Website Design That Improves UX, SEO, and Rich Results

March 4, 2026

Website design is more than aesthetics — it’s how quickly and reliably your pages deliver value to site visitors and search engines. The biggest downfall business owners make is choosing to keep an old, outdated website and refusing to upgrade. Older websites often are slow loading, offer delayed interactions, and have unstable layouts or aren’t responsive to mobile devices. This seriously hurts your conversions and visibility.

REAL Moxie has been building websites since 2006, so we know a few things about what it takes to keep a website relevant. Over the years, and with every technological advancement, websites have changed. They have had to adjust to keep the interest of the consumer. Your website could be beautiful, but if it is difficult to navigate, or takes forever (more than 3 seconds) to load, you are losing more business than you know. There are actionable improvements to speed up content, reduce interaction delays, stop layout shifts, and strengthen SEO and SERP eligibility.

Measure and Track Before You Make Changes

Before you start making any load-time changes, MEASURE and TRACK. There are plenty of tools to help you assess your website’s speeds (Lighthouse, PageSpeed Insights, Core Web Vitals in Search Console to find slow pages, or our Free SEO Report) and identify slow pages.  Make sure to focus on some of the most common aspects that can slow down the site:

  • Fonts are search engine safe
  • Images are optimized for next-gen formats, use responsive scrcset, and compressed
  • Host servers are preconnected to 3rd party origins, use server-side caching and shrink CSS/JS payloads
  • Protocols (HTTP/2 or HTTP/3) are being used to improve performance, responsiveness, compression, and caching
  • JS tasks are split into smaller chunks
  • Navigation is clear and content pathways do not timeout

Changes That Speed Up How Quickly Content Appears

Now that you have an idea of how the website design, storage, and coding is affecting load times, you can turn your focus to page content and elements. Make sure page elements aren’t jumping around or loading off screen, eliminate Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and images, ads, embeds, and iframes width/height or CSS aspect-ratio is properly set. Additionally, you may need to upgrade your hosting.

You will want reliable hosting, so do your research or ask a skilled website design professional to help you pick a host provider with strong uptime, low TTFB, and good regional presence for your audience. A reputable host provider offers autoscaling and monitoring: For traffic spikes, use autoscaling, health checks, and real-user monitoring (RUM) to detect regional slowdowns. Avoid hosting that overloads servers sharing and is unable to handle geo-routing to reduce latency globally.

Quick Fixes to Increase Website Speed

  1. Clean up crawlability by correcting canonical tags and structured page and content errors
    • Ensure each page has a self-referential canonical. Fix duplicates (URL parameters, session IDs) by canonicalizing to the preferred URL.
    • Use hreflang correctly for multi-language sites and rel=”next/prev” or pagination best practices when needed.
    • Fix 4xx/5xx errors and clean up broken links and long redirect chains for faster crawling and better UX.
  1. Maintain an accurate sitemap
    • Keep sitemap.xml updated – Include only canonical, indexable URLs; exclude no index/redirected pages.
    • Break large sitemaps – If >50k URLs or >50MB, split into multiple sitemaps and provide a sitemap index.
    • Submit and monitor – Submit sitemaps in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools; watch for crawl errors and indexation issues.
    • Prioritize – Use sitemap priority/lastmod appropriately to help search engines find high-value or frequently updated pages.
  1. Use Schema (Product, LocalBusiness, FAQ, HowTo) to increase eligibility for rich results and AI-driven SERP features
    • Choose relevant schema types:
      • Product: price, availability, reviews — essential for ecommerce rich snippets.
      • LocalBusiness: address, openingHours, geo coordinates — crucial for local packs and maps.
      • FAQ & HowTo: question/answer and step markup to appear in expanded SERP features and voice assistants.
    • Use JSON-LD: Implement schema in JSON-LD in the page head or body for easier maintenance and fewer rendering issues.
    • Validate and test: Use Google’s Rich Results Test and the Schema.org validator. Monitor Search Console for structured data reports and warnings.
    • Keep content consistent: Ensure structured data matches visible page content (misleading markup can cause penalties and loss of rich result eligibility).
    • Enhance AI visibility: Well-structured schema increases the chances AI-driven SERP features and snippets will surface your content in knowledge panels and answer boxes.

Quick Wins for Lasting Results

Measurements are the key to improving website load-time and on-going monitoring keeps your website functional at optimal capacity. Having a functional website that generates visibility and sales is possible, when you work with a website design professional who doesn’t just build “cool” “pretty” or “trendy” graphic-heavy websites. Your website development project must include attention to the end user experience and coding that makes it easy for search engines to quickly identify who you are and what you do.

Quick wins: prioritize pages with the biggest impact on traffic and conversions, compress/serve optimized images, fix CLS by reserving space, add canonical tags, and publish an accurate sitemap.  

Long-lasting wins: continuously maintain and monitor your website’s performance.

Start Your Website Improvements With REAL Moxie

For the most comprehensive, real-time measurements on your website’s performance, run a no-obligation FREE SEO Report. The SEO Report lists, in detail and without highly-technical jargon, your current online strengths and weaknesses. Once you have the report, delivered to your email in minutes, fill out our contact form to schedule a FREE 1-hour consultation. We will explain the findings and offer you advice on how to address the items affecting performance. REAL Moxie, LLC is your go-to for website design that gets your business noticed and positioned for success. The information we share with you is yours to do with what you will. . . it is FREE advice.  

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