With 2018 already in full swing, it’s a great time to look at what you can do better to help build your brand and promote growth. Regardless of the industry you work in, you and your business can benefit from a website fit for 2018 year. Evaluating your web design options is the best way to ensure that you’re making the most of your online presence and that you’re reaching the right audience.
User Experience
Having a website that has user experience at the forefront has a greater chance of a continued stream of traffic. Google values sustainable direct visits to your website immensely and factors that into it’s search rankings. Having loyal customers or clients coming back to your website at a regular rate shows to Google that you have a loyal fan base.
User experience plays a huge part in keeping that traffic and growing that customer base. If your website is overflowing with content and crammed with images, then it’ll be difficult to traverse. This in turn increases the loading time of your website; you’d be surprised at how quick someone will look somewhere else for their business if your website takes longer than 5 seconds to load.
Consider evaluating your sitemap to ensure that the customer journey is as smooth and hassle-free as possible. Leaving little to no barriers to your customers’ goals is vital to a healthy and successful website.
Mobile Friendly
With the advancement of mobile phone technology, the amount of people visiting websites purely on their mobile phones is on the rise. If a potential customer hears of your business on the go, the first thing they will do is attempt to view your website on their mobile phone or tablet. If you’ve not factored this in and developed a mobile version, then your website will look skewed and features may not work, giving the viewer an initial negative experience. The first experience is the most important as from then, it’ll affect their opinion of your business.
This is completely avoidable if you invest in a mobile design of your website so that it’s fully functional on a small mobile screen.
E-Commerce
Depending on your business and industry, you may want to want to invest in e-commerce functionality. It’s important that you choose the best option to make a large amount of sales. With e-commerce, whether it be with Magento or WooCommerce, you have an abundance of functionality at your fingertips that benefits your business.
With e-commerce functionality weaved into your website, it enables you to get ahead of your competition as it will greater influence your sales. Combining that with SEO and PPC, you’ll begin to see a large sale increase as your products are viewable by a greater amount of people.
Conversion Rates
Having high conversion rates and low bounce rates is at the core of what makes a successful website and in turn, a successful business. Taking control of your conversion rates is essential to keeping sales high and keeping your business growing. You can ensure that visitors are turned into customers, not just browsers.
Avoiding a high bounce rate helps with this and this can be the result of several problems; whether it be with how your website is laid out, creating a longer process for the customer, or if you have long load times and errors, making it difficult to complete purchases. These and many other issues can contribute to high bounce rates and it’s vital that you focus on fixing these.
Hosting
Websites are only as good as their hosting options; without solid and reliable hosting your website will be offline more than its online. It’s something a lot of people don’t think about until it all goes wrong, but a website going offline during prime time can be a disaster for many businesses, especially if you’re banking on large sales, such as Black Friday. The large number of visitors to your website could test your hosting option to its limits, resulting in extensive periods of downtime.
Make certain that you evaluate your hosting options and be confident that in the event of large influx of visitors, queries and checkouts, that your website is running smoothly and efficiently.
Support
When your website is fully designed, up and running and ticking along nicely the work still isn’t over. You’ll need a solid support system in case any problems that occur, and with websites, these problems can appear out of nowhere if you aren’t prepared. Random error messages, 404 pages or functionality on the fritz, these are all quite common over the lifespan of a busy website.
Take a look at getting support contracts along with your website development, making sure that in the event your website does go down or pages need fixing, that your website and your business is in capable hands.
These are just a few points you should be looking at to bring your website to the next level. Be prepared for what 2018 has in store for you and your business by getting in touch with reliable and trustworthy digital marketers.
