10 Essential Elements Every Website Design Should Have
Websites are a crucial part of the online presence of your business or brand.
Even with social media and other things going on, websites are much relevant to your business goals.
However, they’ve come very far ever since the early days, and more elements are needed now. Ensure that your website is on point and not a waste of money and time to maintain.
Having elements like XML sitemaps is essential. Know more about Why XML Sitemaps still matter for SEO.
If you want to maximize your website’s effectiveness and provide positive returns on your website investment, below are the other elements that your website must have:
Table of Contents
1. User-Friendly Website Navigation
The most crucial element for good websites is having the best user-friendly navigation. You might be offering the perfect products and services in the market. However, they’d be of no use if the potential customers or visitors can’t locate them.
Read – How To Optimize Your Website For Mobile SEO?
So, how can you ensure that the customers will have smooth and easy website navigation?
The key is to have a simple and well-organized website layout. Moreover, prominent navigation and search tabs must be placed on the top of every page.
Links to all your website’s main pages must be present on your navigation tabs.
2. Well-Written Content
If you want to resonate with your readers or potential customers, you must write with their unique needs in mind. It may mean not only writing about how you may help them with various things but also writing in a way that’s easy to understand.
Your potential customers must easily find the gist of your content if you want to improve your conversions.
If content writing isn’t something you’re good at, try to ask for help from professional copywriters for your content pages, like the About section.
Copywriters know the importance of the connection between content and SEO.
They may start from your general ideas and words and improve them by organizing them into paragraphs that speak in the voice and tone your company likes to convey.
For some ongoing updates on content like blog articles, it may be a good idea to write like conversations, which can help your customers connect easily with your business and build a sense of loyalty and sense.
3. Clear Homepage
Among other pages of your website, your homepage is the most visited one. So, it’s crucial that you convey your message across your homepage and let your audience dive deeper into your website quickly.
Visitors can easily get an immediate impression of your business at first glance at your homepage.
They can also determine how professional your business is just by looking at the homepage since it highlights what’s crucial for them to browse more or proceed to the next few pages.
Therefore, ensure that your homepage must give your visitors access to your website’s areas by chunking any related information together and providing visitors a preview of every section.
4. Call-To-Action (CTA)
Make sure that your website has a CTA, which is useful to guide visitors to the activities that are necessary to do such as online purchases, subscribing to your promotional emails or newsletters, and availing discounts.
5. Company Logo or Name
Once your target audience lands on your website after doing a quick search, they like to ensure that they’ve visited the right place. So, don’t forget to include your company name or logo.
Read – 15+ Best & Free Logo Makers, Logo Creators & Online Designing Tools
The best spot for logos is in the upper right corner of your website. It must also serve as your default link to return the visitors back to your homepage.
6. Responsive Design
Your website should be usable and must look good, regardless of the browsers being used by your audience.
The reason behind it is that most of your users may use either mobile or desktop to access your website. Thus, wherever they view it, your website must work as intended.
Read – 15 Best WordPress Blog Themes & Templates [Responsive]
Responsive design is crucial for this reason. Because first impressions matter, you would want your users to like your website.
If you don’t apply a responsive design, they might just look for another website that’s more appealing and easier to use.
7. Contact Details
More often than not, most websites miss placing clear contact information or a contact form.
A simple contact form must be included in all your website’s pages, along with a link to your contact information.
Read – 4 Best Contact Form Plugins for WordPress Compared [2021]
If some of your customers want to come to you, having an address is vital. Place that above your top header and navigation menu with your email address and phone number.
Depending on your preferences, you can also put contact information in the footer.
8. Links to Social Media Websites
The majority of web traffic these days happens on social networks. This doesn’t only include websites, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, but also other websites like Instagram and YouTube.
Have a row of social media icons that link to your pages somewhere on each page of your website.
Read – 3+ Best Social Media Sharing Plugins For WordPress [2021]
It’s also a great idea to share links that enable your visitors to share your website content on their social media websites or embed them on their websites.
It’s not only a good form of free advertising, but it can be beneficial for your SEO.
9. Website Security
If you’ll sell online, your customers have to know that their personal data is safe. It includes anything sensitive information, such as phone numbers, physical address, emails, names, and credit card details.
Read – The Ultimate WordPress Security Guide – 27+ Tips to Keep Your Website Secure!
Your website must have full-fledged security features and an outward appearance of being trustworthy.
Website security often includes encryption using an SSL certificate and other anti-fraud measures to protect your customers and your business.
10. Quality Images
Having images of your business, staff, and facilities can make a difference in your website’s credibility in the industry.
A great example is hosting company sites. Nowadays, there are thousands of them, and most use stock photos. You should remember that stock photos don’t help in establishing credibility.
Read – ShortPixel Image Optimizer Review – Best WordPress Image Compression Plugin
As a matter of fact, they make your visitors question whether or not your business exists or just a façade. To avoid this, use quality and original images instead for an effective web design.
Conclusion
There are other website elements you can consider, but the listed ones above are paramount to the effectiveness of your website as a sales tool.
Recommended Read – 5 Must-Have WordPress Plugins for Beginners [2021]
It’s always a great idea to have a team of professionals who can work on your website, so you can enjoy the benefits of an effective business website.
