Your business website can have a direct influence on sales, profits, lead generation, and company growth, so it needs to be the best it can be. In order to quantify how good their website really is, many businesses conduct a website critique on a regular example, either in-house or with the help of an outside audit team.
Carrying out a website critique can be a challenge, but it's also one of the best ways to identify weaknesses in your current site and make the necessary website design improvements.
It can be especially important to carry out a website critique if you feel like your site isn't performing as well as it should, with poor Google rankings, high bounce rates, a lack of leads, or disappointing online sales figures.
But what is a good website critique example and what are some of the key areas to focus on to make your critique? This guide will offer insight into some of the key website critique examples you can use when evaluating the effectiveness of your own site.
Practical Navigation
A quality business website needs to be highly usable.
You might attract all kinds of potential customers to your site, with varying degrees of technical competence. It can't be too complicated or awkward to use.
Eighty-eight percent (88%) of online consumers say that they're less likely to return to sites where they have had bad experiences. If a site isn't easy to use and navigate, it will be more likely to generate bad user experiences.
While carrying out a website audit or critique, it's important to put yourself in the shoes of an average user by asking yourself the following:
- How easy is it to find certain website sections?
- Is the Contact Us area easy to find for people who want to get in touch?
- Does the search bar work as intended?
Try to see your site through the eyes of someone who is arriving on it for the first time
Impressive Aesthetics
It takes a fraction of a second for visitors to form an opinion on your website.
In the blink of an eye, a user will scan your pages, taking the layout, design, aesthetics, colors, font choices, and other aspects into account and making their impression on whether or not the site is right for them.
What's more, 94% of user feedback on websites is design-related, with people quickly spotting things like unappealing color schemes, small fonts, busy layouts, and complex aesthetics.
From these statistics, it's clear to see that aesthetics are something to focus on during a website critique. You won't be able to make a design that is universally pleasing, but you can, at the very least, make a site that has a clean look, modern vibe, and generally appealing layout.
During your critique, look for areas of the site's visuals that may be outdated and distracting, and try to make sure that the same visual theme flows from page to page.
More Effective CTAs
In any good website critique example from leading companies, there's always a focus on CTAs.
Calls-to-action hold incredible power on the internet, with statistics showing that between 83%–93% of web post leads come from CTAs. And perhaps your site already has CTAs in place, but if you're getting high visitor counts and low lead generation, the current CTAs might not be getting the job done.
CTAs are the encouragement that visitors need to go from browsing a site or looking at a product or service to actually making a purchase or getting in touch with your company to learn more.
As the name implies, they inspire users to take action, and you can adjust them in different ways to make them more effective, from changing the actual words in each CTA to adjusting their location, font size, or even font color.
Increased Mobile Responsiveness
Having a mobile-friendly site is very important in the modern age, with more people than ever before using mobile devices to access the internet and shop for goods and services.
Sixty-seven percent (67%) of users say that they're more likely to buy from brands that have good mobile sites. What's more, Google's algorithm also favors mobile-optimized sites.
During your website critique, you need to make sure that your site runs smoothly on smaller screens. There are various tools available to help with this, and you can also use your own mobile devices to visit the site in mobile browsers and see how well it works. Does it load smoothly? Are font sizes and images adjusted to suit the small screen? If not, you'll have some work to do to fix it.
Better Speed and Performance
You also need to take a look at the speed and overall performance of your site when conducting a website critique.
Speed has always been a crucial component in web design, but it's becoming even more important than ever before as modern users, particularly those of younger generations, demand and expect sites to load quickly.
Thirty-nine percent (39%) of people say that they'll simply move on and leave a site if it is slow to load. So, one of the things to think about for a website critique is to make sure that the various web pages and parts of your site load quickly.
Check the site across different devices and on different networks too to get a general view of how well it works for users in varying locations.
Looking Critically at Your Website Leads to Improvement
When it comes to running an efficient, effective business website, you can't afford to simply sit back. The best sites have to evolve with the times, changing, adapting, and improving in order to continue drawing people in and giving your customers the best possible user experience.
A website critique is a super way to see what's good about your site, as well as what's wrong with it, and make the necessary improvements. Focus on the key areas outlined in this guide during your next audit to get the best results.