Everybody talks about how to drive traffic to a website but few talk about the elements of a website that help retain the traffic coming in. The way a website is developed determines the user engagement, the traffic level, the ability to be found by the search engines and the conversion rate.
It is not the fancy fonts and the complex design that draws the most visitors; it is the usability, functionality, appearance, and utility a website renders. One needs to devote enough time and thought to make a website successful. We have put together a list of six things that should be kept in mind when developing a website.
- Mobile & Tablet friendly: Research indicates 57% of the web traffic comes from smartphones and tablets. Having a mobile-friendly website is not only important for good user experience but is also for SEO rankings. The information on your website – images, texts, videos, and links – should be perfectly visible when accessed from any mobile phone or tablet. Since these gadgets offer minimum space for your content, one should aim for a simple and specialized mobile design.
- Speed Optimized: Page loading speed is very important as customers can get frustrated if they have to wait for a long time for your website page to load. Kissmetrics studies show that half of the internet users expect a website to load within 2 seconds. When developing your website, there are simple measures you can take in order to optimize your site loading time like choosing a better hosting, using a Content Delivery Network (CDN), reducing plugins and redirects, CMS data optimization or detecting 404 errors.
- Keywords optimized: Keywords are one of the crucial elements of SEO. A website that has optimized keywords is easily found by potential customers when they look for products and services. SEO keywords research should be an ongoing process where the focus should be on expanding and updating the SEO keyword list. Make sure that you don’t target keywords that are way too popular because they will be highly competitive.
- Internal Links on pages: Google crawls your website by following internal links on your website and understands the structure of your website. Internal links also help in ranking content which can make your SEO strategies more effective. Apart from rankings, links allow Google to know which content is more important. For example, the links on the homepage carry the highest value because they have the most backlinks. Therefore adding the right links at the right place is very important.
- Contact information prominently displayed: Displaying contact information on the website creates trust and credibility in the minds of the visitors when they like your products/services and think of buying them. It reassures your availability and accessibility to visitors. Prominently displaying your contact information also increases your conversion rate. Focus on displaying the contact information at a place where visitors can easily find your information. Most commonly it is in the header and footer on your homepage, however, you can also choose to display this information on other highly visited pages on your site.
- Intuitive, user-friendly, simple navigation: A website should never be about you and your business. It should always be about the visitor who seeks your website for information and solutions. Never let the user do the work. Instead, the website should be developed with clear navigations that lead to established product pages. A user-friendly, intuitive and well-designed site effortlessly guides visitors to the solutions you offer to their problems.
Conclusion
A website can be built by keeping plenty of things in mind like color, typography, content, design, however, these 6 building blocks would make your website more robust in terms of performance. Don’t get caught up in the aesthetics, rather focus on performance metrics as well. Keep your website simple and do not add unnecessary elements. Keep yourself updated with the latest technological trends, improve your content by adding keywords that attract more traffic and optimize your website always. Following small things like these would definitely improve your website performance and help you in reaching your goals.
We hope you find this post useful. You can also share your thoughts by posting your comments below. We would love to see how it helped you in particular.
Get in touch with us to learn more about how our website design and development services can help your business.
