On today's episode we are going to talk about eight simple tweaks you can make to your website today to make it better, right here on Your Website Engineer podcast, episode number 329.

Hello, everybody, welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler, and today we're going to continue our discussion on how we can make our website better in 2017, or actually the series in March that we've been talking about lately. So, today, we'll get to that in just few minutes. There's more news in the WordPress space, it seems like there's a lot coming in in the way of Automatic, so let's go ahead and dive in and see what the updates are.

The first thing is there's a new writing experience on WordPress.com, and so they've revealed some changes and unleashed some changes inside the new editor to just make it more distraction-free and easier to navigate and write. So, if you have a WordPress.com site, you will definitely see that when heading over to WordPress.com and you can start creating your new posts and your new content. Basically, the menu area that used to be on the left is now on the right, and it's all completely hidden as you are typing in, composing your blog posts, and so that's something to look out for. So there's a link in the show notes for this, and all the other things that we'll talk about here in the announcements section.

All right, another piece of news that comes from Automattic via the way of WooCommerce is now Apple Pay is allowing...You can now accept Apple Pay payments within WooCommerce on mobile and desktop. I've been a Apple Pay fan ever since I got an Apple watch, makes it so convenient going to the grocery store, just double-tap on a button and then hold my watch up to the payment device and it's just so simple, so easy, I absolutely love it. And I haven't really used it that much on websites or online, but I have experienced it one time when I was buying something, I can't even remember what I was buying, but I ended up purchasing it, it asked me whether I wanted to use Apple Pay, I was on my MacBook Pro that had the fingerprint scanner so I was able to use my fingerprint to scan it to authenticate, and it just filled in all the information for me, it was so fast, so easy, and so painless.

Now, you could do that with Apple Pay on WooCommerce stores, and so it speeds up the checkout process by like 60 percent. You'll have better conversions, because it's so much easier to check out and pay. This Apple Pay is powered by Stripe, so you do need a Stripe payment account for this to work, and it's free, it's free to install, free to use the Stripe plug-in. Basically, if you are interested in offering to use Apple Pay, I highly recommend checking out this new edition to the Stripe extension and the plug-in. So that's another piece of news that came out of Automattic.

And the last piece of news that came from Automattic is via Jetpack, so we've got WordPress.com, we've got WooCommerce, and we've got Jetpack today, but today, or starting on March 16th, all Jetpack users have free access to the 165 professionally made WordPress.com themes, which is really unique, and pretty awesome. All of those themes that you could only use on WordPress.com, the free themes there, you can now use them on your Jetpack-enabled sites. So, you can use all of them for free. Our theme team adds maybe ten to 12 to 15 new free themes every year, so you have access to all of those. Just really nice, really simple, you can search for them inside of the... you can actually just visit the WordPress.com theme showcase, you can select your Jetpack site from the sidebar, and then you can scroll down to the all-new WordPress.com theme section, and now you can manage and use those themes.

You will never have to worry about updates because those are always kept updated, and it's just a really simple, elegant way to add... find a really good, free WordPress theme. 165 beautiful new themes are available for your WordPress site as long as you are running Jetpack.

All right, let's move on into the "Is there a plug-in for that?" And 48,000 plug-ins, there's so many plug-ins out there, I mean, we're gonna hit 50,000 here just real, real soon, and I wanna just spend time, I spend time every week kind of researching, looking for plug-ins or extensions out there that may benefit at least one person in my listening audience. Just highlight and showcase these plug-ins that are just kind of neat or do something that's "Wow, I didn't know WordPress could do that" type of a thing.

Today's plug-in is one called Watermark, and this plug-in adds a watermark dynamically to all of your images, even ones that are already uploaded. And so this means that the images are not modified. The watermark is actually placed through the htaccess file, and the PHP file. So, none of your images are modified. You can download via FTP and they will not have a watermark, but it automatically just goes through your entire library and it adds this watermark. So, it's really cool.

I think it only puts it on the ones that are uploaded to the media library, so if you have images inside theme, it obviously doesn't put watermarks on all of those images, but that's what the plug-in does, and I think it's a really cool plug-in for somebody that wants to put in some sort of watermark on your images out there to make sure that they can't be downloaded or copied off the web in any way, shape, or form. So if you're interested in some sort of watermarking plug-in, this is the plug-in for you.

All right, today I want to share eight different ways, or eight different small tips or tricks or tidbits, or whatever you want to call them, to go ahead and update and make changes on your website. Because this whole month we've been talking about small tweaks and things that we can do to improve the performance and make it better, and without redesigning your entire site. And so today we're gonna talk about eight small things that you can do, and each one will take maybe 15 minutes at most, and so over the next week, week-and-a-half, you can go ahead and knock out one per day. But let's go ahead and just dive right in.

