Running a small business is extremely rewarding, but it also has its challenges.
Anyone who runs or works in a small business knows how many different hats you have to wear in order to complete a variety of different daily tasks, from monitoring finances to managing staff and handling customer support. Keeping your website in great shape shouldn’t have to take up too much of your attention.
Your website should be a fun and satisfying project that represents your best work and helps you grow your business. In order to keep it joyful and effective, it is essential to be efficient every step of the way, so you can spend more time on what matters most to you.
There are a few core things that you can do to save time when it comes to managing and maintaining your website. From automation and content strategy to outsourcing technical work, there are lots of tasks you can take off your plate.
We’ve put together a list of the top time-saving website tips that will help optimize your website and workflow, resulting in more overall happiness! We hope you find them helpful.
1. Work with Professional Developers
The internet is a fast-changing environment. There are always new methods and tools coming out that improve the functionality of a website, which is exciting and beneficial for your business. The technology at our disposal helps business owners to stay up-to-date on the latest ways to run an efficient website that consistently delivers an excellent user experience.
Some of these areas include new developments in SEO, UX design, hosting, and security that could boost your business’ success – or threaten it.
Delegation is the biggest time-saving tip for your website’s maintenance and development. To save time as you strive to make your site an effective business asset, consider hiring an agency to handle all your website’s daily, weekly, and monthly technical tasks.
Delegating tasks to an external agency will cost less money and time for your business in the long run. It also provides you with a team of experts you can rely on to have the expertise you probably don’t have.
An agency can fully manage your site’s:
- Security
- Backups
- Hosting
- Plugins
- Themes
- Speed testing
This way, you won’t have to worry about getting involved in anything technical at all when it comes to your website’s performance. You can trust that your site will be kept secure and up-to-date. Delegation can also significantly increase your productivity because you can remain focused on what you do best for your business.
2. Use Automation Tools
Automation software is one of the most practical time-saving tools for businesses. We are lucky to live in a time when there are so many innovative automation tools out there to make our lives easy!
The time this software trims from your daily tasks can allow you to focus on more important and complex work.
Some of the ways automation tools can help a business include:
- Creating media ideas at scale
- Eliminating repetitive website and marketing tasks
- Generating ideas for content
- Monitoring metrics and analytics
- Automating your marketing efforts
These types of tools are specifically designed to boost your overall efficiency, and increase productivity.
Here are five automation tools that help save time on keeping your site optimized for search engines:
RankBuddy provides you with the most important SEO information about your website. The valuable insights include keyword rankings, backlinks, and social shares. It can also create an outreach list that helps you get in touch with influencers who show specific interest in your content.
SEMRush will help you get an overall view of your site’s position in various search engines by checking keyword rankings, organic traffic, and backlink analysis. It also offers strong competitor analysis and topic research features.
SE Ranking is a free tool that allows you to track your keyword rankings on Google, Bing, and Yahoo. It’s easy to use and has many features that will help you with your SEO strategy:
Your position on Google, Bing, and Yahoo for a keyword that you are tracking
A history of the ranking over time so that you can see how well your SEO campaign is going
The total number of searches for a given keyword at any point in time
The estimated monthly traffic for a given keyword at any point in time
Screaming Frog is a popular professional tool for SEOs that crawls links and tells you the root vulnerabilities of your website. Some of its features are URL parameters, pages being crawled, crawl type selection, and site map generation with keywords highlighted.
Yoast SEO is the most popular SEO plugin for WordPress. It helps you do on-page optimization by adding the all-important meta tags and social media meta descriptions to your content. It can also automate things like your sitemap, schema markup, and redirects.
Yoast SEO enables digital marketers and website owners to choose from various configurations that include a standard (general) setup, digital marketing, eCommerce, or blog configuration. You can also set it up for a WooCommerce site if you happen to have that specific need.
3. Work with an SEO Consultant
As mentioned, staying on top of current SEO strategies helps to grow your business. But even with the SEO automation tools described above, learning the basics of SEO to use the tools – and checking them regularly – can be too time-consuming for business owners.
Rather than spending your time reading articles and taking online courses, you can delegate your website’s SEO, too.
Work with an SEO consultant or agency to make sure that you always stay up-to-date with the latest SEO trends. SEO consultants do everything from creating and executing search engine optimization strategies to reporting and advising on how to improve your site’s ranking.
This provides you with experts on running regular audits of your site, and alerting you to any changes in search rankings, SERP position, and traffic flow from search engines.
These audits can help you understand how your website is performing in the digital world. They let you know if any technical problems need attention before they get out of hand, and hurt your rankings and traffic. SEO audits can also be used to plan for the future, so it’s important to keep up with them.
A further way to save time is delegating the fixes required after those audits reveal problems or opportunities that need action. You won’t need to invest in expensive search engine optimization software or spend hours researching how to use that software to fix your website issues – a consultant can do that, too.
4. Create and Stick to a Content Strategy
If you want to maintain a successful website, you need to focus on writing awesome content and avoid the common content marketing mistakes that can hurt your chance of success.
The majority of business websites are aimed at generating leads and improving sales. Your goal should be to develop compelling articles on topics your audience cares about, building up a website that attracts visitors likely to convert.
The next time you’re struggling to think up something relevant to write about, consider this: it would save time to plan ahead, and create a strategic content outline for the entire quarter – or the year.
A content strategy is also a must-have for business owners, because it provides a framework for creating new content to increase search rankings, attract traffic, and drive conversions. This reduces hours wasted figuring out what content is needed and who will create it.
Your plan can include further time-saving strategies for producing content. Two such methods are:
User-generated content: a form of content that’s created by your customers, and shared with their permission. It will help you create more engaging posts, since the content is coming directly from your people who are among your target audience.
Guest posts: relevant articles that are contributed to your site by an external writer. They can save you time on content generation because you’re not tasked with putting that content together.
5. Eliminate Potential Problems Before They Happen
If your website’s user experience (UX) is excellent, it gives users an engaging, simple, and enjoyable experience. This will drive leads and sales.
Poor UX such as broken images, slow pages, or confusing design elements can cost you potential buyers, by making them leave the site before they have a chance to enjoy what you have to offer. This then forces you to spend extra time fixing weak or broken site elements that could have been avoided.
What’s most important is to conduct thorough user research, and plan your website user journey so that it’s quick and easy for your visitors. You want to ensure that the user gets to their goal in the least amount of time and effort.
Consider employing these three UX practices for a great website:
Professional web design: It’s important to create an aesthetically pleasing, usable website that is compatible with all devices and browsers. That’s what makes a great user experience. It doesn’t matter if you’re going for a minimalist and a simply designed website or something extravagant; a professional UX designer will be able to advise on what’s best for your audience.
Fast loading speeds: You’ll achieve a more efficient website and improved user experience when your website loads quickly.
Current content: Update your website’s pages, posts, and integrations on an ongoing basis.
6. Use Chatbots
If you have a customer service department, then it’s a good idea to automate your responses. The advantage is that you save a lot of time by not handling calls that could have been dealt with through automatic responses.
Using chatbots allows you to employ messaging apps to offer appropriate responses that can give your visitors their desired answers without waiting on hold or even picking up the phone.
The overall customer service experience improves, and it saves you time. Keep in mind that for certain business activities, it’s still vital to have an agent take over the conversation eventually.
Having a happy and healthy website that’s easy to use and run is important for your business growth, and results in happy users, happy employees, and happy business owners!
Even more vital than that is using time-saving methods to ensure you’re not stuck on maintenance or content tasks all day long. If you want to improve your workflow and minimize website worries, try these small business website tips and watch how much more efficient you become.
