Ways to improve your nursery website

Is your nursery website in need of some improvements?

Do you manage your nursery website or do you out source this? Managing your own nursery website can be a full time job in its self, this may be the reason why some nurseries out source this job.

Having a working website is crucial in creating a successful nursery business. Online presence is forever increasing and high percentage of parents use online to search for nurseries.

Do you ever evaluate your website and reflect on how it is working for the users. It is important to put yourself in the user’s shoes and see how your website works.

A website that doesn’t work can have detrimental affects on your nursery business, as competitors are always right behind you.

Sometimes when designing your website it’s best to work with the designers or even better try and build your own website yourself. There are many tools out there now to help you achieve this.

Here are a few suggestions of ways to improve your nursery website;

Update content regularly- there is nothing worse than adding content here and there and then leaving it a while before adding more. By doing this it can also have an effect on your Google rankings and also it reduces the risk of user engagement. People what to know that your website is updated with fresh new content regularly, this will help them return to your site.

Keeping layout and theme of website simple but effective- people want to visit a website that is easy to navigate around and to find the right information they need. They don’t want to be spending time searching for their answers. Having a nice fancy website looks great but again look from your user’s point of view and see how user friendly it is.

Balance of content – varying your content again will attract the users; mix it up with content and images. They say people prefer to see content broken up with images and images also tell a story.

Structure of content – evaluate the structure of your content,  are paragraphs to long and have very few images. Break your content up with short snappy paragraphs with more images. People are more likely to read those snappy paragraphs rather than a huge chunk of writing.

Quality of content – as your website will be seen by hundreds of prospective parents; you need to ensure customers are receiving quality content. A good quality image will represent who you are. Therefore maybe invest in a quality camera to take those professional images.

Tool bar for navigation – having a tool bar that can help people navigate around the site is a good tool to have. However ensure this is correctly titled and navigates to the right place.

Website loading speed – this is crucial as you want people to access your website rather than choosing to leave and search for another one. A piece of advice test how long your website is taking to load over your competitors.

Links to social media – a way to increase further engagement is to have social sharing buttons on your website. This is a great way for users to access other avenues of content and for users to share your content to their platforms. Many of us know that social engagement is popular, some nurseries are against this however there are many benefits to using social media.

Try using some of their suggestions to evaluate the performance of your website.