22 years of brutally honest website advice in 15 minutes

If I could give you just one single piece of website advice after 22 years of designing and building and fixing them, it's this. Don't do it. Just quit. Delete your website. No, it's not that.

It's that most websites don't actually have a design problem. They have a clarity problem. Because clarity is money and confusion is expensive. When your website is unclear, you don't just lose a few clicks. You lose the right customers and you attract time wasters.

And time wasters leads to getting ghosted by potential clients because they're time wasters. And before you know it, you're on the bread line. You've lost your business. You're living in a cardboard box and nuclear war has begun or something like that. So give me the next 15 minutes and I'm going to give you six brutally honest rules I've learned the hard way.

Rules that will make your site convert better without you needing to redesign the whole damn thing. And yes, I do have a black eye. Somebody didn't like what I said about Web Flow. And if you're sat there thinking, who is this knobheaded and why should I listen to him? It's a fair comment.

I've been doing websites for over 22 years now across pretty much every industry you can think of, and I've seen pretty much every flavor of mistake along the way. The funny part about it is that the stuff that moves the needle on a website is rarely the fancy stuff like a nice design or a pretty animation. It's actually the boring fundamentals. And unfortunately, that's what this video is going to be about. All right, let's get to rule one.

Your homepage has just one job. It's to confirm people are in the right place. And the way to do that really is with an excellent headline or something like that. But most website homepages open up with something like this. Welcome to my website.

We're passionate about excellence. And actually, I spoke about the dangers of that in another video I did recently. Here's the brutal truth about it, though. Nobody comes to your website to read your life story. Nobody's there to read the marathons that your staffers ran or the dog that outranks your team or how many awards you've won.

Nobody cares about any of that. People are coming to your website asking, "Is this for me? Do you solve my problem? How do we get started? and where do I click next?

So on your website homepage, you need at least those four things. Who is this for? What do you do? What outcome does my customer get? And what is the next clear step they take when they land on the homepage?

A good headline is the start of that. And a good headline is not clever. It's not witty. It's not about the best iPhone since iPhone. I mean, what does that even mean?

Obviously, the iPhone is the best iPhone since the iPhone because it's an iPhone. Think of a good headline like basically a road sign. It points you somewhere clearly and quickly. A good example is the one that's at the top of our website. Sick of wasting your ad spend?

Our websites fix that. It immediately tells you what to expect if you're coming to get a website with us. Or what about this one? Accounting for UK freelancers. We handle your tax.

so you can just get on with your business. Those headlines tell you instantly what to expect. Remember, if your headline could be copy and pasted onto your competitor's website and it still makes sense, it's not really all that effective. And I know it's it's pretty difficult to write a unique headline these days, but it's important to get across your personality and your unique way of doing business as quickly as possible on your homepage. And then directly under the headline, you need to tell me what to do next.

And no, it shouldn't say learn more. What am I learning about? What are we learning about? Is this a classroom? Well, we're learning something right now in this video, but on your website, you're not really learning anything.

It's a website to provide information. A good example of this could be say see pricing or book a call or get a quote instead of saying learn more. Please, please, please don't say learn more. So, rule number one is your homepage should say exactly what you do in your own unique way. If you fix nothing else from this video, fix that first 5 seconds of somebody landing on your website.

And then you need to fix what's on the rest of the web pages. And we're going to talk about that right now in, you know, in a second or two after this second. Maybe after this second. Most websites are trying to do 10 jobs at once like an octopus or something. Actually, no, that doesn't work because octopuses have got eight legs.

Most websites try and do too many things on every web page. They're trying to educate, convince, impress, rank on Google, show personality, build trust, show process, answer questions, as well as trying to make you buy something at the end of all that. Oh, and yeah, they need to show off the dog. Make sure you show off the dog on your website. And they're trying to do that all on one page on the website, often the homepage.

And the result of that is that the page kind of feels like a bin or trash if you're American. It's full of a jumble of rubbish that doesn't really make any sense at all. Here's the brutal truth about that. Most web pages are trying to do too much at once. I see this all the time on pretty much every website that I look at.

Rule number two is one page should do one job. Your homepage should be am I in the right place? Your services pages should be conversion. Your out page should be about building trust. Your case studies should be about social proof.

And the contact page is a nice clear clean next step of what happens next. If your own page is 47 sections long and you didn't make it thorough enough, all you've done is make it too hard to understand and no one's going to read it anyway because nobody reads websites. They scam them. Steve Krug said this best with the title of his bloody brilliant book and it's called Don't Make Me Think. Confusion really is the number one killer to a conversion on a website.

It's not your colors or your logo or whether your site feels premium or looks good. It's confusion. So, make sure you pick a job for each page and then delete everything else on that page that doesn't help that one job. One page, one job. Next, let's talk about the navigation, the menu on your website.

If your navigation says something like solutions or offerings or capabilities, I'm already annoyed as and I'm going to click off your website. Honestly, those words mean nothing. Those words are business gobbledd nonsense speak. And they're not customer speak. You're not talking to your actual customer.

The brutal truth of that is that most navigations or menus on websites, they're just I mean there's no other way I can put it to be honest. They're just they just are. Yeah, they're over complicated. They're full of long words. There's too many items.

They're confusing. Nobody understands them. They're just confusing B. Instead of saying solutions, say what we do. Instead of saying something like budget or investment, just say pricing.

And that's if you're brave enough to put your pricing on your website, which by the way, you should be. Instead of saying location, say how to find us. These are simple rules to follow. Make your navigation very clear. Here's rule number three.

