More than a handful of Retail Forex brokers have a website which can be easily described by those dreaded two words: It sucks. Leverate‘s Yael Warman provides a few tips to improve your website’s ability to create conversions, by focusing your efforts towards making minor but impactful changes.
The worst thing (well at least one of the worst things) you can do for your brokerage is to underestimate the value of your website.
As an online business, if your web site sucks, chances are your brokerage well, ah… has room for improvement. Think of your website as more than just a business card, but rather as the first impression that you will make on your traders.
The process of optimizing your website is double sided; it not only improves how search engines crawl, index and rank your page, but it should also improve the human user experience, as a more satisfying visit to your website will entail higher rates of conversion. What’s more, the task of optimizing your web page is never-ending. Usability testing and search engine optimization (SEO) efforts should be performed on a regular basis so that your site continues to be finely tuned and is working at its optimum potential.
In this article we provide a few tips to improve your website’s ability to create conversions, by focusing your efforts towards making minor but impactful changes. And turning your sucky website into a source of pride.
Are you using WordPress?
If not, you should be using WordPress. Everything from its customization options to its smooth configurations are well done and easy to use. Also, Google appears to love crawling over and giving good ratings to WordPress sites. Adding to its value is the enormous community of developers and enthusiasts who support the system and are a great source of information.
How long has it been since you’ve cleaned up your code?
A while? Well it is undoubtedly time to do it again. A good way to identify problematic areas in your code is to use any of these tools such as Firebug for Firefox, the GT Metrix Performance Tools and the well-worn but always reliable Google Webmaster Tools. Any of these tools will not only help you to identify what’s wrong with your site by pointing out errors but it will also recommend adjustments to fix them.
Are you targeting a local or international audience?
If your brokerage seeks to attract an international pool of traders then you may want to consider using a CDN (Content Delivery Network) such as CloudFlare which will speed up the load time and improve the user experience of your site. However, if your brokerage is restricted to defined regional boundaries, then you need to host you website as close as possible to that geographical area to improve the speed and efficiency of your site.
While these are just a few suggestions, we encourage you to follow up with more research on other techniques such as optimizing your content, customizing your tag titles, displaying one primary call to action and upgrading your design. Keep in mind however that all these techniques are just tips that can vary in their effectiveness from one site to the next. To ensure any of these techniques have qualitative value in optimizing your site’s performance, test each change and compare results, so that the decision to keep these adaptations will be well grounded.