Manage your website

Make it easy to find with SEO

Search engine optimisation (SEO) ensures your business is visible when potential customers search on Google or other search engines. By learning SEO best practices, and applying them to your website, you can increase both the quantity and quality of traffic you get from search engines.

Learn more about how to improve the SEO on your website.

Make it easy to use with UX

User experience (UX) is the experience your visitors have each time they interact with your website or service. Considering the UX can help:

• understand your customers better
• improve customer satisfaction
• encourage customer retention and engagement

Find top tips on improving UX and what your website needs to provide a good UX.

Engage customers with content

Storytelling is an important part of promoting your business. Telling interesting and authentic stories about your product, your business, your location and your sector allows you to:

• attract new customers
• keep existing customers engaged

Think about the information you have to share – practical details, news, staff and customer stories – and how best to get that information across.

Find out more about creating engaging content.

Learn about the importance of using good imagery.

Make your website accessible

There are many reasons to create an accessible and easy-to-use website for all your customers. Following best practices benefits all customers by creating a great user experience and could see your website rank better with SEO.

• Provide alternative text for images which is used by screen readers to explain the content to visually impaired users.
• Use descriptive headings and set heading styles – this helps both SEO and screen readers to understand the importance of text on the page and navigate around.
• Make sure forms, buttons, and other interactive elements are keyboard accessible. Most website platforms should offer this automatically.
• Choose the colours of your website to meet colour contrast guidelines for users with low vision.
• Include transcripts for multimedia content like videos and audio where possible.
• Make sure any additional documents such as PDFs are accessible and compatible with screen reader software.

For more information on website accessibility check out:

• website accessibility compliance from Level Access
• how to make your website accessible podcast from Business Gateway

Get feedback and conduct regular checks

You should be continually monitor how your website is performing for your customers. Technology and design practices change regularly, so you need to evaluate and improve your website regularly as well.

Simple checks can involve:

• asking your staff for feedback, conducting a customer survey or looking at your website analytics
• scheduling regular checks that all pages on your website work and are up-to-date
• testing forms, email addresses and the full booking process
• looking for broken links or images – these can cause frustration and give a bad impression

Improve your website’s sustainability

The internet has a huge impact on sustainability – storing, sending and receiving data requires energy as well as physical infrastructure for data centres.

Learn more about how your website impacts your carbon footprint and think about how you can reduce it.

Read an introduction to sustainable web design.

Find some top tips on making your current website more sustainable.

Learn how to design and build a sustainable website.

If you're still at the planning stage or looking to do a complete refresh of your existing website, you'll need to decide whether to hire a professional company or do it yourself. Factors such as cost, time, knowledge and technical expertise will play a part in your decision making.

If you choose to build the website yourself, then remember to make it easy for your customers to find key information and perform tasks like booking simply and securely. You don’t want to lose a customer in the middle of a booking because your website wasn’t easy to use.

The key pages you need on your website

Homepage

This is the first impression the customer will have of your business so it needs to represent you well and should be visually appealing. This page directs the user to other pages, so it should have a clear, simple menu.

Quick check – can customers find the following easily:

• what the business is
• where the business is based
• opening times
• accessibility facilities
• prices

Booking page

All of your key pages should carry a booking button, with text most suitable to your business such as:

• Book Now
• Check Availability
• Book Tickets

This button (or call to action) should link to a page which could feature an interactive calendar to show availability but should detail the different options and prices for your product.

Find out more about booking systems for experiences or booking engines for accommodation.

Product pages

This can be multiple pages to showcase your product whether that’s the accommodation you offer, your different tours or the details of your event. Some of the essential features of a successful product page are:

• imagery of your physical space or the experience you offer
• description of what they get when they visit you
• clear pricing for all booking options

About us

This page is important to give users a better insight into who you are as a business. Tell your story about yourself, family or team, how you came to be running your business and why do you work in this area?

Contact page

You can include a contact form, asking the customers to share information about their query, which is delivered to your email inbox.

You should always include your address, phone number and email address. You can also link to your social media channels.

What else you'll need on your website

Content

Once you have the key information in place, you can begin to think about creating other content pages that makes your business stand out and inspires customers to make bookings.

Find out more about creating engaging content.

Accessiblity information

Provide clear and accurate information about your accessibility features so that customers can make an informed decision about whether you are likely to meet their needs and you are the right inclusive business for them.

A lack of information on accessibility is one of the top barriers to visiting somewhere new.

Find out about creating a Detailed Access Guide for your business.

Secure certificates

Having a secure certificate for your website means the padlock icon will show to visitors who are browsing your website. If you use a website building software, you should automatically gain secure accreditation but check with your provider for more information.