Your website is your digital storefront, your first impression, and often the deciding factor for potential customers. To make it a success, you need more than just a pretty design—you need functionality, engagement, and optimization. Here are the 10 things every website must have to thrive in today’s competitive digital landscape:
More than half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices. If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, you’re turning away potential visitors. Ensure responsive design so your website looks and functions great on any device.
Patience is thin online. Websites that take more than 3 seconds to load lose about 40% of visitors. Optimize images, leverage caching, and use a fast web host.
What do you want visitors to do? Buy? Contact you? Subscribe? Make your CTAs clear, prominent, and action-oriented to guide users through their journey.
A confusing website is a bounce waiting to happen. Implement intuitive menus, breadcrumbs, and internal links to make finding information effortless.
Content is king. Regularly update your website with engaging blogs, product descriptions, FAQs, and more. High-quality content builds trust and helps with SEO.
Your site needs to be visible. Research and incorporate relevant keywords, optimize meta descriptions, and ensure your site is crawlable by search engines.
With cyber threats on the rise, an SSL certificate is non-negotiable. Visitors need to trust your site is safe for browsing and transactions.
Showcase customer reviews, testimonials, and case studies. People trust the opinions of others, so let them see the great experiences of your happy clients.
You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Tools like Google Analytics help you understand visitor behavior, track conversions, and optimize performance.
Even the best websites need upkeep. Regularly check for broken links, outdated plugins, and content updates to keep your site running smoothly.
If you need assistance implementing these 10 things every website must have, partner with a professional website management company like RooSites to ensure your site always delivers the best experience.
They just would substitute the main picture and change text, my guess is it took them an hour to build the entire websites. The problem with this is that it’s not only boring, it’s also not a good business practice at your charging people for a new website, but giving them re-used websites.
Have you ever noticed when you are designing a website, you have a tendency to fall back on what worked in the past for you? Does it get to the point where all your sites start to look the same? I call this the “Mike Brady Syndrome”. If you remember, in The Brady Bunch Movie, Mike, an architect was failing to sell designs as they all looked like his one successful project: The Brady house. He designed a gas station, and it was the Brady House with gas pumps, he then designed a restaurant, again exactly the same. He couldn’t understand why he couldn’t sell a design, as he was too close to it to see the forest through the trees.
The point is, we all get stale and it can be challenging to come up with new designs. For me, I don’t have the option of repeated trips back to the drawing board, so I tend to have at least 2 other designers create a mockup along with myself. This allows my clients to have really good choices and the end result tends to be something special. As my company develops sites for small businesses, this type of service is pretty rare, and I am proud of that. Now if I were strictly a designer I may not be able to do this, but since I also develop and ultimately manage the sites, it is my best interest to create something special, even if the design phase can be quite costly. I also try to rotate in new freelancers to create designs, as using the same few ends up back with Brady Houses.
So let me ask you this, if you are a designer, you need to get inspiration to avoid the syndrome I mentioned. Where do you go for that inspiration? Websites? A walk in nature? I would love to hear. I am sure those pulling their hair out would like to know as well.
