7 website optimization techniques you need to be using

Your website is your most powerful conversion tool. But if it isn’t optimized correctly, you may be pouring hundreds, perhaps thousands, of dollars into maintaining it each year with very little ROI.  The right website optimization strategies help you transform your website into a conversion powerhouse that brings in leads, entices them to explore your site, and eventually convinces them to become loyal, paying customers.

7 valuable optimization techniques for creating a high-performing website

Website optimization is the process of maximizing general website performance. This includes processes like fixing bugs and page load time, improving SEO, optimizing usability across devices, and user experience analysis. It’s the key to creating the best possible user experience for your page visitors.

The benefits of website optimization include increased traffic, longer user sessions, higher conversion rates, and more revenue, making optimization a win for both your business and your users.

Let's take a look at seven strategies that will help bring in new visitors and improve the user experience on your site. 

1. Understand what drives your users

Having a deep understanding of your users and product is crucial to website optimization. This means knowing exactly what your users are trying to do on your site, so you can make it as easy and friction-free as possible for them to do it. 

To develop this comprehensive understanding of user needs and preferences, you need data—not assumptions. Use an experience intelligence platform (like Contentsquare 👋) to get a first-hand look at how people behave on your site and let you tap into what’s motivating them.

• Surveys: ask the right questions at the right time, on-site or in your users’ inbox, gathering actionable data about key topics like your website experience or why they’re leaving

• Interviews: connect with members of your target audience or ideal customer profile (ICP) to conduct detailed research about their goals, needs, and preferences

• Session Replays: playbacks of individual (anonymized) users navigating your website. Use recordings to follow your users’ journey from beginning to end and identify what they’re looking for so you can help them complete their goals.

• Heatmaps: color-coded visualizations of where users click, scroll, and move on your page. This quickly reveals what captures people’s attention, what frustrates them, and what they miss, helping you connect the dots between their intent and your site.

Use the insights from these tools to discover more about your users and optimize your website accordingly. For example, you might restructure your page to put key content above the fold, change up your website design to make it easier to navigate, or add more information based on what matters to your ICP.

2. Optimize content for readers (and search engines)

Despite the name, search engine optimization (SEO) isn’t just for search engines. While on-page SEO is important for SERP rankings and organic search, it’s arguably just as important for creating a good user experience. 

That’s because making your content easy for search engines to read also makes it easy for people to read. Use these tips to ensure your SEO writing is on point:

• Break up long chunks of text to make content more readable using tables, headers, bullet points (like these ones 😉), and images

• Include plenty of headings and subheadings to create scannable content

• Employ a well-planned keyword strategy so you know you’re creating content that your users actually want to read (and can be easily found on SERPs)

Remember: your priority should always be to create high-quality content. People are not machines, and they want to get real, actionable value out of what they’re reading. Users can spot keyword-stuffed, low-value content that’s purely produced for SEO purposes—and it pushes them away. On the other hand, content quality and relevance are used as key ranking factors. 

3. Establish content authority

In digital marketing, ‘content authority’ refers to how trusted and valued your content is. By establishing content authority, you position your website as a leader in your industry. 

One of the best ways to establish content authority is with pillar pages and topic clusters. 

• A pillar page is a piece of website content that explores a specific topic closely related to your product or service in depth. So if you’re an ecommerce company whose primary product is running shoes, you should have a pillar page about running shoes. 

• Topic cluster pages link to each other and back to the pillar page, and they tend to focus on a more detailed, usually long-tail keyword (search phrases with longer word counts) directly related to your pillar page. Topic cluster pages for the running shoes website could include 'best cushioned running shoes', 'best daily trainer running shoes', 'best beginner running shoes', 'best running shoes for long distances', and so on. 

Your website can (and should) have multiple pillar pages and topic clusters. You can even repurpose old content to create this topical organization.

