A complete website optimization roadmap to get users to your page (and keep them there)

You’ve dedicated months, maybe even years, to creating a product or website that exceeds your users’ needs and expectations. But if your audience isn’t finding your website, all that time spent will have been in vain. What's worse is that potential customers might land on your site and leave seconds later because it takes too long to load or the UX design is outdated.

Website optimization is the answer to attracting users to your page and enticing them to stick around—but without a plan of action, it can seem overwhelming. By creating a website optimization roadmap, you’ll streamline the process and get the knowledge you need to optimize your website for users and search engines alike.

Use our practical tips to design an effective website optimization roadmap tailored to your user—and business—needs.

A website optimization roadmap gives you the structure you need to go about improving your website efficiently. With a good roadmap, you get right to the weak points of your site so you can start improving the aspects that need the most attention, without wasting time addressing elements that don’t require immediate improvement. A misdirected approach means lost time, wasted resources, and lower returns.

Website optimization roadmaps give dev, creative, product, and UX teams the structure they need to design an optimization process while leaving room to adapt to new developments.

Follow these 6 proven steps to build a clear roadmap for website optimization so you can draw traffic to your page and give users a valuable experience:

1. Have a clear understanding of your business goals and capabilities

Before you set out to create your website optimization roadmap, you need to know what you want to achieve and be realistic about what your limits are.

First, clearly define your primary business goals and KPIs to measure your progress. 

Some strong KPIs for the website optimization process include

• Number of marketing qualified leads (MQLs)

• Monthly website traffic

• Call to action (CTA) conversion rate

• SERP rankings

• Customer acquisition cost (CAC)

You should also set a realistic budget and take into account the size of your team so you know whether you have the capacity to optimize your website in-house or need to outsource an external agency or freelancer. 

💡 Pro tip: use Contentsquare to set up customizable dashboards, where you can track your metrics and see how they change over time. You can also share these with your team: add users to view your dashboard, or export the data visualizations it creates as images for reports. 

2. Create hypotheses based on your website’s performance  

Once you understand what you want to achieve (and what you reasonably can achieve), it’s time to hypothesize about what may be bringing down your website’s overall performance. There are several questions to ask when optimizing your website.

Consider which are most important: are you not getting enough traffic to your page? Are people visiting your website but not converting? Various factors could be behind these issues, including 

• A lack of a clearly defined target audience/ideal customer profile (ICP)

• Insufficient knowledge of your users 

• Low-quality content

• Misdirected content such as weak CTAs

• Poor SEO strategy like focusing on the wrong keywords

• Website errors and broken links

• Bad UI/UX or website design, which makes it difficult for visitors to navigate your page

Once you’re clear on what could be causing your primary issues, it’s time to utilize strategic tools to test what’s really causing the problem.

3. Use strategic tools to discover the weak aspects of your website 

Now you’ve reached the fun part. Once you’ve brainstormed ideas, use strategic tools to determine what’s going awry when someone visits your page or searches for one of your keywords. 

Here are some tools you can use to pinpoint where you should focus when optimizing your website: 

• Google Search Console to track the performance of your keywords and check for crawling and speed errors

• Semrush to do a site-wide SEO audit

• PageSpeed Insights to test if your website speed is lagging on desktop or mobile

• Screaming Frog to find broken links and analyze page titles and meta descriptions

• WAVE to identify accessibility issues that make your content inaccessible to screen readers

• Contentsquare Voice of Customer tools that ask users directly what they think of your site, including Surveys, Tests, and Interviews 

• Contentsquare Experience Monitoring tools that help you keep an eye on potential usability issues, via Error Analysis, Frustration Score, and Speed Analysis 

• Contentsquare Product Analytics to track essential metrics like bounce rate, revenue, conversions, and session time to understand multi-session user journeys 

• Contentsquare Experience Analytics tools including Journey Analysis, Session Replays, and Heatmaps that help you understand how users move through your digital surfaces  

Contentsquare tools (including Heatmaps) are perfect for collecting digital experience insights to continually optimize your website

Once you’ve used these advanced tools to figure out what’s going wrong with your website, it’s time to take action and fix the major problem areas.

