Did you know it takes users less than 0.05 seconds to form an opinion about your website? This means you have a fraction of time to impress them before they click away. Whether you’re building your first website or you already have one, there are a lot of important details to take care of. From making sure the website is loading fast to choosing the right color palette for your audience, building a user-friendly website can be challenging. Luckily, a good web designer will know how to build a strong, optimized website that’s ripe for conversions. Keep reading to discover eight essential factors to consider when designing websites for your business or brand.
1. High-Quality Hosting Provider
Before you start thinking about website design, you need to find the best possible hosting. A powerful hosting provider will make sure your website is always up and running, help you improve loading speed, and handle any technical issues that come up.
Choose a plan based on the traffic you expect, the content you post, and your website’s purpose. If you’re starting with a new website, go for a more basic plan until you grow your traffic.
2. Website Speed and Loading Time
Did you know that users expect websites to load in less than 3 seconds? If a website takes even 4 seconds to load, the bounce rate goes up to 90%, which means users click away, never to come back again. This is why you need a reliable hosting provider, a lightweight web design, and optimized images.
For businesses, slow websites mean fewer conversions and lost visitors. Users are impatient, and if they don’t get what they need within the first 3 seconds (or less), they’ll exit and go somewhere else.
3. Mobile-Friendly Design
Having a mobile-friendly website is not an option, but a must for both search engine rankings and user experience. With most people browsing from their smartphones or tablets, your website needs to be designed for smaller screens as well.
You can check your website’s performance on mobile devices using Google’s mobile-friendly test. It’ll show you if there are any issues you need to fix to improve performance.
4. Layout and Visuals
The website layout is important for user experience and conversion rates. It should be structured to be easy to navigate so users can find everything at first glance. When designing different pages, imagine how website visitors see each page and what they’re looking for.
Layout refers to how the website is organized, i.e. headers, footers, CTA buttons, social share buttons, menu, forms, banners, and locations for logos. Visuals like your logo, colors, typography, graphics, and images will help keep visitors scrolling and clicking.
5. Color Scheme and Typography
Choosing a color scheme for your business website should be easy if you already have a defined brand identity. You may use one or two main colors and one complimentary color, but anything more than that will overwhelm the visitor.
The colors you choose also depend on the type of audience you’ll have for the website. For example, if your business is a SaaS, your audience will want to see blue, green, or orange. If you have a parenting website, your safest bet is using bright, gentle, pastel colors.
You can also look at your competitors’ websites to see what color palettes they use to get inspiration.
6. Search Engine Optimization
When you build a website from scratch, it’s essential to optimize it for search engines. As soon as you launch, search engines will start reading each page and rank it based on the content, visitors and activity, and optimization efforts.
One of SEO’s biggest benefits is increased visibility – the higher the ranking, the more users will click on the website. Here are 6 important SEO details you don’t want to ignore when it comes to websites.
7. User Experience
One of the most important parts of a website is user experience. This is also a crucial factor for search engine rankings, as search engines like Google pay special attention to bounce rates, time on page, and clickthrough rates. In other words, the more time visitors spend on your website, the higher it’ll rank.
But user experience isn’t just for search engines. It’s mainly about giving users a simple, seamless experience where they can find everything they need. This means simple menu design, clean pages, defined color palettes, easy-to-read text, and fast loading.
8. Website Content
Internet users are not only impatient, but they’re also very picky when it comes to the content they consume. Website content is a powerful communication tool between a business and its potential and existing customers.
Content is more than just your homepage and blog, but it’s also what you say in your About page, Contact page, and Services pages. This is where visitors go to get to know your business and form an opinion about it. Your website content should be customer-centric first and aim to help, inform, and convert.
Let’s say a user searches for something on Google and uses a specific keyword. If you have a blog post containing that keyword, but the content doesn’t answer the user’s question or search query, they’ll leave your website.
This is why website content is important for both attracting and retaining users. You want to keep them interested, so they stay on your website and ultimately convert.
Consider These Crucial Factors When Designing Websites for Businesses
Whether you’re new to designing websites or need a re-design of your existing website, there are some important factors to consider before you launch.
Making the website fast-loading and easy to navigate using a branded color palette is all about having a user-friendly website optimized for conversions.
Ready to create a website that’ll represent your business perfectly? Contact us today and let us bring your vision into reality.
