It can be hard knowing where to start when you want to quickly tidy up your website. This article will give you practical steps you can implement to help you break through that wall, starting with a few small changes that can have a big impact.

I’m not just talking about visual improvements here either. These changes can impact how visitors view your website, and whether or not they do the thing you’re asking them to do in your calls to action.

You don’t need to implement all or even most of these.In fact, I’d suggest you have a quick scroll and find just one that stands out, and do that. It might even get the ball rolling on some ideas you’ve had in the back of your head for a while now.

In this article, I’ll cover why and how you can:

  • Improve your call to action button/link text
  • Check your copyright year is correct
  • Check your OpenGraph images
  • Have a clear CTA button in your header
  • Compress and optimise images
  • Optimise page titles for SEO

Let’s get started!

1. Improve Your Call-to-Action Button/Link Text

Do you have any buttons or links on your website that are using uninspired or not very descriptive text like Read More or Contact Us? You can change this text to something more descriptive that fits  what the customer wants or needs.

For example:

  • Contact Us > Request a Free Consultation
  • Learn More > Our Tax Audit Process
  • Submit > Get Your Free Quote!

Using descriptive button text can help customers to take action. But it’s also important for accessibility. For example, if you have a grid of six cards for each of your services, each with a button that says Learn More, people with screen readers may find it difficult to identify which button to select. But if a button says More About Swimming Lessons, they can confidently select it, knowing where it’ll take them.

2. Check Your Copyright Year is Correct

When was the last time you looked at the copyright year in your footer? Sometimes people just type the current year in this section (maybe with the intention of coming back to make it dynamic), and then it stays that way for years and years.

This may not seem like a big deal, but details like this can be a trust barrier for some people. If they see Copyright 2019 in your website footer, it may look like your business isn’t active.

You can fix this by simply adding the current year, but if you type in the YYYY numbers, you’ll still need to manually update it each year. 

Your website theme/template/builder may have an option to dynamically show the current year. If this isn’t an option, and you have the ability to add PHP code to your website, here is a simple snippet you can use to always display the current year:

<?php 
$current_year = date("Y"); 
echo "© " . $current_year; 
?>

3. Check Your OpenGraph Images

When someone shares a link to your website on social media, it will usually pull in an image to display with the URL. It’s a good idea to have a custom image that gives people an idea of what your website is about because this can encourage them to click through.

If you don’t have a custom OpenGraph image, the social media platform may display nothing, or it will pull the first image it finds on your page. This image could be a stretched and pixelated version of your logo, or an out of context (and potentially awkward) photo from the page that has been linked.

Most WordPress SEO plugins will allow you to easily upload these images — either globally or for each page/post.

If your CMS doesn’t have this ability, you can simply add the following code to each of your pages where you would like an OpenGraph image:

<meta property="og:title" content="Your Page Title"> <meta property="og:description" content="A brief description of your page"> <meta property="og:url" content="https://example.com/your-page"> <meta property="og:type" content="website"> <meta property="og:image:width" content="1200"> <meta property="og:image:height" content="630">

And for Twitter/X you will also need to include following code:

<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">
<meta name="twitter:image" content="https://example.com/path/to/your-image.jpg">

Once you have updated your OpenGraph image, don’t forget to use Facebook’s sharing debugger to make sure the new image is shown when people share your website.

4. Have a Clear CTA Button in Your Navigation

This one may seem obvious, but many websites don’t do it, and it could have a measurable impact on conversions.

You likely have one big action that you would like users to take on your website. To increase the likelihood of them taking action, add a button to your navigation bar with clear directions on what action you would like visitors to take. Make sure the button uses your bold primary colour so that it stands out. You could also add an icon to the button to make it more interesting and help it stand out.

Here are some examples from our client websites:

5. Compress and Optimise Images

The biggest impact to a website’s page load time is usually unoptimised images. To find out if this is impacting your website’s speed, run your URL through a tool like GTmetrix and see what it spits out. Go to the Waterfall tab and select Images. It will show you every image that was loaded on that page, the size, and how long it took to load.

If you have big images that are taking a long time to load, then it’s time to optimise. Check the dimensions of the image. If it is thousands of pixels wide or high, then you need to reduce the size. Once you have done that, use a tool like TinyPNG to compress the image before uploading it to your website.

If you have hundreds or thousands of images already on your website, this process can be quite tedious. Fortunately, if you are using WordPress, there are plenty of image optimising plugins out there that can resize and compress every single image on your website.

We have used ShortPixel for many years. It’s not much to look at, but it is solid and does a really good job of optimising images. However, their free plan only offers 100 credits per month. There are many other options available — just do a search in the WordPress plugin repository to see what’s out there.

6. Optimise Page Titles for SEO

This one can have a significant impact on your website — particularly if you haven’t paid much notice to your page titles, or if you’ve ignored them completely.

Highlight the main pages on your website that you would like to rank, and spend some time optimising the page titles. These are the titles that Google will (typically) display in search results. Page title optimisation should consider:

  • Length: Typically 55-60 characters is the limit
  • Keywords: Relevant search terms you’d like your page to rank for (but don’t just cram them in!)
  • Conversion: What phrases might encourage people to take notice and click through
  • Branding: Any phrases that might be relevant to your brand, product, or business name

Here’s some examples:

Bad:

Better:

Bad:

Better:

That’s it from me. Hope you’ve found at least one idea you can benefit from and quickly implement. 

Let me know how you get on in the comments!

– Stew

P.S. I regularly put into practice these ideas for my clients at Brew as I build and design their sites, make content updates, and optimise sites for clients on care plans. Check out my custom design & development package and reach out if you’re interested in working together.