In a recent study on focusing on what makes a website good, experts found out that it takes about .05 seconds for users to form an opinion about your website.
With only .05 seconds to decide, you’ll need to ensure that you really create a good impression on your customers, so you might be wondering what makes a good website.
We’ll break down some of the key components that will ensure your website ranks highly while leaving a lasting impression on your audience.
1. Good Design
Having a good design for your website will help your audience stay on your site as they won’t feel overwhelmed by trying to find all the information that they need.
Hiring a professional for your website can help you achieve a look that will reflect your company and brand. Well designed websites should be visually satisfying, polished, and professional. Be sure to leave room for white space to ensure that it’s not cluttered with information, photographs, or other images that aren’t relevant to your site.
2. Easy Navigation
Many of the best websites involve a design that is intuitive for its users—visitors can easily find what they want, and they’re even directed to the most important sections/pages of the site through a thoughtful design. Ultimately, you want to make certain that your website is easy to navigate so that customers don’t immediately become frustrated trying to figure out where something is.
Once your customers become frustrated, they will quickly leave your site which will hurt end up hurting your ranking statistics. As such, be sure to carefully plan and organize all of your landing pages on the website. In the event that the website has a numerous pages, you could create cascading menus that fold out or into columns that your customers can easily navigate.
You might also consider including a search bar in case your customers already know what they’re looking for and want to skip the navigation process.
3. Optimized to Rank for Search Engines
While making a good website, you need to also ensure that it is optimized to rank for search engines.
Requirements for ranking in SEO includes criteria like using meta tags and page titles, optimizing content that fits into your genre of website, using keywords in the correct places on your content, and using a cascading style sheet to help organize your code.
4. F-Shaped Pattern
During the design phase of your website, consider the layout you want.
One of the most popular ways to do that is to follow an F-shaped pattern to help your visitors scan your website. According to one eye-tracking study, it only takes users about 2.26 seconds for their eyes to follow a pattern and land on an important area of the web page.
Studies have also shown that most people start at the top and left area of the screen, which is why the F shape is perfect.
5. Fast Load Times
At this point, you’re aware of how much time you have to make an impression on your site visitor—customers aren’t going to wait very long for things to load. In the end, if the website takes even a few seconds to load, they’re going to return back to their search results and find a different website that will give them what they need quickly.
Websites need to have lightning fast load times, so ensure that you have a caching system set up for your website that allows it to send out your pages and content faster. Check in with your developer to see how they’re hosting your website—be sure the server host is powerful enough to host and hold everything on your website.
6. Metric Tracking
Having a well designed, fast, and fully optimized site is clearly important. But if you’re not driving traffic to site, and tracking where the traffic is coming from, your efforts will be marginalized. Accordingly, ensure that you have some type of system to track metrics and data. Later on, you can use this to analyze how well your website is doing, and if you need to be doing something else to gather more traffic.
Once you track data points, you’ll also be able to gauge insights into your customers, show them relevant ads, bring more traffic in, and rank higher which will bring in more money for you.
These systems will allow you to track anything from if customers purchase your product online, if they fill out a form, contact you, or find a way to subscribe to emails from you.
7. Contact Information
Based on the .05 seconds you have to leave an impression on a site visitor, it’s clear that customers don’t have a long attention span. This means that you’ll need to ensure that they can find all the information they need, including your contact information, as soon as possible.
You can put a tab at the top or bottom of your website with a link to all of your contact information so that customers know exactly where to find you and how to reach you. Many designers put a “Contact Us” page at the top right because it’s easily accessible and one of the first places that site visitors will look.
Ensure that customers can easily contact you. Assuming that you’re going to offer a contact form, double-check to ensure that it’s working before you post it. Businesses should also list alternative ways to contact you, in case one customer prefers email over calling or vice versa.
Learn More About What Makes a Good Website
Web development and design elements such as those offered in this article are only a few of the items that make a good website.
Ultimately, growing your business and creating your online digital presence can be difficult, but thankfully, we have the expertise to help you find your way!
If you’re interested in making a great website and ranking higher in search results, contact us today.
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