Decluttering Your Website

Now that we have wrapped up our Social Media Breakdown blog series, we’re moving on to a new topic for the month of July. As stated on most of our materials, we believe that a website is a necessity for every organization. Our increasingly digital world requires you to have a digital foothold for your business, especially in an age when people “google” everything before choosing a service or buying a product. With that dynamic in mind, we should probably amend our original statement a little. In reality, it’s important for every organization to have an efficient website that is easily accessible and easy to navigate. 

It’s all too common for websites to be so littered with information that visitors quickly move on to another site. According to Contentsquare’s 2021 Digital Experience Benchmark report, the average time on a webpage across all industries is 54 seconds. With a 54 second average, you have an incredibly limited time to hook your website visitors, and you don’t want those seconds wasted on less pertinent information or even on trying to navigate your site. 

So, here are some tips that we hope will be helpful in decluttering your website: 

1. Keep to the Basics

Your website is not necessarily the place to outline every single detail about your organization, your staff, your procedures, and your products/services. As a company, you have to decide which information is most important, but once you do, keep to it. People want to know what your company does and how you’re going to make their lives a little easier. 

So, stick to the key elements of your services or products; your brochures (digital or print) or a representative can go into more detail. 

2. Reorganize on Key Pages

As much as I’m sure we’d all love to not have to consider search engine optimization and solely focus on user experience, that is not an option. Word counts and keywords have to enter the conversation, but you can be judicious in how to incorporate that content. You can make key services or product pages. Additionally, visitors typically scroll down a page, so you can make a page longer with more sections. Structure your pages so that the top of your page has limited content and negative space while the lower sections contain the sections with heavier text.   

3. Simplify Your Navigation Bar

No one wants to see twelve tabs of tiny text in your navigation bar at the top of your website. If you have more than four or five links in your top navigation, we recommend using a hamburger navigation tool. It’s a clean alternative to having more tabs while keeping your most important tabs in the forefront.  

4. Keep Your Text Brief

This one is self-explanatory. People move fast when they hit a website, and they are not going to linger on paragraphs for long, especially on a homepage. So, limit your text where you can; it’s worth it to use the least amount of words to effectively make your point. 

Will there be pages where you have actual paragraphs of text? Of course. If you have an about us section or a page about the history of the company, then paragraphs will be utilized. However, the text on your main pages should be limited if you want to keep a person’s interest and his or her eyes on your page. 

5. Balance Imagery Out

Quality images and even videos are vital for any website, and of course, text is unavoidable. The important thing is to balance these aspects with white space. We need white space within any design, and make no mistake, your website is a visual landscape like any other. Having space for the text to breathe will keep your website from looking overcrowded, and an overcrowded page can quickly overwhelm visitors and leave them going to a different site. 

6. Utilize Blog and Resource Sections

If you’ve had your website live for a while, then you probably have years worth of content built up. If that content is still something you want to keep, then organize it under a blog or resource section. If it’s something that is not as applicable, then don’t hesitate to delete some things. 

These are just a few simple tricks to keep your website looking clean and simple to navigate. Later this month we’ll be specifically focusing on ways to enhance your homepage, so stay tuned. 

Also, if you’re in need of a website makeover, you can find out more about our process here or contact us here.