Are you building a brand new website at this very moment? First of all, congratulations. Second, make sure your business website is ready to hit the ground running. Unless you’re planning to use your new website for journaling purposes, some considerations ought to be part of your plans from the get-go. Happily for you, we’ve already done all the legwork, and below, we present four tried-and-true tips for building an amazing business website.
1. Make it easy to find
Until your new site is visible on search engine results, it’s not complete yet. That said, visibility doesn’t automatically translate to favorable rankings. Your site can be visible and still languish helplessly on page 10. The lower your Google ranking, the less traffic you’ll get. Less traffic means fewer quality leads, and consequently, fewer customers.
With that in mind, find a domain name that either matches your company name or describes your brand in some way. If money allows, have several domains that point to your website. This means driving traffic through paid advertising, strategic content marketing, keyword research, and technical SEO best practices.
2. Put Emphasis on a Clean Design
If only given 15 minutes to consume content, two-thirds of people would prefer to see something beautifully designed versus something bland and uninteresting. Put differently, your site’s design and overall outlook is by far its most important aspect. Flop at it, and you’re bidding goodbye to your future prospects and customers.
There are several website design elements that demand equal input and focus. Ideally, though, color should take precedence. If you already have some brand colors that align with your logo and other brand identity elements, then you should use those on your website as well. However, if you are starting from scratch, you’ll want to learn a thing or two about color associations first.
Next comes the layout aspect. The ideal website layout is simple to use, intuitive, well-structured, and responsive. Make sure your site ticks all of these boxes before moving on to the next aspect, which is—you guessed it—fonts and topography. Using more than three different fonts makes a website look disorderly and unprofessional. As a good rule of thumb, limit the number of font families to a minimum (two is plenty, one is typically enough) and stick to the same ones throughout your site.
3. Get that SSL Certificate
You’ve registered a superb domain name for your new website. The design elements you’ve been working on for days are starting to come together beautifully and your site is nothing short of a visual masterpiece. Now it’s time to make sure your website is secure.
Your website needs an SSL certificate if you’re going to be asking for any personal information—think: names, addresses, credit card numbers, or other financial details. However, that’s not all there is to it. Search engines are currently displaying a “Not Secure” warning next to websites that are reluctant to take out security certificates. If your website gets slapped with this warning, rest assured that no searcher or reader will be landing on your pages any time soon.
What’s more, Google recently announced SSL as a ranking factor. Not having one will undoubtedly affect your traffic and lead generation efforts. Thankfully, an SSL certificate manager such as Sectigo can help with complete certificate lifecycle management so you don’t have to.
4. Don’t compromise on load times
We’d all rather visit a fast website than a slow one. It’s a well-known, undisputable fact. That said, condoning a website with slow page speeds is akin to shooting yourself in the foot—you’ll be attracting zero eyeballs. Yes, zero. The modern, savvy user spends more time on a website when its pages load quicker.
Stay away from cheap hosting. Cheap hosting almost always translates to poor performance. Choose performance-focused hosting solutions instead. It’s also a good idea to compress and optimize your images. By reducing your images’ file sizes, you can minimize their ‘weight’, ultimately helping your pages load more quickly.
Create the Business Website of Your Dreams
The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. Similarly, the journey of building a beautifully designed, high-performing website starts with the following these tips. Before you know it, you’ll hopefully be staring at surreal website performance stats. Good luck!
