12 Must Have Features for Your Website in 2018
Websites are a must in today’s digitally competitive world. A bad website is sure to throw a wrench into the reputation of your brand and hamper your business. Once you have chosen an interesting URL that matches your business type and industry you are in and got the domain set up, you can start building your site.
Here are the quintessential features that every website needs, in order to fetch more business growth and earn greater ROI.
Reliable Hosting
Hosting plays a major role in enabling smooth browsing of any website. If you do not choose a reliable host, your website is bound to get slow and ultimately, it impedes the traffic and business growth. Slow-loading websites become irritating for the customers, thereby shooting up your bounce rate. Search engines give special preference to fast-loading website as their algorithms can identify the loading speed of the webpage. Consequently, your ranking gets affected due to faulty hosting. Take professional help if you get stuck anywhere.
Easy Navigation
Make sure you have a navigation bar in the header of all your webpages. Any visitor coming to your website should easily be able to get what they might be looking for. That’s the first step to converting them into customers. According to Inbound methodology, it is the best way to attract visitors. You can even place the navigation bar at the footer of the website.
Regularly Updated Content with Relevant Images or Videos
It is highly recommended that you have a blog with regularly updated content that is fresh and without any plagiarism. There’s no dearth of content on the World Wide Web, and yours ought to stand out from the clutter. Include images to execute visual marketing. Relevant images supported by content bring great results from the point of view of “Conversion Rate Optimization”. You can even add videos that make it easy for the customers to understand your products or services. Leverage on video marketing if that suits your business but the videos should not be put on Autoplay. Do not use too many interactive elements, JavaScript or Flash.
Responsiveness
Mobile responsive websites are a must as the world is shifting to mobile devices on a large scale. Your website should be readable on mobile phones. It has become even more important these days because Google gives more weightage to sites that are mobile-responsive. You can create mobile-responsive websites by the following ways.
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- Build a different website with a URL like m.websitename.com. This method is specifically used when you want to create a website exclusively for mobile devices. They need a different domain, host, and URL.
- Another option is by using a web development platform and the website gets scaled to the respective device on its own. This is more economical than the former technique.
Security and Trust Seals
Website security should be the foremost priority for every business. Whether you are an e-retailer or from travel industry, you should ensure customer security throughout the website. Comodo SSL Certificate offers you encryption of your customer information and prevents any security breach or leakage. It shows a green padlock in the address bar that makes your customers trust you and purchase from you. Once you have an SSL Certificate, you can have a trust badge for your website. These are an evidence that your business is legitimate and is safe to work with.
Contact Details
Contact information including your location, phone number, email address, and “Contact us” form is an integral part of every good website. Place this information in the first fold on your home page as far as possible so that your customers can see it without scrolling too much. Include hours of operation and other branches too in this section.
Sitemap
Do not confuse your visitors. Display the sitemap so that they can easily jump on the page of their interest. It would improve your website visits and build a better brand reputation too.
Search Engine Friendly
Search engine optimization is very important in the present times. To generate organic traffic without spending too much, get your webpages and blog optimized for keywords. If your website ranks better on Google, you are sure to get more traffic even without paid Internet marketing.
FAQs
Many a times, your visitors may be having questions about your products or services. Jot down a list of the queries that are most likely to arise in the minds of your visitors and create a FAQ page so that it shortens the conversion cycle and your prospects can get deeper in the sales funnel.
Fast-loading
Your website should load quickly without wasting too much of the visitor’s time. With the attention span of humans dwindling even below that of a gold fish, this becomes absolutely imperative. You can use Accelerated Mobile Pages too if you have too many mobile users and your business demands that.
Social Media Integration
Create consistent marketing campaigns throughout the marketing channels including websites, emails and social media. Add the links to your social media platforms in the contact information too, if they are relevant to your brand.
Reviews and Testimonials
Rather than you as a brand, your customers will trust “people using your services” more. This fact makes it necessary to include product reviews and customer testimonials on your website. Some brands even take help of video testimonials. That’s again a great idea to promote more conversions and drive greater revenue.
Final Thoughts
A good website takes effort, time, and considerable amount of money. It does not happen overnight. You can even A/B test different alternatives of your website design and go with the one that brings the desired results. An experienced website developer can help you with all your business needs and the perfect website you need. If you are missing out on implementing any of the above stated features, do it right away and bring your website at your top.
Author: Harry Patel