Running a small business is extremely rewarding, but it also has its challenges.
Anyone who manages or works in a small business knows how many different hats they need to wear to complete a variety of different daily tasks, from monitoring finances to managing staff to customer service. Keeping your website in great shape shouldn’t 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. To keep you happy and effective, it’s essential to be efficient at every step, so you can dedicate more time to what matters most to you.
There are some essential things you can do to save time when it comes to managing and maintaining your website. From content automation and strategy to outsourcing technical work, there are many tasks you can take off your plate.
We’ve put together a list of top time-saving website tips that will help you optimize your website and workflow!
1. Work with professional developers
The internet is a rapidly changing environment. New methods and tools are always emerging that improve the functionality of a website, which is interesting and beneficial for your business. The technology at our disposal helps business owners 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 can boost your business’s success – or threaten it.
Delegation is the biggest time-saving tip for the maintenance and development of your website. To save time as you strive to make your website an effective business asset, consider hiring an agency to handle all of your website’s daily, weekly, and monthly technical tasks.
Delegating tasks to an external agency will cost your business less money and time in the long run. It also provides a team of experts you can rely on for the knowledge you probably don’t have.
An agency can fully manage its website:
- Safety
- Backups
- Accommodation
- Plugins
- Themes
- Speed test
This way, you won’t have to worry about getting involved in anything technical when it comes to your site’s performance. You can trust that your site will be kept secure and up to date. Delegation can also significantly increase your productivity, as you can focus on what you do best for your business.
2. Use automation tools
Automation software is one of the most practical time-saving tools for companies. We are lucky to live in a time when there are so many innovative automation tools out there to make our lives easier!
The time this software takes away 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:
- Create ideas for social networks at scale
- Eliminate repetitive website and marketing tasks
- Generate content ideas
- Monitor metrics and analytics
- Automate marketing efforts
These types of tools are specifically designed to increase your overall efficiency and increase your productivity.
Here are the five automation tools that help you save time keeping your site search engine optimized:
RankBuddy provides you with the most important SEO information about your website. Valuable information includes keyword rankings, backlinks and social shares. You can also create a mailing list that helps you get in touch with influencers who show a specific interest in the content.
SEMRush will help you get an overview 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 capabilities.
SE Ranking is a free tool that lets you track your keyword rankings on Google, Bing and Yahoo. It is easy to use and has many features that will help you with your SEO strategy:
- Your position on Google, Bing and Yahoo for the keyword you are tracking
- A history of rankings over time so you can see how well your SEO campaign is doing
- The total number of searches for a given keyword at any given time
- The estimated monthly traffic for a given keyword at any given time
Screaming Frog is a popular professional tool for SEOs that tracks links and reports root vulnerabilities on your site. Some of its features are URL parameters, crawled pages, crawl type selection and sitemap generation with highlighted keywords.
Yoast SEO is the most popular SEO plugin for WordPress. It helps you optimize the page by adding the important social media meta tags and meta descriptions to your content. It can also automate things like your sitemap, schema markup, and redirects.
Yoast SEO allows digital marketers and website owners to choose from a variety of settings that include a default (general) setup, digital marketing, online store, or blog setup. You can also set it up for a WooCommerce site if you have that specific need.
3. Work with an SEO Consultant
As mentioned, staying on top of current SEO strategies helps your business grow. But even with the SEO automation tools described above, learning the SEO basics to use the tools – and checking them regularly – can be very time-consuming for business owners.
Instead of spending your time reading articles and taking online courses, you can also delegate your website’s SEO.
Work with an SEO consultant or agency to ensure you are always 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 rankings.
Experts run regular audits on your website and alert you to any changes in search rankings, SERP position and search engine traffic flow.
These audits can help you understand how your site is performing in the digital world. They let you know if a technical issue needs attention before it gets out of hand and hurts your rankings and traffic. SEO audits can also be used to plan ahead, so it’s important to keep track of them.
Another way to save time is to delegate necessary corrections after these 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 site’s problems – 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 amazing content and avoiding common content marketing mistakes that can hurt your chance of success.
Most business websites aim to generate leads and improve sales. Your goal should be to develop compelling articles on topics your audience cares about, creating a website that attracts visitors that are likely to convert.
Next time you’re struggling to think of something relevant to write, 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 essential for business owners as it provides a framework for creating new content to increase search rankings, drive traffic and drive conversions. This reduces wasted hours figuring out what content is needed and who will create it.
Your plan may include other time-saving strategies for producing content. Two of these methods are:
- User Generated Content: A form of content created by your customers and shared with their permission. This will help you create more engaging posts, as the content comes directly from the people who are among your target audience.
Guest posts: Relevant articles that are contributed to your site by an outside writer. They can save you time in generating content because they are not tasked with putting that content together.
5. Eliminate potential problems before they happen
If your website’s user experience (UX) is excellent, it will provide users with an engaging, simple and enjoyable experience. This will generate leads and sales.
Poor UX like broken images, slow pages, or confusing design elements can cost you potential customers, causing them to leave your site before they have a chance to take advantage of what you have to offer. This forces you to spend more time fixing weak or broken site elements that could have been avoided.
The most important thing is to carry out a complete user survey and plan the website user’s journey so that it is quick and easy for your visitors. It wants to ensure that the user achieves his goal in the shortest time and with the least possible effort.
Consider using these three UX practices for a great website:
Professional web design: it is important to create an aesthetically pleasing and 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, simple design site or something extravagant; a professional UX designer will be able to advise on what is best for your audience.
Fast Loading Speeds: You’ll get a more efficient website and improved user experience when your website loads fast.
Current content: update your website pages, posts and integrations on an ongoing basis.
5. Use chatbots
If you have a customer service department, it’s a good idea to automate your responses. The advantage is that it saves a lot of time by not answering calls that could have been answered through automatic responses.
Using chatbots allows you to use messaging apps to provide appropriate responses that can give your visitors the desired responses without putting them on hold.
The overall customer service experience improves and saves you time. Remember that for certain business activities it is still vital that a conversation is taken over eventually.
Having a happy, healthy website that is easy to use and run is important to growing your business and results in happy users, happy employees and happy business owners!
Even more vital than that is using time management methods to ensure you don’t stay on maintenance tasks or content all day. If you want to improve your workflow and minimize website worries, try these small business website tips and see how much more efficient it becomes.