the format and size, so that they don’t affect your website’s performance. Web application development for WordPress has come up with various image optimization plugins that can compress your images individually, or in bulk by using dedicated servers.

Make your CTA-s attractive

Your users are accustomed to following visual cues in order to determine and reach the content that they find important. You need to mark your calls to action clearly with the appropriate action word so that your users can more easily get to where they want. When choosing a color, keep in mind the different psychological effects of colors according to the message that you want to send. Pay attention to the words that you use as well. Include an appropriate verb in order to entice the user to take the wanted action. The colors and words that you choose are psychological triggers for your users to emotionally identify with your content.

Optimize your website’s speed

Your website’s speed is a crucial factor to your bounce rate. Slow page load creates a negative experience for the user, which is bound to result in them looking for what they want elsewhere. Content management systems like WordPress come with plugins that offer various solutions thanks to modern web application development. Some of them include browser caching, compression of your resources, cleaning up your database, and placeholders that are replaces by actual items once the user interacts with them.

Make your website mobile friendly

In the era of advanced mobile phones, it is essential for your website to be mobile-friendly and easy for your users to navigate regardless of the screen type that they are using. This urgency has grown with the fact that Google has recently started penalizing websites that aren’t optimized for mobile. Mobile-friendly pages now rank higher than non-mobile-friendly ones, so for best SEO optimization it is crucial that your website is available for the mobile platform. You can either create a separate mobile version of your website, use mobile plugins on popular CMS platforms such as WordPress, or convert your website to RWD (“Responsive Web Design”).

Avoid 404 Errors

Search engines won’t penalize you severely for 404 errors, but they will certainly throw away your users. Next to slow load time, broken links are one of the most disrupting experiences during web surfing, and therefore one of the main reasons for a high bounce rate. Modern web application development offers various applications that can help you check all your pages and other content for broken links, and enable you to fix them right away. These apps will also stop search engines from following on these links.

In summation

There are various technical and aesthetic solutions that you can apply to your website thanks to the advances of web application development, in order to keep your site functional and up to date with modern technologies as well as the desires of your audience. If you do it properly, your conversion rates will increase and you will attract a bigger audience.

Author bio: Steven Clarke is a web entrepreneur and a business consultant. Whenever he gets the time, he likes to write about his ideas and share them with the world. He is currently advising companies about WordPress Development in Sydney.