4. Prioritize fixes for user pain points 

Tools can help you identify user pain points and streamline the process of finding solutions to optimize your site.

One of the best ways to address and correct the weak points of your website is with A/B testing: a methodology you use to split your traffic in half, and show one user group a version of your site, and another user group a different version, to test which performs better. Use a tool like AB Tasty or Optimizely to carry out A/B testing. Both integrate with Contentsquare, so you can view heatmaps and session replays of users interacting with both versions of your site, and discover why your results look the way they do.  When it comes to SEO, use tools like Clearscope or Ahrefs to ensure that your content has the right keywords. You should also check whether your site is loading slowly using a tool like Contentsquare’s Speed Analysis. You could also try speeding up your site with NitroPack, which offers caching and image optimization capabilities, as well as a built-in global content delivery network (CDN).  Once you’ve prioritized the optimization actions you need to take and laid them out in your roadmap, you can also go back and manually make small fixes on broken links, errors, and other issues you identified during the previous stage. For example, using Contentsquare tools like Heatmaps, you see that the CTAs on your landing pages aren’t doing their job—now is the time to go back in, make some adjustments, and see how users respond. 

💡 Pro tip: it’s hard to know which user pain points, bugs and UX bloopers to fix first—but Contentsquare’s Frustration Score tool can help. 

It scores your user sessions by signs the user was experiencing friction, considering things like rage clicks, bugs, and repeat attempts to complete forms. Your Frustration Score data can quickly reveal which parts of your site are frustrating your users the most, so you know which places to look at at first. 

5. Collect and implement continual customer feedback

While A/B testing is a great tool, valuable insights from your users are crucial to constantly improving your page (which is what website optimization is all about).  Contentsquare Surveys lets you obtain accurate data from visitors in real time. After all, you’re optimizing your website for your users, so getting their feedback while they’re on it is one of the best ways to discover its weaknesses and strengths. 

Ask users to share their opinions about everything from UX design and content relevancy to page speed and usability across devices. Learning directly from your users about what’s blocking them on your page is the first step to addressing those issues and improving website performance. 

Pauline Pedemanaud, Digital and Content Manager at The City of Paris, underlines the importance of prioritizing user feedback when deciding how to optimize the website:

Contentsquare has changed our way of working by ensuring that we are making decisions based on customer experiences and really focusing on the empathy that we have for the customer with each decision we make, by giving us really robust data behind these decisions. — Pauline Pedemanaud, Digital and Content Manager, The City of Paris 

6. Adapt your roadmap and website as your product and brand evolve

The final step in any website optimization roadmap is to keep optimizing. Your product and brand aren’t stagnant, so your website shouldn’t be either. As you adapt your product strategy to your customer’s desires, be sure that that’s reflected in your website roadmap. 

It’s important to stay up to date on industry trends to keep your website relevant. Let’s say you’re an ecommerce company and sustainability efforts are a huge push in your industry. If your product reflects that, your web content should as well. Produce blog posts about your eco-friendly approach and be sure that the keywords you use are relevant and up-to-date on this topic.

At the end of the day, your product is for your customers and users, and your website should be too. A big part of website optimization is ensuring your digital platform reflects the key values of your product and brand, and helps users meet their needs. 

Combine data with a creative mindset to prepare and plan, but be willing to pivot your approach to be more reactive to opportunities too. — Sean Potter, Organic Content and SEO Lead, Contentsquare 

Start your journey toward an optimized website 

With the right planning, website optimization doesn’t have to be an overwhelming task. Creating a website optimization roadmap ensures you’ve got a strategic framework that allows you to optimize your website continuously and easily. 

Use your website optimization roadmap to keep improving your website, bringing in more traffic to your page and creating loyal, satisfied customers.

FAQs about website optimization roadmaps