1- Keep the copy straightforward and to the point. You don’t have to use a bunch of flowery words to get people to take notice of your message. Visitors will only spend a few seconds glancing down the page before making the decision to stay or move on. Give them a reason to stay by getting your message across right away.

2- While you’re at it, you might want to improve typography. No matter how nicely worded your message is, nobody’s going to read it if the typography is messed up. On one hand, you don’t want it to look boring, on the other, you don’t want it to look so bright and colourful that it hurts the eyes. It should have good contrast with the other design elements on the page. Typography includes typefaces, spacing, colour, etc.

3- Use impressive imagery, and avoid generic stock photos. Visuals are perceived and opinions are formed over designs within milliseconds. If the images on your site look cheap, that’s what people are going to perceive about your website. Put up high quality images that will impress them. Investing in a quality photo shoot is better than using cheap pictures from stock photo directories.

4- Work on getting navigation right. Your site should be designed to guide visitors from one stage to the next. If it’s a mess, they will get lost, and this will be a disaster. Improve navigation by getting rid of unnecessary and outdated pages. Define the primary navigation links by having the visitor, rather than yourself, in mind. It’s also ideal to put the main navigation at the top of the page, so that users can access it quickly. Add tools such as a search box, profile links, shopping cart, etc.

5- Implement the AIDA model in your website design. This stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. You will first want to grab the visitor’s attention and then make the content as interesting as possible in order to keep them around. Just because they are interested enough to stick around, however, doesn’t mean they are ready to take any actions. This is where the Desire step comes in. Use some type of persuasion technique, such as providing positive reviews, to encourage them to take action. The Action itself could be anything from making a purchase to signing up for a newsletter.

6- Make the little things on your site more inviting. For instance, make sure the input forms are a decent size. If they are too small, mobile users will have a difficult time tapping on them. If they are too big, they will take up too much of a smartphone screen. Also, use fewer form fields. Don’t force the user to provide tons of information just to sign up for a newsletter. You won’t get very many subscribers that way.

7- Optimize your site to make it run as quickly as possible. The faster a website loads, the more likely the visitor will stick around. You can make a site run more quickly and smoothly by using no more than a few graphics and different typefaces and eliminating everything that doesn’t serve a specific purpose.

Now you have an idea of what it takes to run a successful website. Analyze every page and make the necessary tweaks.