A high-quality website is an integral component of a top-notch marketing strategy. Without investing sufficient effort into website design and optimization, it’s impossible to improve your company’s visibility or drive its profitability.
Regardless of the competition in your industry, a website can give you a competitive edge. From structure optimization to mobile capabilities, any aspect of the website creation strategy can make a big difference for the company.
Let’s take a closer look at what qualities your successful website should have.
1. Good Usability
The 21st-century internet user is pressed for time. The attention span is getting shorter by the hour. To be appealing to your target audience, the website should have a stellar UI (user interface).
The interface must be highly intuitive so a consumer who has a couple of minutes to make a buying decision doesn’t lose precious seconds looking for the right button to click.
Remember, the ‘x” button is always in the same place. It’s much easier to press than figure out how to use a website with a complex UI.
Here are the factors that can contribute to the good usability of your website:
- Good color combinations – bright colors are hard to process and can confuse visitors.
- Logical button placement – make sure menu buttons are placed in such a manner that a visitor doesn’t have to look for them.
- Adjust site speed – pages should take under 2.5 seconds to load. Otherwise, the visitor may lose interest quickly.
- Use easy–to-read content – text should be broken up into short sections to simplify reading.
- Implement images – make navigation simpler with well-picked images. However, overdoing them could slow down the loading time so a balance is imperative.
Make sure to optimize your website for the disabled audience and make it easy to use. Otherwise, you could lose a big number of prospects with a high buying potential.
2. Great Performance
Your website must provide top-notch performance so users don’t have a technical reason to leave. You need to understand which aspects of your website contribute to the UX (user experience) and which should be left out.
In 2021, Google is implementing Core Web Vitals into its algorithm to improve the experience of all users. By keeping its parameters in mind you can improve site performance while increasing your chances of ending up on top of the SERPs (search engine result pages).
- Loading performance – the page should take less than 2.5 seconds to load
- Interactivity – the website should be highly responsive to users’ actions. The reaction should take less than 100 milliseconds.
- Visual stability – the browsing of the website shouldn’t be hindered by technical elements. For example, if image loads after the user starts reading the text, it shouldn’t throw them off to the beginning of the page.
Besides getting ready for the Core Web Vitals implementation, you can take advantage of the following strategies.
- Reduce the size of images and videos so pages load quicker.
- Cache webpages to reduce bandwidth and improve site performance.
- Cut the number of HTTP requests
- Review your hosting service and switch to a better one if necessary
Test the loading speed of your website all the time to make sure it doesn’t slow down as you add text and other elements. This major factor contributes to a stellar user experience.
3. Search Engine Optimization
The key goals of a high-quality site are to generate leads and convert website visitors. Optimizing your web pages for SEO can achieve the first part and help with the second. Here are the key characteristics to consider when optimizing your site for SEO:
- Implement focus keywords into content, be it a blog post, an article, or a landing page. Consider using keywords in the domain name.
- Make sure the information you share is always valuable. Avoid keyword stuffing.
- Make sure the website landscape is easy to browse to avoid increasing the bounce rate.
- Beef up the web content to keep visitors on your site longer while making it appealing to Google.
- Generate the XML site map and Schema markup to make it easier for search engine crawlers to index your website.
- Check your site for duplicate content so Google doesn’t flag it as untrustworthy.
- Implement a strong link building policy for both internal links and backlinks
- Always use a secure HTTP. Google and other search engines are more likely to recommend secure sites to web visitors.
- Use well-structured data on your website to simplify search engine navigation.
Top-notch SEO is integral to the success of your business. The rest of your marketing tactics may provide excellent results. However, without a good website, you may not achieve your main business goals. The best way can be to hire a professional SEO agency.
4. Security
Today, more and more site visitors understand the importance of cybersecurity. People are likely to avoid sites that lack secure protocols.
Meanwhile, an unsecured website may hurt your company and make it easy for hackers to steal personal information. To make sure your website is secure, consider implementing the following tactics.
- Install an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate.
- Use anti-malware programs to scan for cyberattacks.
- Keep your website updated.
- Set-up a high-quality backup system.
- Use secure business hosting.
- Always use strong passwords and change them regularly.
- Use free VPN for mobile phones and computers
Overall, maintaining effective website security doesn’t take up too much time. However, without this important factor, key information may be lost. This, in turn, may hurt your reputation and scare away the target audience.
5. Mobile Optimization
An effective website is always optimized for mobile phones and other devices. Today, more than half of internet users browse websites on mobile gadgets. People are unlikely to stay on the website if it’s not designed for mobile browsing no matter how good the content is.
You want to make sure that the web design and structure of your site supports mobile experience. When collaborating with web development specialists, you need to stress the importance of mobile optimization. It’s one of those things people aren’t likely to overlook.
- Make sure your web design is done with mobile website visitors in mind
- Adjust content and images to fit the smaller mobile screen.
- Prioritize text over images and other design elements.
- Resize your images to improve loading time.
- Always test you’re the mobile version of your website to check if it works properly.
- Make your website easy to use for users on the go.
Proper mobile optimization is the key to creating an effective website. It can increase customer traffic while improving rankings. By making sure that your website is optimized for mobile users and implementing a user-friendly graphic design, you can improve your conversion rates.
6. Quality Content
A good website needs to have stellar and SEO-friendly content. While site visitors may not pay attention to little things, search engines do. Meanwhile, high-quality content is imperative for lead generation and conversion tactics.
The top characteristics of high-quality content are:
- Value
- Brevity
- Information
- Entertainment
If you find a way to pack these four things into one, you can create stellar content. Whether you are writing an article, social media post, or a blog, it’s imperative to stick to the following strategies:
- Make sure each sentence carries useful information.
- Add something valuable to each sentence to make it useful to the reader.
- Break text down into smaller sections so it’s easy to skim through.
- Keep the needs of your customers in mind when choosing content topics.
- For social media updates and posts, stick to a low character count.
- Pay special attention to the number of headings.
- Consider implementing topic clusters to make your content more structured.
- Add images and videos to the text (blog, articles, contact form) to make it more appealing to site visitors and increase traffic.
You want to make sure the content you share on your website is unique and free of keyword stuffing. Otherwise, even the best website design and technical SEO tactics won’t help you achieve your sales and marketing goals.
7. Excellent Website Design
High-quality website design makes your website appealing to the audience and contributes to higher rankings on Google. Good website design doesn’t just make the pages look stellar, it simplifies navigation and increases brand awareness.
Consider the following site design practices:
- Use consistent brand colors throughout the website.
- Cut the number of clicking choices you give website users
- Leave sufficient white space between elements on web pages.
- Don’t fill your pages with too much text.
- Try to use videos and images wherever possible.
- Make sure the CTA is easy to see (try to limit one per page).
- Make SEO a priority.
- Keep navigation simple.
- Run split tests to see which design choices work best.
Ideally, you should consider working with an experienced web designer. When creating a website from scratch, it’s always easy to miss something important.
The Takeaway
By exploring the qualities of highly efficient websites and implementing the above practices, you can achieve excellent results. A good site should provide value to the visitor while being optimized for Google search.
It may take some time to set up an efficient website. However, once you do, it can start showing results almost immediately.