How Can I Improve My Website?

You improve your website by making it load fast on a phone, saying clearly in the first screen what you offer and who it is for, giving every product or service its own page, fixing the SEO basics so Google can find those pages, and making it effortless to call, book or buy. Most websites do not need a full redesign. They need a dozen focused fixes in the right order, starting with the ones that lose you the most visitors today.

Start by measuring what is wrong

Before changing anything, find out where your website is losing people. Three free tools give you most of the picture.

• Your analytics. Look at your most visited pages, how long people stay, where they leave and which pages lead to enquiries or sales. A page with lots of visits and no conversions is your first fix.
• Google Search Console. It shows which searches bring you visitors, which pages Google has indexed and any errors that stop pages from appearing.
• An SEO and speed check. Our free SEO checker scores your site against 56 signals in under a minute, and Google's PageSpeed Insights shows what slows your pages down.

Then watch a few real people use your site on their phones. Ask them to find a price, book a call or buy something. Where they hesitate is where you are losing customers.

Fixes 1 to 4. Make it fast

Speed is the improvement that helps everything else. Google uses page experience in ranking, and visitors abandon slow pages in large numbers, especially on mobile data.

1. Compress and resize images. This is the single biggest win on most sites. A photo uploaded straight from a camera can be 5 MB when it only needs to be 150 KB. Serve images at the size they are shown, in WebP or AVIF format, and add loading="lazy" to images below the first screen.
2. Remove scripts you do not need. Old tracking codes, chat widgets nobody uses, sliders and heavy plugins all slow the page. Every third-party script is a request your visitor has to wait for.
3. Use caching and a CDN. Page caching serves pre-built pages instantly, and a content delivery network serves your files from a location close to each visitor. Together they usually cut server response times dramatically.
4. Upgrade hosting if needed. If your server takes more than about 800 milliseconds to respond, no amount of image compression will make the site feel fast.

Fixes 5 to 8. Make it clear

Visitors decide within seconds whether they are in the right place. Clarity beats cleverness every time.

1. Rewrite your headline. Replace slogans with a plain statement of what you do and for whom. "Family dental clinic in Jumeirah, open seven days" tells visitors and Google far more than "Smiles that shine".
2. Add one obvious next step. Every page should have one primary call to action, such as "Book a consultation", "Get a quote" or "Shop the collection", visible without scrolling.
3. Cut the jargon. Write the way your customers talk. If they say "get more bookings", do not write "maximise conversion potential".
4. Show proof early. Reviews, star ratings, client logos, case study numbers and photos of real people build trust before visitors read the details.

Fixes 9 to 11. Give every offer its own page

A website with one "Services" page listing everything struggles to convert and struggles to rank. Google matches searches to pages, and visitors want the page about the thing they need.

1. Create a page for each product or service. Explain what it is, who it is for, how it works, what it costs or how to get a quote, and answer the common questions.
2. Create location pages if you serve several areas, with genuinely local information such as directions, local projects and area-specific details.
3. Answer questions in guides. Every question a customer asks before buying is a search someone else is typing. Answer the most common ones on your site, and link those guides to your service pages.

Fixes 12 and 13. Fix the SEO basics

Even a beautiful, fast, clear website gets no visitors if search engines cannot read it properly.

1. Give every page a unique title and description. The title should include the main thing the page is about and stay under about 60 characters. The description should answer the searcher's question in 140 to 160 characters.
2. Check indexing. Submit an XML sitemap in Google Search Console, remove any noindex tags from pages that should rank, make sure http redirects to https, and use one version of your domain. Our guide on how to improve SEO covers the rest.

Fixes 14 and 15. Remove friction

1. Make contact effortless. Put your phone number and a WhatsApp or chat link where people can tap them on mobile. Keep forms short, three to five fields is usually enough, and say how quickly you reply.
2. Make buying simple. If you sell online, reduce checkout steps, offer the payment methods your customers use, show delivery times and costs early, and allow guest checkout.

Accessibility helps everyone

An accessible website works for people with visual, motor or cognitive impairments, and it almost always works better for everyone else too. Use enough colour contrast, real text instead of text inside images, descriptive alt text for images, labels on every form field and buttons large enough to tap. Search engines read many of the same signals, so accessibility and SEO reinforce each other.

Make your website easy for AI assistants to read

More people now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews which business to choose. Those tools read websites in a simpler way than a browser does, often without running JavaScript. Make sure your main content is in the HTML itself, state plainly what you do, where and for whom, add structured data that describes your business, and publish an llms.txt file that summarises your site and links to your key pages. These small additions help AI tools describe and recommend you accurately.

Keep your website secure and up to date

An outdated website is a risk to your visitors and your rankings. Serve every page over HTTPS, keep your CMS, themes and plugins updated, remove plugins you no longer use, take regular backups and add basic security headers. Browsers warn visitors away from insecure pages, and a hacked website can be removed from Google's results until it is cleaned.

Set up conversion tracking

You cannot improve what you cannot see. Make sure your analytics records the actions that matter to your business, such as form submissions, calls from the website, WhatsApp clicks, bookings, purchases and app store clicks. Most analytics tools let you mark these as conversions. Add UTM tags to links you share in emails, social posts and ads so each visit is attributed to its source. Once conversions are tracked, every improvement in this guide can be judged by the number that matters most, how many more customers the website brings in.

Website mistakes we see every week

• A homepage slider with five messages. Visitors see the first slide and leave. One clear message wins.
• Contact details hidden in the footer. Put your phone, WhatsApp or booking button where mobile visitors can tap it.
• Stock photos of smiling strangers. Real photos of your team, premises and work build trust faster.
• Pop-ups that appear instantly. Let visitors read first, then offer something useful.
• Pages that say "Coming soon". Unfinished pages make the whole business look unfinished. Remove them until they are ready.
• No prices or price guidance anywhere. If you cannot list prices, explain what affects them and how quickly you send a quote.

Should you improve your website or redesign it?

Improve what you have when the site is built on a modern platform, the structure broadly makes sense and the problems are speed, copy and SEO. Most sites fall into this group.

Redesign when the platform cannot be made fast or secure, when the site does not work on phones, when your business has changed so much that the structure no longer fits, or when every small change costs more than it should. If you do redesign, protect your rankings with redirects and a careful migration plan. Our guide on redesigning a website without losing SEO explains how.

A 30-day website improvement plan

1. Week one. Measure. Set up Search Console, run an SEO and speed check, review analytics and watch three people use the site on their phones.
2. Week two. Speed. Compress images, remove unused scripts and turn on caching.
3. Week three. Clarity. Rewrite the homepage headline and calls to action, and add reviews and proof near the top.
4. Week four. Pages and SEO. Create or improve your most important service page, fix titles and descriptions, and submit your sitemap.

Repeat the measurement at the end of the month. Faster pages, clearer messaging and better SEO usually show up as more time on site, more enquiries and rising impressions in Search Console.

How do you know your improvements worked?

Compare the month before and the month after each change. Watch conversion rate (enquiries or sales divided by visitors), bounce or engagement rate on key pages, Core Web Vitals in Search Console, impressions and clicks from Google, and revenue or leads from organic search. Change one major thing at a time when you can, so you know which change made the difference.

Written by the Proklisi editorial team

Proklisi builds websites and apps, runs SEO, ASO and social media, and creates SI influencers for brands. Everything here comes from work we do for clients every week. About us or talk to the team