While “growing the website” may be at the top of your 2025 priority list, turning that goal into real business impact takes more than publishing new content or tweaking your homepage.
While “growing the website” may be at the top of your 2025 priority list, turning that goal into real business impact takes more than publishing new content or tweaking your homepage.
Creating the most value from your website involves understanding and improving three key drivers of website performance:
- Drive traffic: You can’t convert visitors you don’t have. Get more people to your site — ideally, ones who are interested in what you have to sell.
- Increase engagement: Once a prospect arrives, you have seconds to prove your site is worth their time. Keep them exploring, learning, and moving closer to conversion.
- Optimize conversions: Whether it’s booking a demo, starting a trial, or making a purchase, every step to conversion should build confidence and remove friction.
These three elements go hand-in-hand. Lots of traffic without engagement is just a high bounce rate. Great engagement with low conversions is just window shopping. But when all three work together, your website becomes a revenue-driving machine.
The challenge? Knowing which levers to pull first.
We’ve got you covered. At Webflow Conf 2024, Tim Janes and Dan Foster from London-based Webflow design and development agency MakeBuild shared a laundry list of proven tactics across these three pillars of website growth.
Read on for 12 of Tim and Dan’s most tactical tips — or watch their full presentation to see all 20 ideas.
Drive traffic
The first order of business: get in front of prospective customers and compel clicks to your site.
- Publish competitor comparison pages
People looking for solutions often search terms like “Company A vs Company B” or “Company A alternatives”. Publish pages optimized to compare your brand with your competitors’, and you can capture some of that valuable traffic to increase your number of interested visitors.
- Add schema markup to FAQs
FAQs are a great resource for your visitors, and an excellent way to provide search engines with relevant keywords and content. Go one step further by adding structured data, known as schema markup, to your FAQs. This makes it easier for Google to scrape your content, boost your rankings, and potentially populate the FAQ boxes that appear on certain search result pages.
- Create dynamic OpenGraph images
OpenGraph images are the small thumbnails that display when your website content is shared on social platforms like Facebook or within Slack. Drive as much traffic as possible from those shares by optimizing your OpenGraph content and enticing people to click on those links. On Webflow Collection pages, you can define a pattern to dynamically pull in data (like a blog post name, title, or image) into your OpenGraph settings.
- Add location-specific landing pages
When prospects are searching for local results — like “Webflow agencies in London” — you want your website to show up. Score a quick win by duplicating some of your landing pages and updating the content to make them relevant to any locations where you do business. (If you want to go deeper, check out Webflow’s localization features.)
Increase engagement
Once new visitors arrive on your site, you need to capture their attention — getting them to spend more time and visit more pages on your site.
- Quicker page load times
According to Google, bounce rates increase 32% as page load time goes from one second to three seconds. So whatever you can do to improve page load speed is a great way to boost engagement — because if your site is too slow, they’ll be long gone before even seeing any of your content.
- Build an ROI calculator
Useful calculators are engagement catnip. Gather information from your users, crunch the numbers behind the scenes, and spit out a relevant piece of data — like a price or ROI estimate — that they can use to get buy-in for your product or service internally.
- Add an announcement bar
According to Dan and Tim, users typically scan a page from top to bottom. By placing a sticky announcement bar at the very top of your page, you interrupt that flow and grab their attention. Once you have it, direct them to your highest-performing content or most attractive offer.
- Preview content in navigation
When your navigation bar is just a list of links, visitors don’t get a clear picture of what your website has to show them. Use a mega menu that unfolds to include images, text, or both as a preview of what kind of content they’ll encounter by clicking through.
Optimize conversions
Finally, you want to turn your engaged website visitors into leads or customers by optimizing conversions.
Conversions can be form fills, booked appointments, purchases, content downloads, or any other specific action on your website. However you define a conversion, there’s a key principle at play: guide visitors to take that action by removing any obstacle or distraction from their path.
- Capture user intent
Before visitors get to your call-to-action (CTA), consider asking them to choose their most pressing problem or important goal from a small menu or pop-up. This is a great way to instill confidence — if they see themselves in the options presented, you’ve demonstrated an understanding of their problem. According to Dan and Tim, this increases the likelihood they’ll complete the rest of their conversion journey.
- Minimize navigation at key points
When visitors reach the point of conversion, eliminate other paths or distractions on the page. Switch that aforementioned mega menu to minimal navigation to make it as simple as possible for visitors to convert. Many leading retailers, including Amazon, follow this best practice on their checkout pages — and they know a thing or two about conversion rate optimization.
- Simplify your forms
When it comes to forms, less is more. While it’s tempting to try and gather as much detail as possible, optimizing conversions means stripping away unnecessary fields and simplifying styling across your forms.
- Show a product image with your form
When your users are close to conversion, show an image of your product behind or next to your form. Dan and Tim say that this adds context for your users, helps them feel close to a solution for their problem, and reinforces the benefit they’re about to receive — ultimately, boosting conversions.
How to get started with website growth
Now that you have a dozen ideas of how to grow your website, it’s time to prioritize tactics.
“We can’t just throw everything at the wall and see what sticks,” says Dan. “There are three issues: relevance, prioritization, and results. It’s about finding the most relevant ideas, shortlisting them, and measuring them.”
As you evaluate potential improvements, Dan and Tim recommend using the ICE framework:
- Impact: How much could this move the needle for your business?
- Confidence: How sure are you that this will work for your specific audience? What have you done that’s worked before, or not?
- Ease: How quickly can you implement and test this idea?
Start with tactics that score highly across all three areas. These quick wins will help build momentum for your website growth initiatives and secure stakeholder buy-in.
Want to hear all of Dan and Tim’s tactics — and their valuable tips on how to test and measure your results? Check out the full presentation from Webflow Conf 2024.
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