Top 3 Tips for a Successful Website
August 27, 2024
A successful website is measured by how effectively it can attract organic users and, in turn, how successful it performs at converting those users. Regardless of whether you’re looking to turn a user into a paying customer, spread your message, or generate quantifiable leads – the baseline of success is always how well you can meet your individual objectives.
Having a beautiful website design or a stellar product/service may not result in having a successful website alone. There are a lot of metrics in play, so we’ve narrowed down the three items we think are the most important to consider when looking to update an existing project or develop a new website.
1. User Experience
When users first visit your website, it’s important that they have an excellent experience navigating each page while being able to easily digest all necessary content to empower them to convert. A good user experience focuses on getting the user to their destination page in as few clicks, and with as little effort, as possible. For example, for an ecommerce website, the destination page will be the checkout page and there is a journey the user must follow before getting to this page. Amazon perfected this user experience by adding the single-press “Buy Now” button on all product pages which creates a shortcut to checkout without any friction at all.
When planning a web development project it is critical to remember that users will also be visiting your website on different devices, from phones to televisions, using different operating systems and versions. It’s important that your website has a consistent experience across all devices.
There are two statistics you can measure to make sure that your website has a great user experience. Most website analytic tools, like Google Analytics (GA4), will show you your website’s ‘bounce rate’ and ‘average time on site’ as important base metrics. Together, these can identify ineffective performance and lead you to where improvements can and should be made. A high bounce rate indicates users are leaving your website quickly, and a lower ‘average time on site’ indicates that users are not able to digest your content and enjoy their experience for any number of reasons, and are therefore less likely to stay through conversion.
2. High-Quality Content
Successful website content should engage your users through both effective placement on the webpage and delivering value to them right away. Strategically placing compelling calls-to-action throughout your website encourages users to take action, like making a purchase (Amazon’s “Buy Now” button) or signing up for your newsletter and becoming a lead.
In addition, content should also be tailored for search engines so that your website ranks well in search results for your business’ focused efforts, ensuring you can be found online. This includes using key terms within your page headings and copy, and providing descriptions to your pages, images and videos.
3. Security and Reliability
Making sure that your website is fast, secure and rarely offline is essential for a successful website. Users are impatient and will not wait for your website to load, so having a fast website is one way to decrease bounce rates and increase time on site. We recommend a load time of 3 seconds or less to ensure minimal friction for all users.
Adding a security certificate (SSL) to your website will also tell your users that your website is safe and encrypted and is even more important when dealing with sensitive information, like credit cards on an eCommerce website.
Even though there is a lot that goes into a successful website, perfecting the user experience, content and security will help push your website to success!