Cost-effective ways to work with a studio to optimise your website

At Root Studio we love nothing more than a new website brief for the design and development team to launch head-first into. However, we’re also a small business too and we understand that the cost and time involved in a complete overhaul can be prohibitive.

Before considering that all new website experience, could you be missing a trick with your current site? Partnering with an agency or development team to optimise your current website not only saves resources but can help you to enhance the user experience and performance of your site without breaking the bank.

We’re going to take a quick look at some of the cost effective solutions that any good development team can apply to almost any website - no matter how old it is.

Performance Analysis

The first thing any new partner is going to suggest is some initial performance analysis. Using any tracking you have in place, coupled with tools like PageSpeed Insights, Google Search Console and Silktide, a studio or agency can quickly build a picture of where you current site would benefit from some improvements and optimisations.

This initial analysis will help to identify areas that need improvement (such as a high homepage bounce rate or slow loading content) and ensure that you can allocate budget to targeted enhancements that will increase conversions, quickly.

Affordable speed improvements

When we start working with a new customer on their website we often start by recommending a hosting transfer to our super fast, environmentally friendly, UK based hosting. The speed of your website is absolutely critical for both the user experience of your site and for it’s search engine optimisation (SEO).

Aside from moving to a faster host, there are a range of other ‘quick-wins’ that your development partner can help with:

Image optimisation: using professional tools to compress images without compromising quality or by using your own content management system, your developer can ensure that media uploaded to your site is compressed and optimised leading to faster loading times throughout.

Browser caching: if your site isn’t taking advantage of caching technologies then you could be missing some real easy wins for the speed of your site. Your professional team can help you take advantage or caching very quickly.

Code optimisations: having analysed your code an experienced development team can make recommendations on streamlining your code or even set up a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to reduce loading times affordably.

Enhance user experience (UX)

Whilst technical and speed improvements will improve the sites performance dramatically, working with a talented design team on enhancing your site's UX could help your current site turn that corner and increase conversions - all without ‘starting again’.

We’ve worked with a number of businesses to enhance their current website user experience and we often find these areas are a great starting point:

Navigation simplification: as a site gets older and content is added over time it’s easy for the navigation of your site to become bloated and difficult to use. Re-assessing what’s important could help you ‘chunk’ your content and drastically reduce the number of clicks needed to reach important pages and drive sales.

Clear Calls to Action (CTAs): sometimes you can lose sight of what’s important in our page templates. Sales pages that have multiple buttons and attention grabbing elements can water down your message and lead to missed opportunities. Working with a fresh set of eyes can bring clarity to your existing templates and refresh them.

Mobile optimisation: we shouldn’t still have to say this but a poor mobile experience on your site is a poor experience, full stop. Mobile users can easily make up 50-60% of your visitors and in some cases a lot more. If your mobile experience is lacking then a development team can help you turn this around with design tweaks to your current structure.

Content updates and SEO

Depending on your budget level, and once issues with performance and UX are taken care of, we often turn to the content of your site and the search engine optimisations we might be able to make to the current site to improve your ranking.

Combining experience, AI and a range of online tools, your web agency can help you incorporate relevant keywords into your headers, meta tags and descriptive alt text for images to boost search engine rankings without an extensive rework.

Maintenance and support

Moving forward, it’s important to build on these improved foundations and take advantage of the updates you’ve now made. A comprehensive support package for your current website can ensure that performance is constantly monitored and that your site is secure and safe. Working closely with an agency or studio can ensure that encryption, backups and software updates take care of themselves - leaving you to worry about running your business, not your website.

It’s never too late to improve your site

Working with a web specialist to enhance your current website can be an excellent way to improve what you already have, whilst saving money in the long run. It’s likely that the cost of improvements to your current site will pay for themselves and by focusing on performance, UX, content and maintenance, a studio can enhance your website’s effectiveness without the need for a complete rebuild.

We currently work with a number of customers on improving their websites - from flat-file sites that have no content management system right through to sites built using Perch, Craft or Wordpress.

We’ve never encountered a site we can’t work with and we relish the challenge of building on what you already have. So, if you think your site could do with some TLC, don’t be embarrassed - get in touch.