Your membership website is one of the main ways your potential member can find you. But if it’s slow, clunky or otherwise underwhelming, it’s not a great reflection on your organisation. Worse than that, poor sites are increasingly likely to get penalised in Google search results, meaning less traffic, fewer members, poor retention, and decreased revenue opportunities. So, how do you improve your membership site’s performance?
In this article, we give you 8 tips on how to achieve this.
1. Make it easy for people to navigate your website
Users will quickly get frustrated if they can’t get around your site easily. Key pages such as Membership Services, My Account, About Us and Contact should be prominent in the menus. You can help users by using metadata such as tags or categories and providing a clickable breadcrumb trail. If you’ve got a large or complex site, provide a search feature – and remember to upload a sitemap to Google.
2. Focus on site speed
Don’t understate the importance of a fast website. Quicker sites provide a more positive user experience, lowering bounce rates and increasing the likelihood of return visits – or that somebody will sign-up during a single visit. Web hosting speed is vital, but it’s not the only consideration. Remember that some users may be on mobile phones with a weak data signal. Ensure you optimise images and content appropriately. You can check your site using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.
3. Pay attention to your website accessibility
Your membership website should cater for a broad audience, including those with impaired sight, hearing or mobility. Follow good accessibility practice, for example, by prioritising text clarity and enabling keyboard navigation throughout. Ensure your image alt text isn’t just keywords – it should primarily help describe an image to those who rely on screen readers.
4. Optimise the user experience of your membership portal
As a membership organisation, you need to pay attention to the membership features of your site. This is the main way your members will interact with you. Even if the pages are locked behind a log-in, focusing on user experience optimisations in this area of your website will help support members to get the most value from their membership and keep them renewing year after year.
5. Focus on security
Keeping your web software, plugins, and apps up to date doesn’t just ensure fast and reliable performance; it’s vital for security. An insecure and ageing website or lax data control policies and procedures risk the security of your business and your customers. A data breach has massive financial and reputational repercussions – but even simple errors like an expired certificate can knock customer confidence.
6. Create the right content
Your website must have engaging content that describes what you do, who you do it for, and how you do it better than your competitors. Ensure all written content is helpful and that you’ve answered all the questions visitors are likely to have. Check and update your written content regularly and demonstrate your expertise via a blog.
7. Implement an SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) programme
The better your search engine performance, the more traffic you’ll get. You need to target relevant keywords in your site copy, headings, and titles. Add alt text to image files, and make sure that you write custom metadata such as snippets where appropriate. Use tools like Google Search Console to find issues, fix broken links, and improve your website for mobile devices.
8. Ask your members!
Finally, it’s hard to beat a bit of good old customer feedback. Ask visitors and members to rate their experiences – ask what was good or bad, but most importantly, ask how easy it was for them to achieve what they wanted. Ask what they wanted to do but couldn’t. Listen to the answers and implement fixes for common complaints.
In conclusion, there may be many reasons why your membership website may not be delivering the results you want. But if you improve your site content and accessibility, address performance issues, and target problematic areas, your performance should rapidly improve.
Focus on the customer, and audit what does and doesn’t work. Fix what needs fixing and do more of what you’re doing well.
Thanks for reading. We hope these tips can help you!
Get a free membership website Expert Review. Find out how to drive more traffic, acquire more members, improve member retention, and increase revenue opportunities. Find out more.
BrightMinded is a bespoke software development agency. We can help your organisation grow and improve efficiencies by turning your ideas into tailored software solutions.
Leave A Comment