How to Make a Successful Website
You only have 15 seconds. You can’t expect your website visitors to give you a chance on the internet these days. People with lower attention spans will gladly leave your site if you don’t prove that you can give them what you want.
The problem is that it’s hard to create an experience that stands out from the rest. Luckily, there are a few things you can do to set yourself apart.
If you’re trying to learn how to make a successful website, this post will help. Below are the tips you need to know to make a small business website.
Figure Out the Purpose of Your Website
Not every business is the same. A website is going to carry a different set of benefits for companies based on the market they’re in. Before you build your site, you need to figure out what benefits are in it for you.
If you have a local services business, an eCommerce website probably won’t help. You’re more likely to be successful with a general information site that informs people about their problems and your business.
If you sell products, it might be worth investigating in the process of selling online. You can expand out of your local market and sell your products worldwide.
Once you know your needs better, you can investigate the technology needed to build your site. Once you have the tech figured out, you’ll use your website purpose to figure out your design and customer journey.
Get a Reliable Web Host
It’s pointless to spend time and effort creating a website if it’s offline all the time. You risk this happening if you don’t research good web hosting companies.
Research the resources you need to run your site and ensure that your host can accommodate your needs. In most cases, you’ll be able to get away with a shared hosting account. They provide software installers that automatically set up your most popular website platforms.
If you have eCommerce, look into hosted eCommerce platforms. They handle all the security for you, so you don’t have to worry about PCI compliance yourself.
Keep Your Website Speedy
Nobody wants to wait forever to get the content they’re searching for. There are a lot of websites on the internet that serve people. If yours doesn’t respond quickly, your visitors will head straight to one of your competitors.
Website speed is an essential factor in website success. With the increased popularity of image-heavy sites, speed will become an issue if you aren’t careful.
Optimizing your images is your best starting point if you want to decrease page load times. Compression programs will reduce image file sizes without compromising your image quality.
It also pays to delay loading website images until your visitors scroll to them. You can do this with lazy loading.
With lazy loading, only the images at the top of your website will download for your visitors. This is especially helpful for mobile users, who don’t always have the best download speeds.
Make Your Website Mobile
You want your website to reach as many people as possible. Unfortunately, this isn’t possible if you have a site that doesn’t render correctly on mobile screens.
With so many people using their phones to browse the internet today, you can’t afford to ignore small screens when you design your website. If you want your site to appear correctly, you’ll need to create a responsive website design.
A responsive design is one that changes based on the size of the screen. You won’t have a site with the same elements on every device. You’ll add and remove parts of your website based on your visitor’s screen size.
The best way to go about this is to design for mobile-first and add desktop elements later. It’s much easier to add to a website design than to take away from one.
Find a Drag and Drop Page Builder
Not everyone has the fortune to spend on an experienced web designer. In these cases, most people look for pre-made themes that look good. The problem is that many of these themes look similar.
If you want a truly unique design, you can do it yourself. Many website platforms like WordPress have page builder plugins that allow you to design your pages from scratch.
Read on here to learn more about these builders’ new features. You’d be surprised about what you can create by playing around with a page builder yourself.
Build a Content Strategy
If you’re a small business, you likely don’t have a big budget to spend on advertising. Every penny you spend counts, and you can end up with no results with paid ads. Creating a robust content strategy can help you get free website traffic.
Your goal with content marketing is to find the questions people type into search engines. Keyword research tools will give you a reliable count of how many searches keyword phrases get in search engines. With these, you can figure out what people search for the most.
You don’t have to stick with keyword research on your own, either. The chances are that your competitors have already put in some content work.
Most keyword research tools will show you the keywords your competitors rank for. Figure out which keywords get the most traffic and write a better blog post than your competition.
How to Make a Successful Website: Now You Can Get Started
Website development isn’t something you can just pick up right away. However, now that you know how to make a successful website, you’re on your way to getting started. Sign up for a website host today to get started.
If you want to learn more about using your website to drive sales, head back to our blog. Our latest posts