In 2024, 71% of businesses have a website. Just think about that for a moment. That’s defintely the majority of businesses.
But it’s not enough to simply have this digital real estate – your website needs needs to be found when potential customers ‘do the Google’ and then provide them with a good experience that lets them easily buy, book or browse,
Here’s another stat for you:
Customers form an opinion about a website in 0.05 seconds
That means that even if they find you, usually by ‘doing the Google’, they have a teeny-tiny moment on your website before they decide they want to stay and then buy, book or browse.
1. What’s the Website Mission?
OK, That’s not meant to sound like some Star Trek thing, but in the most basic terms, who is your website for, and what is it mean to do? Yes, I’m back at buy, book or browse again. Start by asking these easy questions
- Who is the website for?
- Do you know your ideal customer?
- What will the website do? Sell physical or digital products? Take bookings for services or courses? Provide information? Simply give a way to contact you or request more information?
- Does it reflect your business goals/purpose?
- Does it reflect your brand? Can your customer easily spot that your offline and online match?
2. A Clear and Engaging Design
First impressions count The completely refers back to the stat at the start of this – you have a short amount of time before a customer may jump from your website to a competitor website.
Here are a few questions that you can ask yourself about your website:
- Does your website look appealing and professional?
- Is it on brand? Look at the website’s layout, colour scheme, typography and tone of voice – do they align with your brand identity?
- Are the images right? Are they quality images? Do they enhance the user experience? Are they relevant? Do they ‘talk’ to potential clients?
- Is the customer journey clear? Is it east for customer to find what they need? Are you funneling cutomers in the direction you wan them to go?
I love a stat, so here’s another one for you:
According to research by Stanford University, 75% of users judge a company’s credibility based on its website design.
3. Ease of Use with a Clear CTA
Ease of use ties in very close with having a clear and engaging design and understanding your website mission. Once cusotmers have decided they like the look and feel of the website, now how easy is it to use and find what they want.
Give your customer a very clear call to action and don’t blur it with lots of other CTAs. How many times have you been on a website and it’s just peppered with buttons all asking you to do different things? You’ve either had to work hard to find the right CTA or you’ve just given up and jumped ship *well website).
So, let’s get striaght onto the qiestions to ask yorself:
- User-Friendly Navigation – Are the names/labels clear and in words the customer will use? Don’t overcomplicate it – mega-menus can be more confusing than helpful
- Is it easy to read? Is the content in easy to consume chunks? Is the text contrast good?
- Is it mobile responsive – do it look and work at least as well on smaller screens? In May 2023, mobile devices generated 65.49% of global website traffic. (SimilarWeb, 2023)
- Is the CTA clear the the customers? Are you using simple phrases/words theta the cusotmer understands, e.g. ‘Book Now’ or ‘Purchase’? Does it stand out on the page, like a button?
- Count how many CTAs you have on the page – are they all the same or do they do lots of different thins? Do they need pruning out?
4. Good Quality Content
Content is king. There I’ve said it. But, it needs saying. Good content is needed for both you’re human customer and for SEO. Your content should inform or engage your cusotmers. It needs to be relevant and in words they use and understand. Did you know the second most popular page n a website (after the Homepage) is the About page? People want to know about your business and also what other people think about your buisness., so don’t forget good testimonials. So, look at you content and ask yourself these questions:
- Is it clear about what you do, how you do it, who you do it for/with
- Why they would choose you?
- Is there any fluff? Don’t just pad it out – make sure it’s useful or interesting to customers
- Is it written in words your customer uses and understands?
- Does the content look up to date – Are Blogs or News items dated?
5. SEO
When writing your content, write first for humans, but make it easy for search engines to understand too. Most people think of Google when they hear Serch Engine Optimisation (SEO) but don’t forget other search engine like Bing – where do you think Alexa gets all her information from? Most people think Google, but Bing is there too – Alexa
SEO very often goes hand in hand with accessibility and screen readers will read image titles and ALT tags.
- Are you using the same language as your customers? If they call your product ‘widgets’ then do the same.
- Are you answeting the qauestions that your customer are asking?
- Is your content up to date and regularly updates?
- Is your content structure for search engines, e.g. Are you using headings, page titles, image ALT text and meta data?
- Is your website mobile friendly? Google considers mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor, which can affect the website’s visibility in search results.
Is there anything else my website needs?
Well to be honest, whittling this down to just 5 things is pretty trcky. There are so many other things to consider that makes a great website. If I were to do a top 10, I would add the following:
- Website performance – you need to ensure that your website is loading fast enough. 40% of users will leave a website of it takes more thsn 3 seconds to load.
- Website analytics – it’s really important to check out your traffic and usage stats. You may find people are bouncing straight off your website, so check your website loading speed. Or they may be getting partway through the user journey and dropping out.
- Security – there are some very good free plugins to momitor and keep your website secure. Also making sure that plugins and themes are kept up to date
- Contact information – a very clear way of egtting in touch with you. Having a contact page or a contact form, popping phone numbers and email addresses in the header and footer of your website. Also, not strictly contact info, but get those social media links on there too.
- Email capture – some way to capture email addresss to build your email list. This could be via a newsletter signup, or to signup for a discount or product updates.
I could talk about this all day, so there’s more!
Keen to find out more?
If you want to find out more about the key things that every website needs to work well for your business then I have a free guide that you can download. Pop over to my FREEBIES page and you can download it from there!