We build simple sites, and for good reason.

If you want to get more new business from your website, it’s best to keep it simple.

It’s very easy to over-complicate a website, often to the detriment of the visitor, but so many businesses have complex and hard-to-use websites.

There are three main aspects to any website:

1. The content
2. The design
3. The code

Content is the most essential aspect of any website, as it’s the stuff that gets you found.

Design is important, but it’s often given more attention than it should.

Code is crucial: you want a website that’s built well and performs.

With three simple elements to most websites, why do they become overly complex?

Keep it simple, stupid.

Simple websites are easier on so many counts:

1. Easier to update
2. More intuitive to navigate
3. Quicker to manage content
4. Lightweight and technically optimised
5. Kinder on the eye
6. Easier for search engines to understand
7. The list goes on…

If you are looking for new business leads from your website, keeping things simple can see you surface faster and higher in the search results.

This is another good reason to adhere to KISS.

Why do you need a simple website?

I will assume that your website is there to deliver new business leads, so keeping it simple is designed to increase these leads.

Searchers are looking for a solution to their problem, so your website must achieve three things correctly to generate new enquiries.

1. You have to rank above, or at least around, the competition.
2. When I land on your site, you must convince me you are worth contacting.
3. You must make it easy for the visitor.

If I visit your site and I have to work for an answer, I will bounce back to the search.

This is one of the main reasons for getting a simple WordPress site planned and built.

Everything should be from a visitor-first perspective.

It’s important to remember that when visitors land on your site, they want a solution to what they are looking for.

However, this is often forgotten with the focus on the design, spacing, fonts, and images: Do your visitors even care?

Here’s what the visitors do.

Design & creative.

The first thing you think they do is check out your design, which you probably spent months working on—it is a mere consideration to them: Does it look professional and appropriate?

Most people don’t consider design further than that, but you do because you’re in marketing and see everything from a design perspective.

If it looks professional and appropriate, you’ve ticked that box in less than a second, so the visitor wants the answer to their next problem.

The other key factor is ‘does it work’; if your site is not optimised for all devices and users have a bad experience, they will bounce back to the SERPs, which Google tracks and influences your positions.

The content.

Have you ever studied visitor recordings on your website? Apps like Hotjar can sort these for you.

Watch a few of these, and you will realise that visitors scan your page to look for the answers they need.

They scroll up and down, seemingly at random, and click on things that aren’t links (many people trace text with their mouse cursor and click on points of interest rather than just links).

Visitors are looking for content that will convince them to send you an email or pick up the phone.

Consider your actions when you visit a web page: Do you read everything from the top to the bottom? Probably not—you scan, looking for the answer you want.

Obviously, your content depends mainly on your service or product.

If you sell a service, people want lists and concise information to confirm you can do what they need.

If you sell products, visitors want pictures rather than details (although this varies wildly depending on your market).

The more your conversion rates increase, the simpler and better structured your content will be tailored for the visitor.

The code.

Visitors don’t even consider your code; they don’t care as long as it works.

Search engines, on the other hand, do care about your code. Your search results will suffer if your site is not optimised and fast.

So, how do you keep a website simple?

The first thing you do is to consider the visitor and the search engines in the planning stages of your site.

Then, you move onto the wireframing and design stages, carefully considering what the user wants to find rather than what you think they want it to look like.

Once the design is done, the site is built in a way that is lean, quick, optimised, and easy to manage in the back end.

Planning a simple site.

We obsess over URL structure here at Toast as we think it’s crucial for helping the search engines understand your site; your visitors don’t care about this.

We believe that the days of the short URL are gone, and your URL structure should help search engines understand what you are trying to do.

Here are some examples of a good URL structure:

• www.your-domain.com/services/your-service-name/
• www.your-domain.com/team/team-member-name/
• www.your-domain.com/resources/resource-name/
• www.your-domain.com/case-studies/case-study-name/

This makes far more sense than:

• www.your-domain.com/your-service-name
• www.your-domain.com/team-member-name
• www.your-domain.com/resource-name/
• www.your-domain.com/case-study-name/

Organising your content into structured sections does create longer URLs, but it also makes your site’s structure far easier for bots to understand and index accordingly.

