The days when having a simple website with only a minimal description of your services are long gone. In today’s digital era, you need to have an awesome website if you want to stay on top of your game. In this article, we give you 11 Essential Elements for a Good Website.
A lousy website can do more harm than good – if customers are unable to find what they’re looking for, contact you, or easily engage with your website, they will leave and go to your competitors.
To help you out, we’ve compiled a list of 11 essential elements that every great business website should have.
Table of Contents
1. Make a Plan
When building a website, it’s important to have a clear goal. What do you want from your website? What kind of design would you prefer? What outcomes do you expect? Once you figure out your goals, you’ll be able to plan a strategy accordingly. Your website name, tagline, title, and niche will depend on your goals.
A well-designed, functional site will allow you to engage and connect with prospective customers, but it will also serve as a great marketing platform.
If you’re not very skilled, consider hiring a professional web designer who will make sure your website meets all the above-listed requirements. To find the best web designer or agency, you need a thorough web design RFP and also read ramotion if it sounds challenging.
2. Clear Architecture and Navigation
If your site is easy to navigate, visitors will be able to find what they’re looking for quickly and easily. Moreover, clear navigation will help search engine bots to crawl and index your pages more efficiently.
3. Create a Great Home Page
When people visit your website, you have 10 seconds to impress them. Research has found that more than 90% of visitors make an immediate decision about your website and your business based on your homepage.
A good homepage should inform visitors what’s on offer and leave no room for guessing. It should contain your logo, tagline, and promo message. Make sure that the first paragraph of your homepage is impressive enough to make the visitor stick around and browse further.
4. Clear CTAs
Once you have visitors that are interested in your product or service, you should make it clear what you want them to do on your site. Your CTAs should clearly indicate what the visitors’ next step should be and turn them into leads or conversions.
A “Request a quote” or “Buy now” button should be visible and stand out from the other elements on the page. In addition, make sure to add your contact information on the top right as well as in the footer, with quick links inserted into valuable pieces of content.
5. Create a Great FAQ Page
A great FAQ page is one of the most important elements of a business site because that’s the place where most customers convert.
This is where your audience will go in order to learn more about your company, products, and services. In fact, for many people, the FAQ page is the second page they visit right after the home page.
For this reason, your FAQ page needs to include high-quality content that will help customers understand your products/services quickly.
Another alternative is to use a FAQ plugin. As people are always busy, they don’t want to go through a number of generic questions and answers or search your website for information.
Using a simple WordPress FAQ plugin that integrates directly into individual pages will help you answer important questions, alleviate visitor’s concerns, and sell your product/service more easily.
6. Optimize for Mobile
Today, more than 60% of visitors prefer to open websites on their phones. That’s why all the leading websites are optimized for mobile and unless you want to fall behind, you need to have a mobile-friendly version of your site too.
The best solution is the responsive design which will make your website look good on any device size. Search engines also favor mobile-friendly websites and rank them higher in search results.
7. Great Visuals
People are visual creatures. We respond much better to visual content (images, videos, illustrations, animations, etc.) than plain text. That’s why your site’s aesthetic is very important.
Apply unique, eye-catching visuals that reflect your brand and attract the visitors’ attention.
8. Produce Awesome Content
They don’t say “Content is King” for nothing. Nothing engages website visitors like high-quality, useful content. Produce original, valuable content that educates visitors about your business and offers solutions to their problems.
9. Devise an Effective Marketing Strategy
Having a website isn’t enough. If you want your business to succeed, you need to go beyond online presence and design an effective marketing strategy.
Some of the most popular marketing techniques that will drive traffic to your website include SEO optimization, PPC, email marketing, social media marketing, etc. Try a few different strategies to see which one works best for you.
10. Monitor Your Site’s Performance
If you want to know whether your site is working properly, you’ll need to monitor its performance regularly. Keep a list of the goals we mentioned at the beginning of this article and check whether you’re moving towards reaching those goals.
Set clear tracking and measuring parameters to help you determine your site’s performance. It’s also helpful if you write down your reviews after every analysis or discuss with professional consultants about strategies that could boost your website’s success.
11. Pay Attention to Your Site’s Speed
No matter how visually attractive your website may look, if it is slow because of dead links and broken images, people will get annoyed and leave. Make sure to conduct a website audit occasionally.
Use tools like Google’s Page Speed Insights to check the page loading speed. Depending on the analysis results, you can consider adding a caching plugin, optimize or compress images, etc.
Final Thoughts
A well-designed, functional site will allow you to engage and connect with prospective customers, but it will also serve as a great marketing platform.
If you’re not very skilled, consider hiring a professional web designer who will make sure your website meets all the above-listed requirements.
We hope these 11 Essential Elements for a Good Website have been helpful, and if you’re looking to increase your web design knowledge and skills then we highly recommend Skillshare.
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