Want to have one of the best websites out there? If you look around you will see that the best websites on the web have a lot of things in common. While sometimes there is a certain amount of luck and timing involved, for the most part these sites are great on purpose. The companies they belong to set out on purpose to have an outstanding website.
Where do they all start? Here are five of the most common characteristics of the best sites on the web.
Well-Designed
Great sites did not go on to a free website creation platform, choose a stock design, and start posting. No, the web designers of these sites looked at other great sites, especially those in their niche, and they tried to emulate them. How?
- Color controls perception. The psychology of color causes a reaction in the visitor to your site before they even read a word or scan a headline.
- Fonts matter. Like color, these set the mood for your visitor before they even get started, and commonly used fonts set off specific reactions. Blah fonts indicate a blah site, and that too lets your visitor know you don’t really care or know about design.
- Mobile is first. From the fact that more searches are performed on mobile devices than on computers now, and the Google Mobile First Indexing, mobile responsiveness and speed matter more than ever. Great sites know and pay attention to this.
- Simplicity is key. The simpler the design, the easier it is for a user to navigate, the more likely the site is to be great.
If you are not a designer, hire one who is talented and understands your industry. Trying to go it alone without guidance at this point is foolish at best, site death at worst.
Great Content Everywhere
Great content matters not just on your blog, but everywhere from home pages to landing pages to product descriptions and more. Content includes photos, videos, graphics, and everything in between. Essentially everything a visitor sees is content, anything that is not coding or behind the scenes. This means all of this content must be well done.
Don’t sacrifice one page for the other thinking it does not matter as much. All content is equally important when it comes to a great site, and anywhere you try to cut corners it will be noticed. Hire professional content creators and content strategists and trust their judgements. They are the experts for a reason, just as you are in your niche.
Clear Call to Action (CTA)
Once you get a visitor to your site, it should be clear to them right away what you want them to do. Do you want them to buy something, subscribe to your newsletter, pay for a subscription? Whatever your call to action, make it clear and concise.
Certain pages may have different calls to action. That is fine, and common with great websites as well. The point is that each piece of content, each page, should have a clear purpose or purposes. The user should be able to answer the question right away “What is this page here for? What is it trying to tell me?” This means you must have similar answers yourself.
If you cannot sum up your calls to action, your visitor won’t be able to either, and they will not know or understand how to respond. Want to increase your conversion rates right away? Look at this first.
Great Communication Options
Your customers want to communicate with you, and for your site to be great, that should be one of its primary goals. Your blog content should educate through entertainment, and your landing and product pages should be well written. However, this is not always enough.
Sometimes your prospect or web visitor wants to get in touch with you directly. This can be done several ways. The first is that you should have form plugins for WordPress and well-designed contact forms. This is your customer’s first gateway to contacting you.
You should also have a contact page with a phone number, email address, and even an internet chat option. These things let your customers know you are engaged and want to hear from them. These communication options are essential for your site to be a great one.
Solid SEO
One of the keys to a great site’s success is the ability for a user to easily discover it through an internet search engine. The key to this is Search Engine Optimization or SEO. A complex topic, SEO essentially boils down to making sure you have the right keywords, meta data, title tags, and other items in place so that search engines like Google know what your site is about and what each article relates to.
This helps a search engine index your site properly and bring it up in relevant searches. The higher you are in those search results, the more traffic you will get to your site. Typically the more traffic you get, the higher your conversion rates, and the closer to greatness your site will be.
Great sites all have some solid foundations in common. Take these five to heart, and put your site on the path to greatness.