Ensuring that your website is optimized and ready for visitors through website best practices should be a priority for every business. In particular, if you want your website to be ready for ads, it needs to be set up properly in the first place.
There are 10 key elements to get your website ad ready. These elements ensure that your website is in perfect running order before you start hosting ads and working with advertisers. This helpful checklist will let you plan your advertising ready website and prepare for partnerships in the future.
1. Check that Everything is Working Properly
You would be surprised how many sites, even from major brands, have bugs and errors that go unnoticed by the operators. You can hire someone on a platform like fiverr.com who will complete a comprehensive check of your site to see if forms work, links aren’t broken, and that pages load correctly.
2. Accessible Across All Devices
Not everyone checks websites on a computer! You need to make sure your website works on all possible screen sizes and devices. To take it even further, try using different web browsers and operating systems during your check. You’ll be surprised at how much things can change going from Safari to Microsoft Edge.
3. Speed is Critical
Let’s face it, no one wants to wait around for pages to load. If your website isn’t loading pages in under 2-3 seconds, you’re losing out on major traffic. You can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights to measure the load times on your website. If you want to rank high on Google, you should use their tool for measuring speed.
4. Contact Information is on the Header or Footer of Your Website
Don’t make your website visitors struggle to find your contact info. You want anyone who sees your site to easily be able to reach out to your brand. Placing your contact information in the header or footer makes it simple.
5. Clear Call-to-Action (CTA) on Every Page
Every page on your website needs a CTA. It tells people exactly what to do and where to go after scrolling through the page. The CTA should stand out by being in a contrasting color to the rest of the site so that it’s always highlighted.
6. Make Sure Your Content is Clear and Easy to Understand
Not everyone is going to be reading at an expert, collegiate level. Your content should be around the 8th-grade reading level to capture the widest possible audience. You can use AI tools like ChatGPT to rework your content to hit that specific reading level.
7. Make Sure Every Conversion Action You Want to Track Has a Separate “Thank You” Page
If you want to track specific conversions, then you need to follow this website’s best practice. It allows you to track conversions reliably and have a clear statistic for each conversion action, rather than grouping them altogether.
8. Verification Badges
Customers and web visitors want to know their information is safe and secure. Secure payment, BBB, SSL, and other guarantees help to build trust in your brand and boost your conversion rates. You can honestly turn anything into a badge, from free shipping to free returns on your products.
9. Private Policy
No one wants to be on the wrong end of a lawsuit stick. There are many “ambulance-chasing” lawyers who love to file privacy and accessibility suits against small businesses. You can download a free template for a private policy and place that on your website, but make sure to read through it carefully first so you know you are covered.
10. SSL Certificate (Https vs. Http)
In order to be advertisement ready, you need to have a SSL certificate to be a secured page. That means your website will start with https instead of http. No matter what your website is about, you’ve got to have this taken care of.
An advertisement ready website needs to be free of kinks and bugs that might make advertisers second guess a partnership with you. By going through these items and following general website best practices, you can be sure that your site is advertisement ready and set up for success.
