Your website is your storefront on the Internet. Its role is to attract visitors and convert them into customers. However, its appearance, content, positioning and the customer journey it offers greatly influence its performance.
It is therefore essential to invest in the optimization of your site to derive the greatest benefit from it. Below are the 6 key points to have a successful website.
The basics of a successful website
Having a successful website starts with the choice of the Content Management System (or CMS: Content Management System). Opt for a reliable CMS that will ensure good performance for your site for several years.
Large CMSs like WordPress benefit from regular updates, which keeps your website constantly evolving. For a site developed from scratch, it's not that simple. You will need the time and resources to constantly adapt it to new technologies.
Also think about the choice of your domain name. A relevant domain name is an NDD:
- ideally short,
- easy to remember and write,
- representative of your brand,
- and have an appropriate extension (example: .ch if activity in Switzerland, .com if commercial activity, etc.).
1 A trendy and professional web design
To be successful, your website must instantly leave a positive impression in the minds of your visitors.
Its web design should reflect your brand identity and inspire trust, evoking a credible business. Likewise, the layout of your website must be designed to provide a smooth browsing experience for the user. We are talking about user experience.
Indeed, the human brain captures and understands images much faster than texts. The ideal is to adopt a minimalist design with professional and captivating photos of your products. Opt for an attractive appearance to make your visitors want to know you better.
2 Fast loading
A successful website is a website that loads quickly.
According to We are Social, 53.3% of internet traffic comes from smartphones, and this number is constantly growing. For Google, 53% of mobile users abandon a session if the site takes more than 3 seconds to load. But in addition to scaring away users, heavy websites are penalized by search engines.
To minimize loading time across your entire website, you should:
- have a lightweight code,
- remove unnecessary plug-ins (extensions),
- optimize the size of images for the web,
- have good hosting.
3 A successful website requires responsive web design
Responsive design is an important aspect of making a website perform well.
Your site must adapt to all the screens of the devices used to consult it (computer, tablet, mobile, smart TV, etc.). A responsive design offers several benefits to your site:
- good loading speed,
- a better customer journey,
- personalized content according to the user.
4 A quality text
The quality of text content has a considerable impact on the performance of your site. Your content must respond to the specific concerns of Internet users. This is what will grab their attention and drive them to visit your site.
This is the whole point of web writing: producing relevant and quality content to generate visitors to a website. To do this, you must target keywords relating to the needs and activities of your target.
For example, if you sell children's shoes in Paris, you may be tempted to position yourself on the keyword "Paris shoe". But it may be that sites selling adult shoes occupy the top positions in Google. It would therefore be more interesting to target the keyword "children's shoe paris".
5 Smooth navigation
Visitors access the content of a website by navigating between pages.
The tree structure of your site must therefore facilitate access to the desired content as much as possible. Remember to take care of the navigation levels of your menu, knowing that 56% of visitors use it to navigate on a site.
If you have a complex website or one that contains a lot of pages — a blog or a transactional site for example — it would be interesting to add a breadcrumb at least on the pages that do not appear in the menu.
Also add calls to action (CTA) to your pages to lead your visitors to more information.
6 Good SEO practices
Knowing that 94% of web traffic comes from search engines, natural referencing (SEO) becomes one of the most important aspects of having a successful website.
A good SEO optimization is the assurance of:
- increase your visibility on Google,
- generate quality natural traffic,
- increase your conversion rate.
But to benefit from these advantages and improve the performance of your site, you must:
- optimize the technical aspect,
- optimize your content (texts, images, infographics, etc.),
- and get recommendations from sites relevant to your topic.
If you don't have time to take care of it, the AntheDesign team will be happy to offer you personalized support. In addition, our agency offers the creation of a high-performance website, the redesign and creation of your SEO strategy.
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