What makes a great website?

What makes a great website?

There are 6 things that make a great website. A great website should be:

• attractive
• fast
• secure
• visible
• functional
• compliant.

01 Attractive

There are lots of simple things that you can do to make your website attractive. Make your website consistent and professional.

• You should use two fonts (header/paragraphs). Ideally, two fonts that work well together.
• You should pick three colours to use on your website and one of these should colour match your logo/branding.
• Make sure you use high-quality images throughout your website and make sure you are using the right size, format, and resolution for your images. If you don’t have high-quality images don’t be afraid of using stock photography to make it look more professional or if you want something more unique a photographer.
• Your website should not be overcrowded. Make sure you have plenty of white space so that your content is visible. If you are using a standard template – it should already do this for you.

Needs some inspiration – check out Awwwards.

Resources:

• Font Pair – helps you pair google fonts together
• ColorZilla – Colour picker and Analyzer
• Pexels – Stock Photography
• Pine Tools – large list of free online tools
• ThemeForest – WordPress themes

02 Fast

Your website should be fast. You want to target it loading in under 3 seconds (otherwise it will impact your bounce rate). Use of large images can have an impact, so make sure you compress your images to reduce the file size. Other things that you can do to make sure that your website is fast include set-up the caching correctly (wp super cache plugin), checking your web hosting and reducing your API calls. If you have also of things embedded in your site – consider do you really need them.

You can use websites to monitor your website performance and do speed tests/analysis.

Resources:

• Pingdom – Website Performance Monitoring
• GTmetrix – Analyse your site’s speed
• Google Page Speed – Page Speed Insights

03 Secure

If you haven’t added an SSL Certificate and secured your website – you should do this. If you have an online store on your website – you have to have it secured. However, even if you don’t have a store you should still make your site secure. As it will improve your SEO and improve confidence in your website.

With a lot of web hosting packages will have a security certificate include for free (you just need to activate and set it up) and if you are using managed web hosting – they will do this automatically.

You should also ensure that your computer is secure by having a firewall, using antivirus protection and running regular scans and using strong passwords.

Resources:

• Let’s Encrypt – SSL Certificates
• Last Pass – Password Manager
• Sucuri.net – Website Security Platform
• McAfee Secure – Trustmark/Plugin

04 Visible

It is important that your website is “visible” and people can find you. This will mean optimising your SEO. This will include setting up your google search console and optimising both your external SEO (e.g. backlinks) and your internal SEO (e.g. speed, security, tag alt text etc)

Resources:

• SEO site checkup
• Backlinko – SEO training and Link Building Strategies
• Moz
• Moz Local

05 Functional (User Experience)

Your website should be simple and easy for your user to use. Simply put if they can’t find what they are looking for then they will leave.

Review your website and ensure that you:

• simplify where possible – use a classic and familar structure – e.g. home, about, services/pricing, blog/news, contact.
• plan your customer’s journey. Don’t have strange navigation pathways.
• track your users using google analytics and other tools. Once you understand your customers you can optimise and tweak your website.
• use trustmarks – this includes things like SSL Certificate (mentioned above), testimonials, the logos of official trustmarks and certifications, including your full contact details.
• capture value by collecting email signups and building up a mailing list.

If you don’t do all of this you are leaving it to chance whether your customers click where you want them to.

Resources:

• Google Analytics
• Crazy Egg – Visualise your Visitors / User Heatmap
• User Testing – external feedback

06 Compliant

Your website should be legally compliant. Here in the UK, this means having an EU Cookie Banner, Terms of Use and Privacy Policies on your website. It means compliance with GDPR, compliance with trading and distance selling laws, PCI compliance, making sure your website is accessible etc.

Resources:

• ICO – GDPR
• W3.org – standards
• PCI Security Standards
• LawBite