What are the most important features for your website?

1. Modern, fresh and simple design

The overall design of a website is first and foremost what captures user attention.

What happens during the first-ever site visit truly influences the whole user experience. It’s important to note that the decision to stick around and continue browsing your website takes only 0.05 seconds! (Yes, you read that correctly.) Therefore, the first impression certainly counts for a lot, and you need to do everything you can to give potential customers an amazing experience.

There are so many trends when it comes to an effective website design. Here are a few:

• Strong Design with Limited Color Palette - We recommend choosing a simple color scheme for your site. Although businesses usually want to make their logo the center of attention, it’s not necessarily a bad thing to let the logo take a back seat. This approach helps make it easier for users to focus on your message.
  
  
• Making Use of White Space - This strategy makes your site look clean and neat. The majority of site visitors prefer a plain and elegant design, so making use of white space is a great way to capture the attention of your audience.

2. Has Great Visuals

Take the time to refine your design choices. Check how much space headers take up, make sure images are the same size and quality, and double-check that fonts are easy to read. Typography, color combos, images, and videos all play a big role in how things look.

While some sites might catch your eye at first, they should keep up a consistent experience for users. Keeping fonts and colors consistent and making sure design elements work well together is key.

3. High-quality images

Using high-quality images on business websites has become increasingly important.

An image speaks for your site, gives emphasis to your messages, and allows site visitors to know more about your business even prior to reading the text contents. So, what exactly makes for a high-quality image? 

• Sharpness: No one likes websites with blurry and/or skewed images. 

• Relevance: It’s important to ensure that the images you’re displaying are related to your business and your audience. If the image doesn’t portray the content that surrounds it, readers will become confused and your website will be better without it. 

• Speed: Make sure you use the most appropriate file size so the loading time won’t be negatively impacted. 

5. Simple and easy to find call to action

In general, people want things to be made as easy as possible, including being able to easily contact a business, submit an inquiry or make an order.  Call to action options like these make it clear to potential customers which action to take next.

For example, “Call Us” and “Buy Service” buttons are two of the most important CTAs one can have on their website.

6. Links to social media sites & Google Reviews

The social media section is a vital part of your website. This is the spot where you place the links to your social media pages - Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Email, etc. A social media section is important to include because It serve as proof of legitimacy for your customers. Local reviews are also important for giving your clients  social proof.

Adding social media links to your website is also a way to increase the awareness of your content. The links expand your brand reach and awareness through the users’ networks and they also help increase the number of people who subscribe and follow you.

7. Direct links to reviews

All good websites should have a designated section where users can leave reviews about your business and/or read existing feedback from previous customers.

Your site should have a dedicated space to ask customers about their experience with your business, whether they were satisfied with the service, and/or if they were happy with the product they bought.

This section is an important way of showing your customers that you want to hear from them and that you value their comments. Needless to say, every business should showcase a significant number of reviews to help build trust with target buyers. 

8. Has a useful company blog

Site visitors want to see updated content and the latest information about your company - whether it’s through a story of a recent customer experience or some background about your business or products.

Publishing blog posts regularly with useful content shows your audience that you are a transparent and trusted resource. This also allows you to share your insights and opinions on certain topics and serves as a forum for you to ask your readers to interact with you by leaving their comments.

Also… Google appears to favor fresh and frequently published content. Not to mention blogs are a great place to create links back to your site and use keywords in for SEO!

9. Has an easy way to set up online payments

If you have an eCommerce website, you must offer an easy, secure way for your customers to set up online payments.

Regardless of which method that is, it is best to provide instructions and make sure that the payment system is always working. Downtimes may cause customers to leave the site and look for other businesses in the same field. 

10. Has personalization tools

What is website personalization?

Website personalization is the process of creating an exclusive, one-on-one, customized experience for visitors to a website. By considering factors such as the time of day, location, frequency of visits, past purchases, and other relevant data, the website tailors the experience specifically to the individual user, rather than offering a generic and uniform experience to all.

Do you have a product on sale? A personalization tool could be a fun feature designed to quickly capture your user’s attention when visiting your site for the first time. Typically, these tools (or pop-ups, as they call them), include a call-to-action button whose purpose is to get your visitor to do something - i.e., contact them, buy something, go to another page of your site, etcetera.

Read more on personalization here.

11. Has Search Engine Optimization tools

Strengthening your online presence involves improving your site’s search engine optimization (SEO), which greatly depends on the website builder that you choose to use.

That said, the right builder should have the following features:

• A place to add title, meta descriptions tags
• Ability to change the webpage url
• Ability to resize, compress & rename images, alt tags
• An easy-to-implement schema markup (code that Google uses). Local Business, FAQs, etc...
• Block search engines so it does not show in the search results
• Ability to add social media image and tracking codes for individual pages
• Inclusion of Google Analytics & search console connection and metrics

12. Is mobile-friendly & responsive

A mobile friendly website is essentially when your regular website shrinks down to be small enough to display on a mobile device correctly. Mobile friendly websites should be easy to navigate without the user needing to zoom in or adjust their settings manually. They are responsive to the user. 

If you are planning to build a website for your business, make sure they are mobile-friendly so that anyone and everyone can access it easily and fast.

13. Includes a contact form & email signup form

If you are running a business, contact forms are one of the best ways to get more leads - which is one of the main reasons why you need to generate a simple and easy-to-use contact form.

Good forms should provide users with feedback as they fill your form out so they can see any mistakes before hitting the submit button. At the very least, you want to make sure users have typed in a valid email address and phone numbers. 

Email signups are also an easy way for you to target the right customers by having them subscribe to your mailing list.