This needs to be considered for every type of content on your site, including categories, tags and custom post types.

Writing simple content.

Say what you must, avoiding waffles and padding to get to that 1200-word mark.

In reality, word count does come into play when sites rank, but there are other ways you can add valuable text content without reams of waffle:

1. Add an FAQs section with at least ten questions and answers
2. Use accordions to add technical information for the see-mores
3. Add Calls-to-action or section breaks with images and important snippets of text
4. Add related content sections (which benefit the bots and the humans)

Another key point about the content is that it should be written before the design.

Never ask a designer to design something that you will then write content to fit: it’s completely the wrong way to do it.

Keep all your content structure the same across sections.

If you have a services section on your site, make sure each page has the same content and structure. Include the same information on each page and rewrite it for each service.

This again creates familiarity for both humans and bots and means your pages in each section are organised and curated. This also helps your content people when writing content—you are not reinventing the wheel each time you publish; you are following a plan.

Write for the visitor.

They will already have been bouncing around the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) looking for their answer, so here are some tips to make it easier for them.

1. Summarise the entire page at the top as concisely as you can
2. Tell the story in your crossheads to help the skimmers
3. Use bullet point lists
4. Use calls-to-action halfway through your content to grab attention
5. Have a contact form on the page, not on a click-through to another page
6. Don’t hide the gem at the bottom of the post
7. Don’t hide the solution in a video
8. Make it very, very easy to contact you

These are just the basics, but have a checklist like this for every page of your site.

On some sites we build, we even include this sort of checklist as a required field where everything had to be confirmed before you can publish the content.

This sort of checklist ensures that nothing gets published without everything being correct.

Simple design.

Without wishing to annoy the brand police, you care far more about your branding than your visitors.

Obviously, design is important, but it’s important to consider it from your visitor’s perspective.

Who needs the animation and fancy stuff – the visitor or the marketing department?

The point is that everything you add to your site can slow it down further and distract visitors.

If you have a brand-conscious audience, you might consider more design flourishing, but there is a lesson to be learned here from some sites where the brand is all they are selling.

High-fashion sites sell clothes, and they are all about the brand. However, looking at a range of these sites, you will note that they are all very simple, with just a few design flourishes.

The product does the talking; they don’t need to try and sell you with the site design.

This is a good approach for most business websites.

Consider your audience and make design decisions based on this:

1. Are your branding and design a core influence on their purchase decision?
2. Are they time-poor (need it now) or time-rich (lots of browsing)
3. Is your design appropriate for your audience?
4. Does your design look professional?

Google cares about what you say, not what you look like.

Depending on your service or product, your audience will be heavily influenced by your design or not at all (and anywhere in between these two points).

Professional and Appropriate.

These are the main considerations for your design work – try not to let personal preferences cloud this, and always think from the visitor’s perspective.

If you want a real-life example of this, you can taka a look at my personal website, daveforeman.co,uk – purposefully ‘under designed’ as an experiment: I rank #1 for wordpress freelancer (at the time of writing).

This site has less than 50 pages of content, less than six backlinks and virtually no off-page SEO, so how did I get this to the top of the SERPs?

I did not focus on design; I focused on content.

You may have already made progress toward conversions by ranking #1; don’t lose the visitor by over-designing your site and making me work too hard for the answer that will convert them 100%.

Keeping your WordPress site simple makes everything quicker, easier and cheaper.

Yes, I am going to use the word ‘cheaper’ as it’s true:

1. The less time your team has to faff editing content, the less it costs your business
2. Reduced development time means lower development costs
3. Updates don’t break the site, and less time is invested in fixing technical issues
4. Less expense on off-page SEO as simple (well-written) sites rank higher
5. Reduced PPC spend as your organic rankings bring in the visitors
6. Cost-to-publish rates are reduced, meaning you get more content for less investment
7. And so on…

I have built 100s of websites, but I’ve also worked on 1000s over 25 years and have seen the same thing, time and time again – the more complex the site, the less business it generates. Period.