What is website optimization and why is it important?

You’ve spent tons of time building a great website, only to discover that no one clicks on it—and those who do, don’t spend much time there.

Why? It’s likely you haven’t optimized your site to create a first-rate user experience (UX), making it SEO-friendly and accessible, which spurs users to click and convert. 

In this article, we explain the significance of website optimization, which businesses need to optimize their websites, and provide examples of how four companies successfully improved their sites to reach user and business goals.

What is website optimization? 

Website optimization is an experimental, impact-driven strategy that aims to improve your website’s performance, helping users better navigate your site by ensuring they can easily find landing pages, product pages, and other key website elements. This helps you increase customer conversions and retention, drive more traffic to your site, and boost your ROI.

Optimizing your site is a continuous process. 

Whether you're looking to optimize historical content to maintain or improve rankings, or implement loading speed improvements to improve the user experience, you always need to be on your toes.  — Sean Potter, Organic Content and SEO Lead, Contentsquare 

A comprehensive optimization strategy should involve a variety of roles to ensure your website performs seamlessly, including :

• SEO

• Analytics 

• UX and product design

• Backend engineering (web development) 

• Conversion rate optimization (CRO) and landing page optimization

• Copywriting 

Website optimization is often about making small refinements to parts of your website. These changes might seem like minor improvements on their own, but taken together, they have a discernible impact on your site's organic search results and user experience. 

When done right, tiny changes drive huge results.

The best website optimization efforts put your users or potential users at the heart of what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, and end up making a huge difference to the overall product experience. 

Benefits of website optimization

Whether you’re part of a start-up or large organization with a dedicated product team, you’re probably looking for ways to improve UX on your site, increase sales on your ecommerce platform, or get more website traffic. 

Website optimization helps you:

• Increase conversions 

• Enhance brand visibility 

• Increase traffic and revenue 

• Improve the user experience 

• Boost brand reputation

Website optimization is crucial for the success of any online business. Without it, websites won't receive the necessary traffic they need to stand out and remain profitable. In addition to helping a website stay at the top of Google Search Engine results, website optimization also helps online businesses collect concrete data that makes it easier to create strategies that will provide a significant return on investment. — Zoltan Bettenbuk, CTO, Prerender

💡 Pro tip: use Contentsquare tools like Session Replay, which gives you a playback recording of what your users do and where they scroll on your site, to enhance your website optimization process. 

Once you’ve made changes to your website, launch a pop-up survey to ask users directly whether using your site is a smooth experience. It only takes a few moments to launch a survey with Contentsquare: there’s a gallery of more than 40+ survey templates to get you started, and if none seems quite right, there’s also an AI tool that generates questions for you in seconds. 

Your survey responses will offer a direct insight into users’ pain points and areas for improvement on your site—both of which can be used to guide new features or design elements.

What types of businesses benefit from optimizing their websites?

Website optimization is important for any business selling online and anyone building a brand for themselves through their site.  

There are strong benefits to website optimization for many different sectors. Here are some use cases that show the importance of optimizing for different groups:

• Freelancers: in the world of freelancing, the quality of your website often dictates your income. Website optimization is necessary for freelancers who are looking to generate scalable income and reach more clients. If you’re a freelancer, consider starting with search engine optimization (SEO). There are many different aspects of SEO that can be optimized, including meta descriptions, title tags, and header tags. These are all important aspects of website optimization that help you rank higher in SERPs, and organically boost your site’s visibility. 

• Established businesses: an optimized site brings in quality traffic—users who are looking to take action. For established enterprises with different user groups and visitor types, conversion rate optimization (CRO) lets you create targeted, personalized experiences to help users complete their individual goals on your site. 

• Product teams (especially SaaS businesses): optimization is important for product teams that need to know whether their products meet user expectations. With Contentsquare’s product analytics tools, you can build on user insights to identify problems and optimize your site to solve them faster.

• Start-ups: every start-up needs to build an enthusiastic user base quickly, before they reach the end of their runway. By optimizing your website, you’re more likely to reach the right people, saving time when it comes to your marketing efforts. With tools like Heatmaps, Session Replay and Journey Analysis, Contentsquare offers intuitive visualizations of user data that the whole team can understand at a glance. It’s a great option for those who need to digest their user behavior metrics and improve conversion outcomes under time pressure. 

4 business examples of why website optimization is important 

“When a website has been built, it's never finished. You may think you know what works best, but it’s only when a website is online that you can see if this is true,” says Nathan Veenstra, SEO specialist at Optimus Online.

Let's dive into a few examples of companies taking full advantage of continuous website optimization. 

1. Ocado 

Ocado, one of the UK’s leading grocery delivery businesses, is living proof of why website optimization matters. The company ran a sprint they named “Contentsquare month”: a run of weekly challenges to optimize several crucial web pages based on insights from Contentsquare data. 

By using heatmaps to analyze their homepage, they noticed users were struggling to find what they were looking for. They redesigned the page to have more prominent CTAs and fewer distracting images, and delivery bookings increased by 6.3%. 

2. Easyjet Holidays

EasyJet Holidays, a sister company to the renowned European airline EasyJet, shows how website optimization can improve customer satisfaction and business outcomes at the same time. Their team launched a survey to understand users’ feelings toward a new feature: the ability to add holidays to a personal ‘shortlist’. 

The survey revealed that customers enjoyed the feature, but found it too hard to find on mobile. EasyJet Holidays redesigned the page, and feature adoption increased—which resulted in a +7.3% revenue increase for this customer journey. 

3. Harrods

Luxury department store Harrods may be most famous for its lavish London flagship store, but that doesn’t mean its digital presence is any less important. 

The team invests in website optimization to improve their online shopping experience: they use Frustration Scoring to surface issues and then Session Replays to better understand the why behind these errors. The team recently caught a UX issue on their checkout page that was causing customers to bounce—fixing it reduced cart abandonment by 8%. 

4. GoPro 

The iconic personal video camera brand, GoPro is proof that web optimization has a huge positive impact on your bottom line. The GoPro team used insights from Contentsquare’s Journey Analysis capability to redesign the product page of their best-selling camera. 

They also looked at heatmaps to understand which parts of the original page users paid attention to, and which they ignored. The redesigned page gets 80% more conversions than the version it replaced.  

FAQs about website optimization