Every business, including yours, needs to have a successful website. But what does a successful website mean anyway?
Most people would say that successful websites are those with a great number of visitors, conversions, and ultimately, sales. And to a certain degree, this is true.
However, these are all results of incorporating various elements that make a successful website. Your website is your business’s home, a place where you welcome all your visitors. That is why you need to know that optimizing it for visitors and search engines requires a great deal of effort.
Below we listed the essential steps you need to take if you want to create a successful ecommerce website or business website with great traffic, conversions, and sales.
Web Hosting
The first thing that can make or break your website is your web hosting service. Think of your web hosting provider as of a landlord renting you real 3D space for your store. This space provides (or doesn’t) a reliable infrastructure such as heating and other utilities.
It’s the same with your web hosting service. Whether you choose a basic hosting or managed VPS, your website needs a fast hosting service, ongoing maintenance and improvements, and reliable customer service and support.
Content Management System
Your content management system (CMS) helps you organize and maintain different parts of your website, improving your visitors’ user experience.
There are a number of content management systems around. Eventually, it is up to you to pick one of them depending on your goals. As you already know, WordPress is the most popular content management system, but there are others like Drupal, Joomla, Adobe Dreamweaver, etc.
Design
When people think of design, they usually have in mind visual design. And, in a way, this is true.
If you want a successful website, you need to pay attention to the following aspects:
– Material design
Use gradients, shadows, and other subtle 3D effects to improve user experience on mobile devices.
– Illustrations
Custom illustrations are gaining popularity, as they add a personal touch to your website.
– Natural color palettes
Even though bold and bright colors can be extremely effective in some cases, more and more designers are turning to natural and neutral tone palettes.
– Broken grid layouts
Broken grid design allows images and text to overlap and converge, resulting in juxtaposed bitmap and letterform.
However, the visual design of your website is not the end of your design efforts. You can use a number of other web design tricks to boost your conversions.
For example, your website architecture and navigation play a major role when it comes to user experience, allowing your visitors to always know where they are and where to go next.
Search Engine Optimization
If you have a perfectly designed website that no one can find, you might as well not have it at all.
And no matter what others tell you, search engine optimization (SEO) is still the best way to improve your search engine ranking and attract visitors to your website.
These are the best SEO tips you should follow if you want to build a successful website.
– Choose a keyword
What is the keyword you want to show up for?
This is a million-dollar question (maybe even literally) because if you find out what people actually search for, you will have a good idea what to focus on.
– Competition research
Once you have your keyword, you should see what your competition is doing about it. When you learn what they are doing great and what can be done better, you can move on to the next step.
– Creating content
Your content needs to be better than what your competitors post. It needs to be the best. This is not easy, but it is necessary if you want to outrank your competition.
– Keyword management
Putting your keywords in your posts is a logical next step. Your keywords need to be in your posts, page titles, headers, names and alt-tags of your image, as well as in the URLs.
However, you mustn’t stuff your keywords all over the place, as Google can easily penalize you for this.
– Internal linking
When you insert internal links in your posts, it means that you are building around a topic and talking about your own content in a relevant way.
– External linking
This is probably the most important SEO tip. When you get others to talk about you, it means that you are relevant and important for your industry. Google knows this very well and it relies heavily on external links when ranking websites.
You may get some links naturally, but most of them will need to be acquired through link building, at least in the beginning.
Content
As The Web Designer Cardiff Reports, content is one of the key elements in running a successful website. Your content is what your audience is the most interested in. They need and want quality and relevant content to solve the issues they face on a daily basis.
This is why you need to create high-quality, optimized content, and the best way to do it is by running a blog. You can use blogging to boost sales by building your reputation, extending your reach, building a community, etc.
To achieve this, your content needs to be top-notch. This means that it has to be free of factual, grammatical, and spelling errors.
It also needs to be interesting, valuable, and relevant to your audience, answering their queries and resolving their problems.
Finally, the content needs to be optimized for search engines and enriched with the right keywords.
Mobile Friendly
As more and more people are switching to mobile browsing, your website needs to be mobile friendly.
This means that you should take the following steps:
– make your website mobile responsive (arrange your content and information based on the size of the device screen)
– make information easy to find
– your button sizes should be large enough so that people can tap on them with their fingers
– your font sizes should be large enough so that people can read them easily on mobile devices
Website Speed
If your bounce rate is high, the reason may be your slow website load time. If a page takes more than 2 seconds to load, your visitors can easily get frustrated and close the page. You might argue that we are spoiled, but that’s just how it is.
To reduce your load time, try some of these tricks:
– remove any nonessentials (large images, videos, or documents)
– compress visual media
– use the appropriate tools to run high-quality videos
– use browser caching (this one is a must)
– optimize your website for mobile devices
– minimize HTTP requests required upon loading
– use fewer plugins
Final Thoughts – It’s a Process
When you see these tips summarized in one article, creating a successful website seems like a breeze. But that is far from the truth.
It is true that some of these steps can be implemented quickly, but others, like SEO and marketing, take much longer. That is why the final tip is to be patient and work on your website consistently.
When you realize that building your website is a constant process, you will enjoy it and have much more success in the long run.Author’s Bio:
David is a serial entrepreneur on a mission to rid the world of bad customer experiences. He’s also the founder of LTVplusHQ and TaskDrive.
