1. Your Website Has User-Friendly Content
At the end of the day, content is king when it comes to web design. This has and will continue to be true. It’s important that your site conveys the message you intend through both good content writing and design. Additionally, it’s equally important that your site remains updated. A great way to do this is by blogging, creating new landing pages, and updating outdated information.
For instance, if you are a law firm and looking to take in more clients. Your goal should be to create a flow in which the user navigates to the areas of practice and then can fill out a contact form for more information. The path to the goal of your site for your visitors, whether that be lead generation, reading your blog, or purchasing your product, should be streamlined and a key focus in your web design.
2. Mobile Friendly Websites Are Now A Must
In November 2010, over 90% of internet traffic was from desktop. Almost 6 years later November 2016 marked the first time that the majority of internet traffic came from mobile devices coming in at 48.25% – slightly more than desktop coming in at 46.93%. It’s no surprise that this trend continued as mobile searches and smart phones continued to rise and still do to this day. Flash forward to December 2020 and mobile internet has continued to have taken the internet by storm.
Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Platform Comparison Market Share
Without a site that is optimized for mobile viewing, you are risking losing out on potentials hundreds to thousands of customers over time. Responsive web design is something that is often overlooked as when you code a site on your desktop, it may look great there, but you must ensure it does on all devices. Who knows, your potentially top paying client/customer could be using the one device that you haven’t optimized for, so it is crucial that you optimize for as many as possible! This is why with our web design services, we make sure your site look’s great on desktop, tablet, and mobile!
While responsive website design is great, it’s just one of the many things you can do to fully optimize your site for mobile devices. Another big factor is page speed, as this can vary heavily between desktop and mobile devices – but we’ll get into this later!
3. Able to be found by search engines
Search Engine Optimization is anothering aspect of website design that is heavily overlooked and should be considered part of designing a website. After all, what’s the point of having a website for your business if it isn’t easily found by searches? Traffic is vital to the success of your website.
Several things affect your search engine rankings. For example, at a basic level, you should make sure you have images that are served in next gen formats and well optimized, alt text, heading text, meta title and descriptions for each page, and so on. SEO is a long and tedious process if you want to do it right. While most SEO campaigns last months to see improvements, once you reach that goal the results will show.
Additionally, maybe you don’t have the budget to pay month to month for Search Engine Optimization and just want your site to show up in searches like Google. In that case, consider going through and using free SEO tools to see what’s currently wrong with your site, and how that may be fixed. On top of that, a properly formatted sitemap and robots.txt file are of utmost importance in terms of SEO as they tell search engines how to read and crawl your site.
If this is something you’ve thought about for your own existing site, check out our SEO packages – we’d love to help out!
4. Site has a fast page speed
As mentioned above in the mobile friendly section, site speed is another large component of your site that you should take seriously. Studies show that 100ms difference can decrease conversions by up to 7%. That sounds crazy, but it’s true statistically speaking. Wheny you have a similar domain authority and keyword/seo strategy as a competitor, site speed could be the deciding factor.
It’s important to make sure you’re getting an okay site speed in order to prevent customers from growing impatient with your website. There are numerous things that affect site speed ranging from image file sizes, to the structuring and/or amount of things taking place on your website.
5. Never overlook security
Last but not least, security is a big factor in making/having a successful website. There are many things that go into a website’s security including HSTS, HSTS preloading, setting MIME types, contenting sniffing protection, clickjack protection, XSS protection, and hiding server version data. This is also important for credibility because Google Chrome now shows “Not Secure” next to the url when you don’t have a proper SSL certificate active and correctly configured for your website.
5.5 Concluding Thoughts
Well, as you can see, these 5 things all contribute to a successful and well performing website. While these five are important, they don’t encapsulate everything. For more information about optimizing your current website, or creating the first website for your business, contact us and we’d be happy to chat!
