10 Web Design Tips For Musicians In 2020

Staying up to date in constantly evolving online world can be challenging as an artist, particularly if you’re a musician first and a web designer second. Here we look at ten important web design tips for artists looking to stay current in 2020.

Guest post by Bobby Owsinski of Music 3.0

If you’re frustrated because everything online keeps changing and evolving, you’re not the only one. Just about the time you think you have your online presence sorted, the platforms change just enough that you have to consider doing some updates in order to keep up. While this happens more in social media, it also happens on to your website as well. That’s why these web design tips for 2020 from my Social Media Promotion For Musicians book can be so essential to making sure that you keep not only your fans happy, but Google too.

1. Secure your site. Unless you site has a lock beside it’s URL and you’re using https://, you’ll find that some people will be wary of going beyond a quick bounce load.

2. Concentrate on speed. Most viewers will give up if they have to wait beyond 3 seconds for a site to load. Each platform is different in what it needs to decrease the load time, but there are numerous plugins available for WordPress sites. A CDN (content delivery network) like Cloudflare can also speed things up quite a bit, especially if your site is graphics and media-heavy.

3. Have a clear page header. The title of the page should tell the reader exactly what the page is about. Any confusion and they’ll move on in no time. Plus, Google will penalize you with a lower search ranking.

4. Ask the visitor to do something. Do you want the visitor to listen to music? Watch a video? Buy some merch? Make sure you ask them in a clear concise way. 90% of the people who read the header also read any call to action that’s in front of them.

5. Make sure you have some text copy on the page. Google can’t read the intent of pictures so it uses the text to determine what the page is about which impacts your search ranking. Visitors need it too to understand more about you. They don’t need much though, as studies have found that users usually only need 14 words to understand what you’re saying.

6. People love reviews. Whether it’s for your music or your merch, happy consumers lead to more happy consumers. Include some reviews if you can.

7. Use the right images. Random graphics may look cool but unless they get across the point of the page then they’re not doing their job. You did make sure that the file size was reduced for faster loading, right?

8. Be careful of video embeds. If you’re using video embeds on your page that’s great, but if they’re being embedded from YouTube then be sure to remove the “related videos” feature at the end. You don’t want to be sending your viewers to someone else’s music.

9. Put your social last. Social link icons are a given for any site, but make sure they’re at the bottom of your page. You don’t want visitors diverting their attention before they see what you’re offering.

10. Be mobile responsive. Make sure you check your site in mobile mode or on your smartphone to make sure that it has acceptable formatting since most of your visitors will be viewing it that way.

There are many more web design tips available if you want to tweak your site to its utmost, but these 10 will make sure that your visitors are getting the experience they expect in 2020.

You can read more from my Social Media Promotion For Musicians book and my other books on the excerpt section of bobbyowsinski.com.