How To Make Your Website Successful (And Grow Your Business)

There is no denying the role of a quality website in expanding your customer base and driving sales. However, developing a website and driving people to it with marketing efforts isn’t enough. For a website to be successful, it needs to deliver great user experience, in terms of content or overall usability. So, how can you deliver such results to visitors? Let us find out.

Top 10 aspects to consider to make your website a success

As of 2022, there were more than 1.98 billion websites operating across business verticals (Source: firstsiteguide.com). And with more being added to the list by various website development companies on a daily basis, the competition is growing exponentially. In the below-mentioned segment, we discuss the top 8 ways to make your website stand out and be successful. Additionally, if you want to build a new website or redevelop an existing one, you may read our blog on the latest trends in web design.

1. Define your goals clearly

When it comes to building your website, it is important to define goals from both the company’s and users’ perspectives. Remember, your website can only deliver the goods (generate traffic, leads, and sales) if it offers what your target users want. For instance, if you are a website designer, and one of your goals is to offer a seamless browsing experience to your users, then make sure the website design is intuitive wherein the users can find every service or piece of information easily.  Also, if the bounce rate of your website is high, then it might be a clue that the goals of your company and users do not align, and it is time to set them right.

2. Make a proper budget

Prepare a budget plan for your website by keeping a balance between aspects such as design and marketing. Going for the overkill in any of the aspects can ultimately boomerang. Decide on the type of website you want (eCommerce, educational, portfolio, blog, entertainment, etc., ) and the right CMS platform (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc., ) to build it. Weigh the pros and cons of investing in an off-the-shelf template-based website or a custom design one. Take the breakeven point into consideration while deciding on the upfront investment and the incremental one to follow. You may read this blog for a better understanding on factors that determine the cost of website development.

3. Identify Your Target Audience

Defining your target audience is an important step in ensuring the success of your website. By identifying who you are trying to reach, you can tailor your content and marketing efforts to more effectively engage and appeal to your desired audience. Consider factors such as age, gender, income level, education level, and geographic location when defining your target audience.

4. Earn audience’s trust

Design your website to highlight your offerings in a transparent and clear manner. Know what your audiences are likely to do when they visit your website. Leverage your strength and the knowledge of what motivates your target audience. Try making your website credible to earn the trust of visitors by putting in relevant and comprehensive information, say on the About Us page. Your target audience should know who they are dealing with instead of having a feeling that you are just another site in the webspace. Tell a credible story about your company using pictures and by mentioning its philosophy, mission, vision, and culture. At the end of the day, your website should give the impression of being legit before shoppers can gain trust and share their credentials, including credit card details.

5. Create High-quality Relevant Content:

Content forms the backbone of any website. Creating high-quality, relevant content is crucial to the success of any website. Providing valuable, informative, and relevant content can help keep visitors engaged and coming back to your website.

Make sure your headlines accurately reflect the content of your article and use actionable language to entice readers. Using multimedia, such as images, videos, and infographics, can help break up large blocks of text and make your content more engaging. Regularly updating your website with fresh, high-quality content can help keep visitors coming back and improve your search engine rankings.

6. Search for ways to stand out

The key to standing out in the competition is to be different than others. This can happen even when you use an off-the-shelf website template. Just customize the imagery and styles to your brand and achieve differentiation. Stand out from other templated websites selling similar products or services by telling your story. Create a bond with your target audience by focusing on factors such as quality, price, customer service, how you give back to society and channel your profits for just causes, etc.

7. Usability and user experience

Your target users should not struggle to access the information, products, or services when visiting your website. Create suitable landing pages where they can reach with the least clicks possible. For instance, if yours is a news website, let the users land on the page that shows the latest news headlines of the day. Also, besides keeping an intuitive main menu for seamless navigation across mobiles and desktops, ensure easy visibility for the search boxes as well. Don’t assume that your target users are going to navigate a long distance to reach their favourite content. If they find the journey too long and circuitous, they will bounce off.

Similarly, your website needs to load fast as well. That means it needs a good Core Web Vitals score as well. So make sure your website is coded accordingly.

8. Focus on SEO fundamentals

The right SEO strategy can increase the visibility of your website on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Know how the search engine bots crawl your website and index its content. Also, ensure the basic on-page elements (headers, title tags, meta descriptions, etc.,) are optimized. This can be achieved using semantic coding and the use of plug-ins. Even though SEO extends beyond on-page, if you can customize all on-page elements as per the search engine norms, not only will it fully represent your content to the search engine bots but ensure they crawl and index your website properly. This can eventually mean winning half the battle for success.

9. Learn from heat mapping

Heat mapping can serve as a great source of information on user experience. Remember, many aspects leading to the success of your website are related to the user experience. So, using appropriate tools you can get insights into the user activities on your website – how far they scroll, how much they fill the form before leaving, where their mouse hovers, and where they get stuck, etc.  After knowing the areas of concern, you can fix the issues and fine-tune the website to ensure seamless browsing.

10. Minimize or eliminate issues

Your website may have issues or bugs, which can drag down its performance level significantly. These may include buttons not working, portions of JavaScript not executing, and UX issues related to mobile, among others. Further, you may have broken something while updating a plugin using CMS admin. So, while you may be engrossed in analyzing figures on the sales dashboard, you may not notice that some users are facing issues. These users won’t let you know of the issues they face and simply leave. Hence, as a preventive measure, ensure the code is functional and is tested across browsers.

Additionally, monitoring and analyzing your website’s performance is an important part of ensuring its success. By using tools like Google Analytics, you can track key metrics such as website traffic, conversion rates, and bounce rates. If you can track down pages which are having issues (such as high bounce rates or low conversions), it’ll be easier to identify and fix them.

Conclusion

While user experience largely determines the success of your website, it is important to harness technology, insights, and feedback to optimize your website as well. Each of the above-mentioned aspects can go a long way and culminate into a successful website. Hence, it’s time you hire an experienced and reputable web design agency and achieve your goals.