Web Dev 101: 5 Characteristics of a Good Website.
I know that defining your business website structure can be overwhelming. Choosing the colors and where to place things can be hard if you don’t have a clear idea of where you’re going. But don’t worry, because today you’ll find out the 5 characteristics of a good website.
Your website is like the front door of your business. This means it’s the first impression a person will have of your company. So it must be functional and attractive for visitors so you can turn them into your clients. Remember that is not only building something that looks good on the screen, it also has to be useful.
One of the qualities of a good website is that it shows your products and services to your audience all in one place. This makes it easier for them to get convinced about buying what you got to offer. Also, helps you show them who you are, what you do, and why you do it.
So let’s talk about what you are here to read today.
The 5 Characteristics of a Good Website
1. Functional and User-Friendly Layout.
If you want your website to be successful and stand out from your competition you need to make sure it’s usable. When we talk about website usability in web design, we talk about making things easier for the user.
The goal is to make it easy for anyone who visits your website to find the information they need in a fast way. This is what we call a good user experience. We all love when things are simple for us. We like it when we can find what we need in the shortest time without having to do too much to find it.
Nobody wants to have a frustrated visitor who doesn’t know what to do with the information they got in front of them. If people can’t find the answer or content they’re looking for, frustration will come to them. Most likely, they’ll leave shortly after arriving to your site.
Imagine that you sell cakes, ergo, your website it’s about that cake selling business. So, when someone types for example buy a cake in the Google search engine, your business will be one of the options that will appear. So far, so good.
But, when that person gets into your website, the first thing they see is a chocolate cake recipe. It has to do with your business and it’s related to what you sell, but it’s not what this person is looking for. This visitor will probably leave your site and check for another one.
And, of course, your goal is to keep visitors so they can take action on your website, therefore, on your business. The way to do this is by showing them what they are expecting to find when they first go in. Also, make sure to add the right calls to action, this is important since it helps you guide them through.
2. Fast-Loading Performance
As I mentioned before, we love it when we get what we asked for in the shorter time possible. To get your visitors a good experience on your site, you need to make sure it gives them what they want right away. This means your website has to load its content fast.
Make sure the loading time of your website meets the recommended 2 to 5 seconds. This is important for good usability. Also, it affects your search engine ranking or the position Google puts you in the search results.
Once again, the goal is to keep the visitors and not lose them because of a slow-loading page. There are lots of things that affect the loading speed of your site. The easiest one to check on is the size of the images you have on your website. WordPress suggests that big high-quality images should be between 60KB and 100KB.
You can also check the speed of your website by using online tools. Here in Inspiral, we recommend GTmetrix or PageSpeed Insights by Google. These sites will give you tips to improve your speed. If you need some help to understand better these insights, you can always book a call with us!
3. Search Engine Optimized.
A search engine is any system we use to find out web searches on the Internet. Google, Yahoo!, and Bing are some of the most popular ones. You would agree with me if I say that it would be convenient for your business to appear on their first search results.
Search Engine Optimization is important. This is the way you tell someone you have exactly what they are looking for and that you can offer it to them. Also, you can manage your site to rank into the search results of your niche. This happens thanks to the keywords and phrases that are relevant to you.
And just like that, you have ongoing daily traffic. Another way to explain to you why this is beneficial for your business is that this will reduce the marketing effort for the company. You will pay less to get more clients.
Extra Tip: Add a Blog.
Having a blog page will help your website to answer your potential customers’ questions. It helps them learn more about your products or services. Also, it raises your SEO score. It gives these search engines we talked about some content to index and show in the search results.
As usual, let’s use an example. If your company provides marketing services, your goal is to sell those services. Let’s say you post an article about Tips to become a Community Manager. Every time someone asks Google about this, you will get a chance to get a visitor that will read this article. Each visitor of this article will also be a visitor to your website, and also a potential client.
You can check our Tips to write SEO-friendly blog posts.
4. Responsive Design.
Your site must work well on any device or platform. More than half of the traffic of lots of websites comes from people who are using mobile devices. You don’t want to lose a visitor because of your website looking broken on their phone.
The idea of a responsive design is to provide a good user experience on any device. So they could be using their phone, laptop, or tablet and have a good experience during their visit. A website with a responsive design will manage to fit the device and browser size.
5. Safe Session.
Have you ever tried to access a website and then got a warning that says that it’s not secure? And if you have, did you ignore the warning? Because I bet you chose not to visit that site. This happens when a website doesn’t have an SSL certificate.
SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer. This certificate adds a bit of code to your web server. This code provides security for online communications. Is important you make sure your website is secure for your visitors.
A long time ago, only e-commerce websites used SSL certificates. Nowadays is a must that every website has this security level. The main benefit of this certificate is that protects your website data. But also, it gives you a better Search Engine Ranking and improves your visitor’s trust.
Whit this last one we end the 5 Characteristics of a Good Website. I hope this will inspire you to create a cool functional site for your business!
Sofia Villamil
Web Developer
