Before You Start Growth Hacking…Fix the Plumbing!

Before you start growth hacking, there are a number of basic requirements that your business website has to meet.

Do you want to start growth hacking? You can’t wait to carry out experiments and to perform your first A/B test? Wait a minute. There are some things you have to check first.  Your website is the foundation of all your digital activities, and it should meet a series of requirements. “Fix the plumbing!”, as we say at RevelX.

Of course, you want your website to suffer as little as possible from downtime. So you need the best web hosting service.

Did you make the right choice, or do you have to migrate your site? A practical way to determine this is to identify which hosting providers have been chosen by the major players in your market. This is possible via sites like WhoIsHostingThis?.

To be absolutely sure, check these competitors’ websites for downtime. That is possible through a site like UptimeRobot.

Also, remember that the location of the hosting provider may have legal implications. Notwithstanding this location, the GDPR will always apply to you if you are active in one or more EU countries.

Finally, do not choose free hosting because that makes your website look like a hobby project.

Choose the URL for your website wisely. This “address” on the Internet has to match as closely as possible the subjects your customers are looking for.

Depending on your industry and/or company, you can claim a general product, one of your brands, or the name of your company as the main component of your URL. If you are a baker, www.bread.com would be a terrific URL, but sadly Innovative Bakery Resources has already claimed it.

Your customer has to be able to find your site, that is the whole point of it. Search engines like Google will be the main point of entrance. Search engine optimization (SEO) helps your website to get a higher position in their listings. If you haven’t done this already, it is not a bad idea to hire a separate employee for SEO tasks.

As an aside, many of the other requirements in this list are closely related to SEO.

You do not want customers to abandon your site frustrated—without making a transaction or requesting a quote. So, find out if your company website meets the up-to-date requirements for speed. This factor is also important in connection with SEO because Mr. Google doesn’t like slow sites.

Approximately half of all traffic on websites is generated by mobile devices. Because of this, it is important that the mobile experience of a site is excellent.

You don’t want high, mobile bounce-rates because the page is badly displayed on smartphones. For example, pages that are rendered with miniature fonts are a conversion disaster!

And again, this factor also plays a role in SEO.

Now it becomes a little bit complex. Make sure your website uses HTTPS. This extension of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol secures communication with your customers. HTTPS contributes to a better position in the search results too.

Too technical for you? Just ask the SEO specialist you just hired.

The copy on your site should be easy to understand for your target audience. The Yoast plug-in can help you with writing easily understandable texts for a general audience. There are also tools such as Readable.io that indicate the reading level of your text so that you can fine-tune your copy for different audiences.

I recommend that you follow the latest version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. These help ensure that your site is also accessible to the blind and visually impaired.

And now…you are almost ready! But before you can growth hack the ^&8# of your business, be sure all your data are being measured and analyzed. These are the tools I recommend:

• Site analytics: Google Analytics
• Interaction: Usabilla
• User feedback: Hotjar
• Advertisements: DoubleClick

At RevelX, we develop and implement winning, growth hacking strategies which are insightful, innovative, and practical. Do you want to grow your business? Let’s talk!