Contrary to popular belief, you need more than just SEO to grow your online business. While SEO will drive more people to your website, the website itself is responsible for if the visitors actually convert into paying customers or not.
Considering your website is like a holiday resort, having a good SEO ensures you’re recommended as a good holiday destination by all travel agencies.
But what if it takes too much time to get to your resort?
What if the beds aren’t comfortable enough? What if the gardens are overgrown?
What if the view from the room isn’t as the travel agencies described it as?
What if your foodservice is slow?
Sounds like a nightmare resort right? While having a good ranking is always a plus point but the experience your viewers have with your website is paramount.
Website optimization is a must to improve the various areas of the function of a website to ensure your viewers are left with a positive user experience that gets them to keep coming back and convert them into paying customers.
Why is Website Optimization Important?
Ever since the advent of the Internet, it and the technology around it and enabling it has been dynamic. There are new changes in it every day that allow for more things to be done and do the old things more efficiently.
Regularly optimizing your website for these changes enables your website to perform better in many functional parameters. This also enables you to make use of all the new features that have come along with the change.
Better Internet Protocols, latest Security Features, ability to use newer forms of media, increasing the stability of your website, increasing the amount of traffic it can handle, cross-device and cross-platform compatibility, increasing the conversion rate by tweaking website elements, etc is all that is made possible using Website Optimization.
Moreover, you can collect visitor data and tweak the website design, website elements, etc. to make the website easier to use and navigate through. Ensuring you have a good and functional design that’s easy to load and light on browsers has long been the definitive formula for having a website that works as it is intended to.
Website optimization can be done manually to some extent but as it is a cyclical task, we recommend you use website optimization tools to make the process easier, quicker and to enable you to do more things.
10 Best tools for Website Optimization
1. Google Search Console
Google is the undisputed King of Search Engines and it offers a tool that helps businesses with websites find out how their website is performing with respect to Search Results and to view the website from the search engine’s perspective.
It enables you to track and collect data pertaining to various basic search engine optimization performance parameters of your website that can enable you to understand a lot of things and take actions accordingly to improve your overall ranking.
GSC also monitors your website for security and alerts you in case of a malware infection. It also highlights the keywords and search queries that your website shows up in for search results, this way you can tweak keywords on your website and content to make gains in terms of visibility.
2. UXtweak
UXtweak is an all-in-one UX research tool which helps optimize your website for better user experience and increased conversions by testing real-life scenarios to discover users’ pain points of your digital products.
This platform provides features such as user research and usability testing tools that help collect and study data about users’ interactions with a website and any obstacles they might face during that contact. A major advantage of this tool is that you can analyze your website throughout all the development stages – starting from a prototype to a fully developed webpage or even an enterprise mobile app development.
Based on the outcome of the research, you can decide what features should be improved for better website optimization. For further research, UXtweak offers preference testing, card sorting & tree tests and first-click testing tools.
3. ABTasty
A/B Testing is a powerful tool available to marketers to experiment and find out which approach, design, content, and CTAs are most effective when it comes to converting people. ABTasty brings this functionality over to the entire website.
It allows you to test different variations of a web page or landing page with or without carousel sliders, onto different sections of viewers who’re segregated using demographic or behavioral data.
Every business and its set of audiences have unique requirements and ABTasty enables you to optimize the elements and designs of your website in a way that enhances the Customer Experience. Using this tool you can even experiment with personalization more effectively.
4. Sumo
Email Marketing combined with automation is the best marketing combination available. But to send emails, you need email addresses. A website has always been the primary organic tool to collect email addresses but how well it converts a visitor into a subscriber depends on various factors.
Sumo is a tool that allows you to collect email addresses for visitors, create and grow a mailing list using various ways such as exit-intent popups, CTA popups, discount codes, scroll boxes, etc.
Sumo even excels at retargeting website traffic by engaging them using emails to further raise your chances of making a sale.
5. Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider
When it comes to on-page SEO, a crawler is the most powerful tool and having the right one is crucial. Screaming Frog is an effective crawler that crawls through your website, analyses it thoroughly, and points out common SEO issues.
You can analyze page titles and metadata and make sure you have the right keywords in those, it also highlights broken and missing links so that those can be fixed at the earliest. It also allows you to track progress made between two crawls so you have a clear idea about what has been fixed and what needs more work.
6. Hotjar
Hotjar is a website analysis tool that specifically collects and visualizes data pertaining to visitor behavior so you can have an in-depth insight into how users are actually using and going around your website.
Hotjar is a powerful tool due to its ability to visualize visitor data in the form of Heatmaps. With this, it becomes easy to understand which sections and elements of the website attract the most attention and which ones get ignored.
It even allows you to collect feedback from actual visitors using a suggestion box cleverly placed on your website. Moreover, you can even conduct targeted surveys to collect user data and understand your users better.
7. Google Optimize
Yet another entry from Google with a powerful tool that allows you to run more than just A/B Testing. Optimize is a comprehensive Experience Management tool that has all features and functionalities to make sure your audience can have the best experience.
A/B Testing, Multivariate Testing, Split URL Testing, and Personalisation are some powerful optimization features available with Optimize. Moreover, they even provide a visual editor that makes it easy to design and deploy web pages for all intents and purposes.
For managing everything they have an Activity Log, Experiment Previews, User Permissions, Experiment Scheduling, etc. Native integration with other Google tools further raises the effectiveness of this tool significantly.
8. GTmetrix
It is a powerful and feature-rich Web Page Speed Analysis tool that uses a visual representation of data and insights to make it easy to understand and take action.
It offers scheduled monitoring which is helpful in maintaining the page load performance of a website over the long run. You can have it run analysis based on your custom schedules also and set alerts for various parameters such as slowing page load speed.
You can test how your website performs from 66 servers located in 22 different locations meaning you can optimize your website for best performance irrespective of where it is accessed from. They also have a Mobile device tester to let you test your website and web pages to see how they perform on specific mobile devices.
9. WAVE
It is a Web Accessibility Evaluation tool that is both free and powerful. It is available in the form of web browser extensions too. It evaluates your website and web content for any accessibility issues and Website Content Accessibility Guideline (WCAG) errors.
It evaluates your website and provides the evaluation in the form of visual feedback in form of icons and pins over website elements that have errors or issues. It flags the elements for Contrast errors, missing h1 and h2 headings, empty alt texts, small text size, ARIA tabindex, etc.
You can then proceed to make changes to these elements making your website and web content more accessible and conforming to WCAG.
10. EqualWeb
If you’re looking for an even more capable Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool then Equalweb is your best bet. It lets you optimize your website to make it as accessible as possible by anyone and everyone.
Under navigation optimization, it provides keyboard navigation, text-readers, voice commands, blink blocking, and smart navigation. Colour and content adjustment are also possible making the website friendly toward physically or sensory impaired users and users suffering from epilepsy.
Equalweb helps you have your website optimized to conform to the WCAG 2.1 level AA+ Criteria.
Conclusion
Your website is a digital equivalent of a brick-and-mortar store.
As the experience your customers have while in-store and shopping is important, so is the case for users online visiting your website.
A good customer experience is beneficial in many ways to a business as it not only boosts conversion but adds to one’s brand value.
Managing this customer experience requires one to regularly optimize their website for the latest changes and trends. All of this can be done more effectively and quickly using a website optimization tool.
Now, depending upon your requirements you can pick and choose from among our suggestions and start making sure your users are left with a lasting positive impression.