The first tweak that you wanna make, and you wanna just kind of evaluate your website, is to make sure there's multiple ways for people to contact you. So, customers like the ease of filling out contact forms, some people really love those. Other people would rather pick up the phone and call, other people want to try to find you on Facebook or Twitter, anything along those lines, and so you wanna make sure that all those pieces of information, any way that you can be contacted online, real or digital, analog versus digital or whatever, you wanna make sure that those are in several prominent places within your website.

You don't wanna make people hunt to find a service number or to look for an address or whatever types of information that you're giving to them, so you just wanna kind of evaluate your website, take a look around, is it easy? Think, "Oh, I wanna call my business, how do I find the number?" Is it in the header; is it up in the upper-right-hand corner somewhere, where it's easy to find? Is it in the footer; is it somewhere on that homepage where it's easy to find? Is it on every single page so it's easy to find?

Just go ahead and look through and make sure that those pieces of information are there. Again, that's whether it's a phone number or it's a contact form or it's a link to a contact form, of if that is a little "help" bubble, or one of those live-chat buttons that's not really live chat, but live chat in the bottom right-hand corner of your website. Look at all of those things and make sure it's easy for people to contact you.

Going along the way of contacting you, the second one is to put a map and hours on your contact page, especially if you are a brick-and-mortar business. If you're a restaurant or a shop or you want people to actually come to your store, your physical location, you definitely want to make sure that you make it easy to find your contact page so they can find where you're located. Definitely wanna put hours on there, hours of operation, so people can quickly and easily find, "Hey, are they open, are they not?" This is great for restaurants, you want to make sure that for sure you have an address; you have your phone number and a map all on the same page.

You also want to make sure that on this contact page it is mobile... you can easily navigate it on a mobile device. A lot of people may be out and about and they'll be like, "Oh, I wanna try out this new restaurant" and then look it up on their phone so they can navigate and know how to get there. So that's one you definitely want to make sure it's there.

Store hours are also awesome on there, just to make sure that... you know, some stores have weird hours, are they open on Sundays, do they close late on Monday nights, whatever that is, make sure that's on the website. You don't necessarily have to field a call to ask, "Are you open," if it's easy to find on your WordPress site. All right? So that's the second one.

The third one is to simplify your navigation. So, a lot of websites I see have tons of navigation. I talk to customers using WooCommerce a lot and they're like, "Oh, my drop-down to my drop-down menu's not working right." So that's like three levels of drop-downs. And I'm like, "Really, are people searching your site via that method? 'I'm looking for this particular category of products and then this particular brand, and then I'm looking for the... '" Most likely, in a navigational setting, that's not what most people are looking for. They're looking for the big, broad items, and then they can navigate from there.

It's very simple. They say customers coming to a website don't spend a lot of time there, some say 20 seconds on that page, some say eight seconds, some say somewhere in-between, and you wanna make sure that they are not being confused or overwhelmed with too many choices. You wanna have that contact information, maybe some resources, maybe a link to your blog, about page, maybe to your shop or your store, and then that's kind of all that really needs to be in the menu. And then use the rest of your page, the rest of your site, to help people navigate to exactly where they need to be on your website. So, item No. 3 is to simplify your navigation.

Item No. 4 is to make your URLs search-friendly, and so this means making sure your permalinks are set to display the title of your page, that definitely helps Google crawl your site, it definitely helps people when they're kind of navigating or seeing search results, they're like, "Oh, I think this is the right page because of the title of the URL." So that's really, really important. I mean, search engines are important, obviously, we wanna make the site easy for search engines to crawl and kind of understand what is on that page.

We also wanna try to make sure that those URLs are as short as possible, and to make sure that they actually kind of make sense and you have dashes between words, instead of like smushing all the words together. That makes it much more easy for search engines to crawl, and it makes it much more easy for someone to kind of see that page URL and be like, "Okay, this is probably what I want to use." You also wanna make sure that there's at least one of your keywords inside that URL, because that's gonna help Google kind of rank and make sure that your site is appearing in the right location top-to-bottom in those search results. So, that is something that you wanna do.

Again, it goes without saying, because a lot of people do this already, but within WordPress, you want to go into the settings, into the permalink section, and then you wanna make sure that you're checking that post name section, so that's gonna pull in the post name for all your posts, your pages, and things like that to make sure you have a very readable URL. I'm not sure exactly why this isn't standard by default when it comes to WordPress, but this is always something that you wanna make sure that you change inside of your WordPress installation.

Item No. 4, or No. 5, excuse me, is proofread everything. So like I said earlier, people only spend a small amount of time on your website when they're coming to it for the very first time, and one way that you can make a very positive impression is to have an error-free copy on your website. That just doesn't mean that you have no typos. Like, you wanna make sure that you've removed any outdated information as well, or incorrect information. You wanna make sure that spelling or capitalization or, you know, all of those things are correct, grammatically correct. There's a report out there on BBC.com that says "Poor grammar causes companies to lose millions in online sales every year," because people just don't trust that it's a real site because they see words misspelled all the time, or punctuation not correct, and things like that.