Keep your navigation four to six items long. And then also keep them very, very simple. Remember, some people are going to come to your site and they're going to be using screen readers and the website is going to be getting read out to them by a device. And if it's complicated with like weird nav items, it's even harder for them to read it. And if you have 12 links in your top menu, what you're really saying to a potential customer is, "Well, I couldn't really decide what goes on the website.

I couldn't be asked, so I threw it all at you, and now it's your problem." Most websites are full of absolutely ridiculous claims. I mean, it's it's a disease. Really, it is. I discussed this at length in the roasting video I did the other day. They say things like highquality, trusted, premium, resultsdriven, innovative.

I mean, what do they even mean? Honestly, what do they mean? That's not copy or words. It's wallpaper. In fact, no, it's not wallpaper.

It's a different kind of paper. It's toilet paper because it's The web is basically a liar factory. Everybody claims that they're the best. Nobody believes it. And that's the way that the web is.

The brutal truth of it is that if you don't have proof of saying something on your website, you shouldn't be saying it at all. Otherwise, you're lying. And we shouldn't be lying to our customers. You need proof to say things like numbers to prove that you did it, before and after photos, real screenshots, specific testimonials, case studies, clear examples of work, logos of the clients you've worked with, but only if they're real. Don't be that wank that puts fake logos on your website like the BBC.

Please don't be that wanker. And if you are going to use testimonials, they need to be specific, not great service, highly recommend. And they don't want to be overly long either, and they want to be video if possible. A good testimonial basically just says what the problem was, how it got fixed, what result it got, and why you were different, and how you approached it. It doesn't need to be war and peace.

Rule number four is proof always beats promises every single time. If you have no proof of the thing that you want to say, go get proof. Build one case study. Show one before and after. Put one real result on your website.

Any of that is worth way more than rewriting your entire website to put more nonsense words in there like, I don't know, leading agency or awardwinning or working nationally. What does that even mean? Okay, let's next talk about website performance. I know I'm sorry you're going to turn the video off in a second because it's boring as but we'll work through this together. Let me just get a drink.

Let's do it. It loads eventually. It's fine on my phone. No, it's not fine. Your website is pretty much just sh money.

It's leaking pissing money out. Any other way I can say that? So, it's even more emotive. No. If your website is taking ages to load, visitors don't just go, "Oh, they well, they probably just used a large image." They go, "This feels dodgy." And then they leave.

And then they never come back to your website. That's it. you've lost the sale. The brutal truth is if your site takes 5 seconds to load, you've lost the sale and the person never comes back to your website. We've got no attention span anymore.

We've got no time. And there's many other websites out there. Google has billions of them. If your website is slow, here's a few quick nonsexy fixes. First of all, you need to go to page speed insights and run your website through it.

It'll give you a score out of 100. And your website needs to be in the 80s or 90s on mobile and desktop. Next, you need to compress your images. You can use a tool like Tiny Ping or something. You need to make sure you're not using five or 10 different fonts on your website cuz that slows it down.

You need to remove heavy animations. Cut down on plugins, especially if you're using WordPress. And stop autoplaying massive videos on your website unless you feel like you want to. and then make sure that they stream instead of downloading. Your site's not mobile friendly just because it technically fits on a screen.

That's every website these days. They're all responsive because if your buttons are tiny and your text is cramped and your pop-ups are aggressive and your menu is chaos, people just click off your website. Rule number five is a slow website will lose you sales every single time. Speed the damn thing up and make sure you're not losing out on them. Most call to actions on websites are pretty damn vague.

It'll say something like contact, get in touch, submit. They're not next steps. They're like just a weird tentative suggestion. Oh, will you please look at this on my website? People don't click vague suggestions.

They click on decisions. The brutal truth of this is that your website should sell and repel at the same time. It should attract the right people and scare off the wrong people as quickly as possible so you don't have to deal with them. And that ain't being rude. It's about turning your website into a sales tool.

And that's what your website should be, bringing in sales. Otherwise, you may as well delete it and there's no point in it being there. There's two main ways we're going to sell and repel. Number one is give one clear action on your website. It can be something like book a 15-minute call, request a quote, see pricing, get a website audit.

Those are very specific actions that we want people to take. Now, we want to repel people. If you work best with certain types of clients, say it on your website. If you have minimum budgets, say it on your website. If you only serve the UK or other regions, say it on your website.

Because otherwise you're going to get inquiries from people who you can't help, who don't live in your area, who don't have the money to work with you. And then you're going to have to waste of time telling them, "No, sorry, I can't work with you. No, you haven't got the budget. No, you're not the right kind of client for me." So, rule six is your website should sell and repel. To remind you of the six rules I went through in this video, number one, your homepage should say exactly what you do.

Number two, one page should do one job. Number three, keep your navigation to four to six items. Number four, proof always beats promises. Number five, if your site takes 5 seconds to load, you've already lost the sale. And number six, your website should sell and repel.

If you want to take these away and do this today, right now, you want to rewrite the headline on your homepage so it says who, what, and the outcome you want somebody to achieve. You want to replace learn more with one clear action. You want to cut your navigation down to four to six items. You need to add one piece of proof to your website that actually says what you do and that's actually going to back up the statements that you're making. Check your website on mobile and page speed insights and delete anything that's annoying on it.

And then finally, I think it's probably one of the most important ones. Make sure your call to action is a decision and not just a suggestion of an action. If you go away and do all of those things today, your website will convert better. even if it's not perfect. And if after watching all of this video, you still don't think your website is important, you should remember these five reasons your business still needs a website today.

I'll leave my finger there so you can go click on it.