The Ultimate Website Checklist for
Better User Experience and Search Rankings
Our comprehensive, 2-in-1 Checklist - Website Must Have's and Google UX Fundamentals - offers step-by-step website updates to give your customers the best user experience, while protecting your SEO from Google's Core Web Vitals Update.
Why Did We Create this Website Checklist?
Because managing a successful website is no easy task!
Website optimization involves a maze of design, data, technology, psychology, functionality, SEO, and content, all working together to provide the best user experience (UX).
Finding the most impactful ways to improve your website and engage your audience is a constant challenge.
To help, our Website Must-Haves and Google UX Checklist guides you through each step, including best practices for:
- Simplifying your site’s navigation and search.
- Ensuring your site loads quickly and is mobile-friendly.
- Optimizing content to inform readers AND search engines.
By updating its algorithm to include Core Web Vitals, Google makes it clear: UX affects a website’s search rankings.
Keep reading below to get a sneak peek of our Checklist.
Did you know that 38% of people will stop interacting with a website if the layout or content is unattractive? Moreover, over 50% of users will abandon a webpage if it takes longer than three seconds to load.
Website Tip - Balance Website Performance, Design, SEO, and Content
High-performing websites must constantly evolve to meet new user needs, algorithm updates, and business goals.
For example, Google's Helpful Content Update prioritizes meaningful and useful content, rewarding websites that deliver clear value to their users. With Google's announcement, businesses refocused on creating the most comprehensive, helpful, and authoritative content to stay in Google's good graces and lean into EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness).
Plus, better content means a better customer experience. It's a win-win!
Moreover, Google's Page Experience Update and Core Web Vitals prioritize technical optimization, such as website speed, interactivity, and visual stability, for success in search rankings.
Your website is a living and breathing channel. Website planning is key! You must continuously analyze performance and apply website best practices to improve technical efficiency, better engage customers, and drive traffic and conversions.
This is where the Ultimate Website Checklist comes into play.
Website Best Practices - Your Key to Higher Google Rankings
Continuously improving your website gives your customers a better experience and helps you understand their needs, pains, and preferences. At the same time, website optimization is a component of better search rankings.
Here are a few areas we dive into in the Ultimate Website Checklist.
- Structuring internal links to help customers find relevant content quickly.
- Adding video to increase customer engagement.
- Strengthening website security to protect your site from hackers and viruses.
- Optimizing your website’s performance speed to reduce friction.
- Updating your website for accessibility to give all users a great experience.
Get your free copy of the Ultimate Website Checklist.
or system implementers...
Whereoware is a full-service digital experience agency, with in-house teams designing, building, integrating, and marketing your holistic digital experience.
We partner with our clients to understand challenges, audit their status quo, and build custom roadmaps to maximize every opportunity and achieve goals faster.
Whether you need to reimagine your website, improve your Salesforce, uplevel executive reporting, develop a personalized customer journey, or more, we can help.
Top Website Optimization FAQs:
What is Website Optimization?
Website optimization is the process of incrementally improving your website by understanding customer needs, measuring performance using analytics tools, applying website best practices, and experimenting to continuously deliver a better user experience.
It’s about strategically removing customer friction, by eliminating areas of confusion, sharing helpful information, adding compelling visuals, streamlining steps and clicks, and improving the technical quality of your site to be more user-friendly, fast, and easy to navigate.
Optimizing your website is an ongoing activity, but ensures your critical investment continually gets more traffic, provides a better user experience, and has higher conversion rates.
What are Some Key Areas for Website Optimization?
There is no one-size fits-all website optimization plan - what makes a great website is unique to your business and customers.
Far from comprehensive, here are a few areas to focus on:
- Review analytics and benchmark performance - you need to audit your existing website performance, looking for areas of customer friction (typically found in pages with high bounce rates, low scroll rates, or low conversions). Understanding your site's pain points is key to incrementally improving them through website optimization.
- Focus on ease-of-use - is your website easy to navigate and find information? Is there helpful copy and visual cues guiding customers' navigation of the website? Is it accessible? Look for opportunities to streamline your navigation, clarify messaging, enhance CTAs, improve the layout, add visuals, and other elements that help visitors understand how to quickly find information or products.
- Audit content - is your website content helpful and demonstrating EEAT? Do you have content to answer questions and provide information for all stages of a customer lifecycle? What content pieces perform the best and can you improve upon low-performing webpages? Have you optimized for on-page and technical SEO?
- Analyze site performance - if your website is slow or you have tons of popup ads causing jumpiness, visitors will abandon your site. Site speed, interactivity, and security are core elements of a great website experience.
- Don't forget mobile optimization - your website needs to look great and work as well on a desktop as any mobile device. Period.
Our website best practices checklist, above, digs deeper into each of these areas - and more.
How Long to See Results from Website Optimization?
The timeframe for noticing website optimization results can vary greatly. If your site only needs minor cosmetic changes or better content, improvements can be fast.
However, if changes to site architecture and technical improvements are required, it may take longer to execute.
In either case, it's beneficial to work with a digital agency like Whereoware. We can help you identify issues and pain points, implement conversion rate optimization strategies, and develop a plan to improve the design, UX, data integrations, functionality, efficiency, personalization, and marketing of your website.
Don’t short-change your site’s potential.
Get the recipe for success. Download our Website Must-Haves and Google UX Checklist and supercharge your site today.