4. Perfect your site’s technical SEO

While improving technical SEO may seem like less of a user-focused task, three Core Web Vitals play a crucial role in the user experience: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), i.e. loading speed; First Input Delay (FID), i.e. responsiveness; and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), i.e. visual stability.  Tim Parker, Director of Marketing at IT services and consulting firm Syntax Integration, highlights that “technical SEO makes it easier for search engines to find your content,” which in turn makes it easier for users to find your content.  

He recommends the following actions to improve a website’s technical SEO: 

• Improve site structure: the format of your URLs should be consistent for you to properly map your web pages. Create an XML sitemap to make it easier for search engines to index your website.

• Optimize crawling and indexing: be sure to submit your website to search engines so bots can crawl it more quickly and accurately

• Find and fix broken links and duplicate content: prevent search engines from indexing pages that have broken links and duplicate material, which can actually hurt your SERP rankings

• Use mobile-friendly design: poor mobile usability and performance can negatively affect your SEO efforts, so ensure your site is optimized for both desktop and mobile users

• Optimize your page speed: reduce image sizes with image compression or image optimization tools, use a browser cache, and remove large page elements to ensure your pages load quickly

🧰 Pro tip: use Contentsquare’s Speed Analysis tool to measure how quickly your site responds to users in different geographies. If you’re unsatisfied with the result, some best practices to optimize your site speed include 

• ‘Minifying’ your code by removing unnecessary characters from your JavaScript source code

• Enabling gzip compression to reduce the file size of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files

• Using content delivery networks (CDNs) to reduce latency

• Using tools like TinyPNG to compress images

If you’d prefer custom recommendations, Contentsquare’s Speed Analysis tool will provide them based on your website in particular.

5. Improve UX to boost conversions

Great UX design helps people reach their goals and find exactly what they’re looking for. Bad UX design causes unnecessary friction—and leads to lost revenue and missed sales opportunities. 

So it’s no surprise that there’s a major overlap between UX design and conversion rate optimization (CRO). CRO uncovers what inspires your users and what stops them from taking action. This gives you the data you need to streamline your website so it meets their needs at every stage and guides them through your funnel until they’re ready to convert.

Here are four ways you can improve UX (and conversions) with Contentsquare:

• Use Journey Analysis—a tool that turns your customer journey data into an intuitive visualization—to understand how users progress through your conversion flow, and spot any blockers affecting conversion rates. For example, if you notice that users drop off at a certain point, maybe they don’t have all the information they need to make a decision—try adding more content and see if that helps. 

• Use Heatmaps to understand how users engage with your value proposition and CTAs. Monitor their engagement with these key CRO elements—for example, by checking which CTA buttons get the most clicks or which headers they don’t even scroll to—to understand which parts of your website are (and aren’t) resonating with users. 

• Filter session replays by Frustration Score to identify UX hiccups that are derailing your users’ buying journeys. Frustration Score, judged by factors like rage clicks, slow load time and error occurrence, measures the extent a user seems to have had a negative experience on your site. 

• Use Error Analysis to understand the UX impact of bugs, and prioritize which ones to fix first. This tool collects data on JavaScript, API, and custom errors, and logs how often they occur as well as how much they’re affecting your conversion rates.  

  

  Contentsquare’s unique UX analytics are invaluable for drilling into page-specific behaviors and allowing us to surface actionable insights. We can understand how particular UX behaviors and blockers are impacting consumers on our site and pick the tests that are going to do the most good.

  — Craig Harris, Head of Performance Analytics, Clarks

6. Listen to your website visitors

Aside from watching your users, you should also be listening to them! Hearing directly from your users helps you understand their problems, preferences, and pain points, so you can optimize your website with their needs in mind.

Get direct user input by using a combination of surveys and user interviews:

• Contentsquare Surveys lets you ask users targeted questions—like “What can we improve?”—that help you meet specific research goals. Create your survey from scratch, use one of our 40+ customizable templates, or let AI generate a custom survey for you. You can embed it on your site or send it later via email. 

