4 key features every website needs to have
Whether you are building your website by yourself or outsourcing the project, it should be as user-friendly as possible. Of course, it depends on the type of your business what features your clients will value the most, but there are universal ones that your website most definitely should have.
The design and content are what’s keeping your clients on the website. It also should be versatile and easy to navigate. However, it is not always clear what the website has to contain and how it suppose to “behave” to attract and keep as much visitors as possible.
Mobile-friendly website
The mobile traffic share is growing year after year. In fact currently more than half of all data traffic (52,2% in 2018) come from mobile devices. And due to the websites not being responsive enough, businesses are missing the huge amount of sale opportunities. You should consider to upgrade the mobile version of your website or even to create a web app to run on mobile devices. This will not only increase your sales but also will give you the foundation for future improvements as the world is becoming more and more mobile.
Outstanding call-to-action
If the user does not see the clear call-to-action he will simply leave your website without giving you anything that you would like to get from him. It doesn’t matter if you sell something, offer some kind of services or your website is only educational, you will want your clients to give you something in return. Whether it’s a bit of information such as e-mail address or phone number, or perform any action you would want the user to come back to your website and become your client in one way or another. Usually, regular users do not realize that websites have the conversion as a purpose behind them and perceive given information as free. So they don’t feel obligated when they leave a website. However, the business is losing valuable data or even a client without giving users clear call-to-action.
Load time
The speed of website load is important not only for Google indexing but also for the overall performance of the website. Mobile users are willing to wait only for 3 seconds before they will move on to the next website or mobile app. In a meanwhile, the average load time for mobile websites is 22 seconds, meaning that a lot of websites are being abandoned even before the user have an opportunity to see its content. Improving the load speed of your website will give you a huge advantage over your competitors as 1 second delay reduces page views by 11% and conversion rate by 7%, also it can increase the bounce rate up to 32%.
Journey-driven design
You need to keep users on your website as long as possible to increase the likelihood of purchase or some defined action. It means that all of your pages supposed to connect with each other in some way to encourage the user to view more of your content. Long session time also will help you to rank higher in Google as the search engine will assume that users are finding your website helpful and entertaining. User journey is valuable data for your business too because it gives you the information about the interactions with pages and most importantly helps you to understand when the user leaves the website and why. Collecting this information you can improve your website to make it more appealing for future visitors.
Modern websites are supposed to sell
The main purpose of websites nowadays is to convert. Some sell products and services, others give information in exchange for users data, but they all are aiming to keep visitors on the website and turn them into clients afterward. All the points mentioned above influence the users’ experience and improve the relations with clients that seem to be one of the most important goals for businesses now. At the end of the day, the satisfied and loyal visitor is more likely to become regular clients.
