How to Boost Your Website for the COVID-19 Crisis

This COVID-19 crisis has forced many businesses to rely more heavily on their websites, learn how to boost your website for better communication and sales.

The COVID-19 crisis is now in full swing, with many countries putting their citizens under strict lockdown, and businesses having to adapt to a landscape that was completely unthinkable just a month before. In the UK, the government has announced a wealth of new measures to sure up the economy through the crisis, but that doesn’t mean that companies are immune to the challenges. 

If your business is still operating through the crisis you will be facing a completely changed economic environment – and this comes with both challenges and opportunities. Now, more than ever before is the time to invest in your website, as customers and consumers are now spending their days at home looking at screens and browsing the internet for the long periods of the day. 

Additionally, your business may have found itself to a certain extent at a loose end. Certain tasks may not be possible or worthwhile at the moment – so why not focus that time instead on improving your site? The best way to do this is to begin optimising your site for better conversion rates so that when visitors come across your website, they are more likely to convert.

Here we take a look at some practical ways businesses can boost their websites during the COVID-19 crisis. 

Address the crisis

The first thing to note in improving your website through the COVID-19 crisis is that you need to ensure that visitors to your site understand that you are working in spite of the issues with the virus. If a visitor sees your website completely unchanged, they can easily assume that your company isn’t actually operating.

That’s why it is important to have a message on your site acknowledging the crisis and to explain that you are still operating effectively. Take a look below at how fashion retailer ASOS has placed a large green banner with information letting the visitor know that they are working through the crisis.

This avoids the possibility that unsure customers will simply click away from the page to visit a site that they feel they can trust to still be working. 

Reassuring your visitors

Feeling unsure about your website is the last thing that you want customers to be. So over this period, you need to go the extra mile to reassure visitors about the service that they can expect from you. Musical instrument store Andertons has created a dedicated page to provide information to visitors.

This tackles the issue head-on and provides customers with the details that they need in order to feel confident in making a purchase. 

Optimise your call-to-action buttons

It is also important to look at more general ways to optimize conversions on your site – one way to do this is through ensuring that your call-to-action buttons are as good as they can be. Yes, the text is important, but something often overlooked is the colour. 

Wessex Garage Doors are a company that has implemented colour changes to great effect. Altering the colour of their call-to-action buttons from green to orange felt like a small change, but it has been worth it. “We have seen an uptake in conversions since making the change,” says Mark Rorison, Managing Director of Wessex Garage Doors “it is surprising what a difference something so small can make, but you can’t argue with the results”.

Put the effort in on content

With potentially more time to work on your website, now could be the perfect time to invest in improving your web content. The written content of your site can make a huge difference to your conversion rates. 

Great content doesn’t always have to be long-form, in fact, often it is important to ensure that the content is easily readable and digestible for the visitor. Focus on quality first, and add quantity as you get the time to do so.

Create videos 

It is also worth thinking about what you can do from the perspective of creating other content. The country might be on lockdown, but that doesn’t stop you from making fantastic video content for the site. Video has become an absolutely essential component for websites as it improves conversion rates and helps businesses to get their messages across.  

Final thoughts

Now is the time to invest in your website to ensure that it is not only effective through the coronavirus crisis, but also beyond when things begin returning to normal and your business is in a strong place to take advantage of the opportunities.