What makes a good website

It needs to earn traffic. Otherwise, all that effort in design, UX and content development will be for naught. There are hundreds of rules and guidelines for effective search engine optimization , so here are a few to start with:.

Make it as easy as possible for visitors to share your content. Social can drive large volumes of traffic and positively impact your search ranking. This is a high-level overview of seven deep topics! These basic tenets will help you start getting more value out of your web presence as you move toward the great website you need. For a deeper dive, contact us. Ideas On Purpose is ready to help. So, what makes a great website? Well Designed and Functional Your site reflects your company, your products, your services and ultimately your brand.

Easy to Use Site visitors are always in a hurry. Optimized for Mobile Today there are no excuses, your site must look great and work well on any platform. Fresh, Quality Content Be succinct, interesting and new.

Clear calls to action If your site asks nothing of visitors, they will surely do nothing. Your branding should instantly tell your customers everything about your story, values, and what sets you apart from your competitors. More than branding, know that good design influences people, and both font and color influence the buying process. A good user experience is more than just aesthetics.

Part of providing a good user experience UX is making sure that anyone, even complete internet novices, can navigate your website without needing any help. Aside from your tone of voice, think about how your copy is written. Write strong, confident, authoritative, and succinct copy. The gap between landing on your site and performing an action like purchasing a product, learning more about a service, or contacting your business is bridged by effective calls to action CTAs.

Your audience wants to be told what to do next, so craft clear, concise, and compelling CTAs. Keeping your words short and straightforward is always a good thing, but take a look at how your words are presented as well.

Does your text utilize proper font hierarchy? Do its colors contrast with your background? You may attract an audience through good visuals and optimization, but what are you doing to keep them on your site? Part of setting yourself apart from the competition is providing knowledgeable information about your industry or product that you should then be telling your audience.

Aside from being good for UX, these also help you rank on search engines. To keep everything organized, create a blog with these top blogging platforms. Attract people to your site through search engine marketing or a strategy to increase website traffic.

Before dealing with the more advanced tactics like paid ads, grow your site organically through search engine optimization SEO. The most basic thing to do is to research keywords using one of the many tools online, and insert these organically into your content. There are other optimization factors too. On WordPress , you can download a plugin like Yoast to help optimize your site. Go above and beyond and make sure all the details that can possibly be asked are on your website.

Outside of your website, where else can your business be found? Include these social media links in your site in the form of social icon widgets or small graphics that link to your other accounts. Between worrying about design and language, you already have your hands full when building your website. Integrate your tone of voice, colors, font, and graphics into your social media posts, and your branding will come out even stronger.

Prospective customers love seeing reviews from other buyers and good press from more established entities. Having reviews and good publicity displayed on your website builds trust with your customers. For restaurants, make it easy for your customers to reserve tables through OpenTable. Use live chat integrations so your customers can get answers quickly.

The average user expects a website to load in a maximum of two seconds. Anything longer than that and the bounce rate increases exponentially, especially on mobile. There are other branding devices you can use in your website design, check out our guidance on brand archetypes.

Every image added to a website is better with a purpose. Images are best placed next to the text they are relevant to, or where they aid in the user experience of the web page — like in these landing pages for Ad campaigns.

Good website design should incorporate a visual hierarchy, with the most important images and symbols at the forefront of your site to direct the users to the most important content first, and then everything else below.

Aside from standard images and videos, good websites also incorporate items such as charts, graphs, screenshots, vector graphics and more, providing more engaging and reliable content to their viewers while still effectively conveying their message.

This also makes it important to include an easily accessible contact page on your website. Making the first steps with your business as simple as possible for the customer can make them more likely to purchase from you. Wanna see some great examples of this? Check out these websites. When we talk about personalisation, we mean both personalised for the user and adding personality to your website that sets it aside from the rest of your competitors.

Adding an about us page is essential and can be used to add personalisation. The about us page is where you can talk about yourselves as a business and forget about the customer for a second. If you want to make a website more people-focused, then add images of people to your site and take quotes off of customers to use as testimonials. Adding genuine reviews increases the trust new visitors to your site have to your company and makes them more likely to complete a purchase with you.

You could also add your team photos. Consistent information is key to good website design throughout your Site. Keep a simple and clear message with limited amounts of detail, such as only a couple of phone numbers and a few email addresses.

Gain a competitive edge over your competitors by making your site responsive. Another great tool you can use completely free to check your website for mobile usability issues is Google Search Console.

Your load time is the first encounter a user has with your website. As a user loads a web page, their patience wears thin real quick! This increases the bounce rate of your website, the percentage of visitors who have left your site without making an action.

Search engines favour websites with lower bounce rates as they are appealing to viewers for longer periods of time, and a consistently high bounce rate can have a negative impact on your search engine rankings.

So what affects your load times? As for what actually affects load times, some areas to look into are:. Not really in the web design category, but security is definitely what makes a good website. Part and parcel of securing a website is installing an SSL certificate onto your site.

You can tell when a website is SSL encrypted by checking for the padlock symbol in the right-hand side of the search bar. An SSL Certificate means that any data passed from your users to your database is protected via an encrypted system. If you are using WordPress as your chosen CMS, then adding a security firewall plugin like Wordfence or Cloudflare is a must-do task to protect your website from DDoS attacks, malicious IP addresses and any other threats to your site you may encounter.

Cheap shared hosting providers place your site at risk on shared servers that hackers actively use to try and enter your website. Upgrading your site to a private server environment can give that added protection and speed your site maybe after.

There are loads of options, but why do we love WordPress?