So, you wanna definitely check that, read through your copy on your main pages of your website, look through those Google analytics or your Jetpack status to see which people are viewing the most on your website, and definitely take some time taking a look through there and make sure that each page doesn't have any blatantly obvious copy. Check and read through, even copy and paste all of the post copy and move that into Google docs or somewhere you can do a spellcheck and you can do a grammar check and all of those things, so proofread everything is another great thing.

Item No. 6 is to make sure that you have social icons on all of your posts. You wanna post products, you know, whatever you people to share, make sure it's easy for people to do that. It's free publicity if people click those buttons and share with their friends and family, and that's exactly what you want to do. You wanna make sure that you are making it easy for people to share. I know that... I'm not a huge, huge social-media user, but sometimes it's like, "Oh, this is such a pain to share, I'm not gonna do it, because first I have to log into Twitter, I have to go to Twitter.com, then I have to find the URL, then I have to come up with some sort of... it's like two or three, four steps to actually share something, when if the buttons are right there I can click the button and I can share automatically, which would be so much easier. So, that item No. 6 is to put buttons on your blog post and products.

The No. 7 tip is to add testimonials and reviews to your products, or pages for your website, or whatever your website is for. So, you wanna just give instant credibility to your website, your presence, your brand online. And you can do this with some social proof. I've seen people embed Twitter URLs, so within WordPress, if you just grab the URL for a tweet about your product or service, you can just paste that into WordPress, and it'll automatically expand and it'll give you one of those cool little Twitter bubbles, which is nice, and you can put that right on your website.

If you wanted to have... like somebody wrote you an email, you can ask for permission and copy and paste that and maybe put their image, or a company that worked with you or whatever. Just put that in very strategic spots, like the homepage is a great place for testimonials, on product pages themselves. Ad reviews, customer reviews are awesome if people are leaving reviews somewhere, those are really great things and reviews are built right into WooCommerce. So, that's another thing to do to just add credibility and just make it so people really understand and know what the product's all about. Because sometimes your words aren't the best words that describe the product.

I know that before I buy almost anything I read tons of reviews on Amazon.com, if the product is on there. What do people think, what is the price-per-value good? Does the product work as designed? Is it cheap or is it flimsy? All of those pieces of information that other people, like customers, will say about a product, those are so much more valuable to me. Even if they are people that I've never met before, like if a product has like a hundred five-star reviews and barely any of the other stars, that's definitely a product that I'm interested in purchasing, because, yeah, it seems like a really great product. So, that is something to think about as well. Look for areas to add testimonials and reviews across your website.

And then the last one, tip No. 8 is to simplify requests for information. And this one sounds kind of vague and weird, but what does that mean? Within your website, you have opportunities for people to either sign up for your email newsletter list, or they could send you a small request via email for your contact form, or maybe they're buying something from your store and they're filling out that checkout form? Make sure you have the bare-minimum essential information you want. Like if you are asking on a contact form, like you want somebody's name and email address and phone number, and best time to call, and then you ask for the information, make all these fields a required field, it's going to raise the bar, it's actually going to make it harder for someone to actually want to go in and fill out all that information.

Same goes true with a checkout form. If you're asking for all of this information, somebody may say, "Oh, I don't want to give my phone number, that's a required field, I'm out, I'm not going to purchase." Or even signing up for a free e-book, like if you ask for a name and phone number and birthday, and ZIP code, and, you know, all of these different pieces of information, the more things you ask for, the harder it is for somebody to actually complete that signup. So, go ahead and look through that as well, just reduce those things.

Like, in general, a first name and email is all you really, really need for an email newsletter list. But then you can always go and ask for that information later, maybe you could send out a campaign maybe a month later, say, "Hey, can you update your information here within your email newsletter provider" and then ask for some additional information. That's definitely an easier thing to do once you've been communicating with them via email list already.

So, those are the eight things. I'll run through them real quick again. You want to make sure there's multiple ways to contact you, you wanna make sure that you have a map and hours on your contact page, simplify that navigation if it's getting kinda unwieldy and cluttery, make sure the URLs are search engine-friendly, we wanna proofread everything across our site, especially those pages that people are coming to most regularly, we wanna have social icons on our posts, we wanna add testimonials or reviews to products or services or whatever you may be offering on your website, and you want to simplify request for information. So, those are the eight things, those are kind of your to-dos, your homework to do in the coming week, and I will do my best to run through this list as well on YourWebsiteEngineer.com and see what I can do to improve on my website.

With that, I'm going to wrap up the show, thanks so much for tuning in, and we'll talk to you again next week. Take care. Bye-bye.