10 Must-Have Features for an Effective Business Website

10 Must-Have Features for an Effective Business Website

If you own a business of any type or size, you already know the importance of a successful website. During this era of the Internet and information, people expect your business presence online. However, there are some business owners who have a list of reasons why they think they don’t need a website. 

In this digital era, it is important to have a strong online appearance through a business website. Here are the top 10 tips that will help you to build an effective website for your business. 

1. Domain Name

The first thing you need to do is find a perfect domain name that suits your business or brand. Your domain will represent who you are. It is always important to find a domain that ends in .com. 

You can check the availability of a specific domain name and purchase from providers like Dynadot and GoDaddy. Take your time to think of a perfect domain name for your business website. Ensure that your domain name isn’t too long, hard to spell, or hyphenated. 

A domain name needs to be short, a perfect representation of your website, and easy to remember. 

2. Navigation at the Top

Navigation is another crucial factor to consider while building a business website. Always ensure that your website has a navigation bar at the top of every page. When people visit your website, the first thing that they do will navigate through your website.

Visitors will explore your website by finding what they are looking for and thus become customers rather than just visitors. It is always a great idea to have navigation in the footer of your website. 

3. Contact Information

You must put the contact information on your website. It can be your location, email address, phone number, and a contact form. Preferably, this information should be placed above the “fold” of your homepage. It is an area of the page that is visible before scrolling down. 

It is also useful to have information that relates directly to your business, like your working hours, social media channels, and other locations. 

4. Calls to Action

There is nothing better than a perfect Call to Action (CTA). It should be placed on every page of your website.In fact, it is always essential to add CTA several times on your page. Your header and footer should have CTAs for increased conversion rates. 

It is also important to add your hyperlink and contact number on your contact page. You can ask your website developer to add a box on web pages that will highlight the contact information. Try to make your contact information more visible to your visitors. 

Moreover, you don’t want your website to look too much like a sales pitch, or it may result in a decreased conversion. You can maintain a perfect balance by experimenting and seeing what is suitable for your particular website.

5. Fresh Content and Images

Your website is nothing without content. Many people think that any content will be better to fill up their web pages and look nice. However, the fact is that nothing can be better than the truth. Your website needs information that is helpful for visitors so that they convert into your customers.

If you want to hire someone for writing content, make sure to provide a writer with specific information regarding your business and website. Tell the writer about your business idea and what you want on the pages. Your web pages should be understandable and easy to read.

Every page of your website should look fresh and have original content free from plagiarism. You can use premium tools like Copyscape and Grammarly to check all of your content and ensure that nothing is copied. 

It is also vital to ensure that your webpages are long enough to accommodate 500-700 words. Google index pages having longer content that represents you as an expert in your business. 

Images are essential for every website. We are living in a virtual era, and people love to see lots of photos for a better online experience. Always make sure that your images are in the smallest size to optimize your site’s load time. 

Moreover, infographics are also helpful to make your website look more interesting than just words on a screen. Some free online sites and tools will help you create an infographic if you have some basic knowledge to share on your website.

6. Responsive Website

80% of people are using the Internet on their smartphones nowadays. People will be looking at your website on various devices like laptops, tablets, and computers. It is always essential to make your website responsive or mobile-friendly. There are two ways to do this.

One is to create a separate website having a similar URL to your website, such as m.yourwebsite.com. Such sites are always designed for mobile devices, and they need a separate website, host, URL, domain, etc. 

The second option to make use of a web development platform that will automatically make your website responsive. However, this is a much cheaper option to make your website responsive. The most important thing is to ensure that your website is mobile-friendly because Google will prefer responsive websites. 

7. Professional Coding

You can indeed create your own business website. Various free tools can help business owners in the early stages of their business. However, it is essential to ensure that your website is well put-together. It means you need to make sure that your images will load correctly, videos are working fine, and your contact form is working correctly. 

It is perfectly fine if you know how to code, but ask professionals for help if you don’t. It will be worth your money and time to have the site perfectly designed. Otherwise, people will find errors on your website and lose their interest. 

8. Customer Testimonials and Reviews

The first step is to attract people to your website. Once they are on your website, they will evaluate your website and your business. What are you offering? What makes you good for your customers? Why to buy your product or services? Have other people achieved something from your business? 

One of the best ways to get people to know about your services is by reading testimonials and reviews from your clients. Reading about your previous or current clients' good experiences will help convince visitors to buy your product or service. 

9. Trust Badges

If you don’t know about trust badges, it’s time to get familiar with them. Trust badges or symbols are images that help to show that you are a legitimate business. It has been estimated that trust badges helped in 32% increased conversion rates. 

There are two types of trust badges; one is SSL badges that prove your connection is encrypted between the visitors' web browser and your site. Images can show a relationship between its users and your website, but they don’t offer security. Here, it is crucial to understand the working of trust badges, but you need to add them to your site.

10. Blog Page

Every website needs to have a blog page. There was a controversy about this, but overall, it is an excellent idea for any business to flourish. Some of the significant reasons to have a blog include: driving traffic to the website, converting visitors into leads, driving long-term results, and establishing authority.

Your website needs a blog to interact with your visitors, and it needs to be updated frequently. At least one blog post a week is essential, but it would be better to add more. Google will rank your website better for updating your content regularly. 

Take the time to invest in a blog for your website, and you will get positive results. If you don’t have enough time or talent to write blogs, you can hire freelance writers to handle this work for you.

Final Verdict

As you can see, these are some critical features for having an effective small business website. Unfortunately, many business owners skip many of these features. You need to spend some of your time and money on a website that is SEO-optimized, full of rich content, responsive, and easy to navigate, and you will surely stand out.