• Contentsquare Interviews lets you invite existing users (or people who fit your ideal customer persona from our pool of 200,000+ diverse candidates) into a recorded conversation, so you can ask about their experience of your site, face-to-face. It’s simple to draw insights from your interview: AI will transcribe it for you, and you’ll be able to create highlight clips of the most insightful moments. 

7. Constantly analyze the user experience

UX research is an ongoing process, so even when you think your website is fully optimized, keep digging deeper to see where you can improve. 

To help with this, Contentsquare allows users to create an unlimited number of sharable custom dashboards. These let you monitor key web performance and user experience metrics to quickly spot user issues you might otherwise miss. Use dashboards to

• Stay on top of the data that matters to you, like page issues and feedback, so you can quickly take action

• Track trends as they emerge to get—and stay—ahead of user needs

• Share at-a-glance insights with team members and stakeholders to prioritize next steps and get buy-in for projects

You can even subscribe to a dashboard and receive daily, weekly, or monthly updates on the metrics it records via email. 

💡 Pro tip: you can spend months analyzing user behavior on your website, but that’s no good if you don’t take action! Use A/B testing to find out what works and remember it’s a process of trial and error. We recommend using a tool like AB Tasty or Optimizely to test out different scenarios on your website and discover what resonates with your visitors. You can even combine Contentsquare tools with your A/B testing platform of choice to get deeper insights. Explore heatmaps, watch session replays, and collect survey responses to understand not just which variant of your A/B test won, but why.

7 factors that might be tanking your website performance optimization efforts

Having a website that’s easy to find and enjoyable to navigate depends on a number of components. The following are some weak points that may be preventing you from having an optimized website. 

1. Poor website speed and slow-loading pages

Slow websites drag down your conversion rates. If your website takes too long to load, chances are your users aren’t waiting around—leading to a higher bounce rate, lower revenue, and frustrated potential customers. According to Portent, a B2B site that loads in one second has a conversion rate 3x higher than a site that loads in five seconds, and 5x higher than one that loads in 10 seconds. 

2. Bugs and broken links

Are bugs inhibiting visitors’ ability to move around your pages? Do broken links hold them back from browsing other pages on your site? These are simple fixes that can quickly improve UX and website performance. 

3. Poor SEO

If your content isn’t properly optimized for search engines, then it’s probably not showing up in the search queries made by your potential users. Your website should be optimized for SERPs (that includes keyword selection as well as off-page and technical SEO) so your target audience finds you as soon as they search for the type of product or service you offer. 

4. Low-quality content

Is your content and copy hard to understand? Are users missing out on a prominent product feature? Does your content match your users’ intent? Misguided, outdated content is a huge detriment to user experience, and improving your content is one of the best things you can do for your visitors.

5. Bad UX design

Your website’s UX design can make or break your users’ desire to keep browsing and eventually convert. Your website should always be designed primarily with your user in mind, meaning that a visitor’s experience should be enjoyable, valuable, relevant, and intuitive.

6. Lack of usability across multiple devices

Usability across devices becomes more important every year, and in 2024, 59.5% of all website visits came from mobile devices. So if your website isn’t optimized for smartphones, you’re missing out on the potential to improve the experience for a significant number of mobile users.

7. Limited user knowledge

You can’t optimize your website if you don’t understand who your users are. Running regular user tests and collecting regular insights (via interviews and surveys) is one of the most important—and underrated—website optimization techniques.

Use website optimization techniques that work 

For any website, from B2C ecommerce sites to B2B software solutions and everything in between, optimization should be a part of your regular site maintenance routine. Once you make website optimization a priority, you’ll start seeing benefits like improved customer satisfaction, higher SERP rankings, extended time-on-page, and increased conversions. 

Most importantly, an optimized website means happy users who can find your product or service and discover how it can improve their lives. Implement these website optimization techniques to start making your website work for you—and your users.

FAQs about website optimization techniques