Business
Is Your Website Helping or Hurting Your Business?
A website can be your business’ biggest asset. Do you know if it’s helping or hurting your business? Find out with help from our guide!
A website can be your business’ biggest asset. It can be a simple, informational site or it can be a complex revenue driving machine.
When building a website, it’s important to keep in mind your business’ goals. Do you need to educate visitors about your business or industry? Do you need to generate more leads or want to sell more products online?
Establishing what you want your website to do is the first step in determining whether it is helping or hurting your business. After you set some goals, there are a variety of factors you can look at that will have an impact of the success of your website.
This article will be the first in a series explaining each of these factors in more and more detail.
Modern Design
The most noticeable aspect of your website that can have a huge affect on its performance is the design. Your website is a direct reflection of your business & your brand, and is often the first point of interaction a customer will have with your business.
Is the design of your site modern & current, or old & outdated?
Mobile Responsive
More than half of all web traffic is on a mobile device and this trend is expected to continue. Because of this, the mobile responsiveness of your website will have a huge impact on your business.
Does your website display properly on a smartphone or tablet? Is it easy to use on these mobile devices?
Strategic CTAs
A call-to-action (CTA) is a prompt or a request for a visitor on your site to complete an action. You may want them to purchase an item, or to fill out a contact form. Constructing a proper call-to-action, and placing them strategically throughout your website will play a big role in ensuring that your website is helping your business!
Optimized Content
This one is big. The content on your website needs to be optimized for humans & for search engines. The content and wording should be arranged in a way that makes it easy for search engines to understand, while still engaging and informing your human visitors! Are you sending the right message?
Intelligent Information Architecture
Intelligent Information Architecture is similar to having optimized content on your site. This is the term we use when referring to the flow of information on your website. Is content on your site arranged in a way that is logical and increases the chance of a visitor reading all the information on your site?
This is especially important when you need visitors on your site to complete an action like filling out a form or purchasing a product.
Recaptcha & Bruteforce Protection
Ever get a password wrong too many times and been told that you have no more guesses left? Tools like Recaptcha & Bruteforce Protection stop people (& robots!) from continually guessing passwords, or submitting spam form entries.
These tools help give you peace of mind, and keep both you and your customers safe.
SSL Certificate
An SSL Certificate encrypts the connection of a visitor on your site. Without an SSL Certificate any information that a visitor enters onto your site may be pulled or stolen by a 3 rd party. This keeps your customers safe and is also taken into consideration by Google.
A good way to tell if your site has an SSL Certificate is to check if you see a little green lock next to the URL at the top of your internet browser. Another way to tell is if your website URL starts with “https://“ instead of “http://“.
Secure Hosting
Another often undervalued security factor is having your site hosted on a secure server. Web hosting can range in price (As can email hosting), and a lot of this has to do with the quality of the servers that your website or email is being hosted on.
This will reduce the risk of your website getting hacked, infected with a virus, or getting lost/deleted. Inquire with your web hosting provider about the security measures used on the server your website is hosted on.
Scheduled Back-Ups
Scheduling back-ups of your website is critically important. If anything happens to your website, it is good to know you have at least one back-up of all the information from content & images on your site, to form submissions & sales data.
If you don’t have a back-up of your website and something happens to it, you will not be able to recover it. Think of this like website insurance!
SEO Foundation/On-Page SEO
While SEO can become a very involved process, the biggest thing we look for when determining if your website is helping or hurting your business is the basic or “on-page” SEO.
Are the page titles, meta-tags and meta-descriptions (Information read by search engines) configured properly? More importantly, is the website set-up to be indexed by search engines in the first place?
In Short
While most of these factors on their own won’t make or break your website, when combined they all work together to help or hurt your business. There’s no denying that your business needs a website, but with a little care & attention it can quickly become one of your biggest and most valuable assets.
Check back to this article often for in-depth articles & videos on each aspect listed above, or Join The World of Bluedot to make sure you don’t miss a single one!
If you have questions or want to learn more, use the chat box in the bottom right of your screen, or call/email us today!
