11 Must-Have Features of a Good Business Website: Do’s and Don’ts

You must be making a new website or unhappy with your current one if you’ve clicked on this article.

Rest assured, we have compiled a comprehensive list of everything that makes a website good while also mentioning some big Nos that you need to avoid. That serves its purpose swimmingly well. 

Want to increase sales on your website? Check this Youtube video from GoDaddy!

Why Is a Good Business Website Important?

User experience is the top factor in determining what makes a good website. Every decision made on your website should be designed to benefit and facilitate how a user views and navigates through your website. This not only leaves a good impression on the visitor but also increases the probability of them visiting it again. A good practice of synthetic transaction monitoring allows you to automate the testing of user experiences and critical business transactions.

Making That First Impression Count

Have you ever scrolled through a website and been so impressed that you wish you had a similar interface for your own? There you go. That’s the clear objective here. What that website successfully did was before you even got the chance to consume the content. You were allured by design alone. They say “looks don’t matter”, but in the case of a website, they sure do! On websites, first impressions are 94% design-related.

The main banner for your website should be an avid representation of what you have to offer on your website. Whether it is consumer products, or blogs, when a user is greeted with great visuals, they immediately show a liking towards your website. According to a study on Behavior & Information Technology, it takes about 50 milliseconds for users to form an opinion about your website that determines whether they like your site or not, whether they’ll stay or leave.

Building Credibility

Authentication and credibility carry paramount importance in web development. A website focused on building a credible platform successfully captivates the users into believing your content and making a decision based on it.

Multiple factors can come into play in building credibility on your website. Once again, however, web design tops the list. 75% of consumers admit to making judgments on a company’s credibility based on the company’s website design.

Do: 6 Features of a Good Business Website

“What is a good website?” While some would say that the answer to this is subjective, varying from website to website, some key factors universally improve the general appeal of your website.

Here are some Do’s that can ensure your website is received well by any visitor:

1. Informative and Quality Content

   Websites that contain outdated or boring content are a big no-no. Readers today have a very minute attention span. And if they find your content doesn’t give them what they want, they skip. We don’t want that. So it would be best if you always focused on creating quality content for your website that does not simply fill space.  

   Viewers will come to your website if they get two lines of value-adding content instead of visiting a website with tons of useless information. The reader today is focus-driven and informed. They know what they want, and they flock to it once you dish it to them.

   Also, remember to keep your website updated. Much like everything else, business science is also continually advancing. As a result, there are new updates, reforms, policies, etc., that you can discuss.

   And these continuous new updates will make the existing information dormant. So always keep in mind to never have dormant information on your site. If you want a successful website, keep refreshing the content on your web pages and blog and see how that makes a difference.

2. Testimonials
   

   Seemingly little client feedback on your website is one of the most powerful tools you can have to increase your website’s credibility and traffic. Have you ever wondered if you can trust a certain product or service before making a purchase decision? Testimonials make an excellent case in filling that gap. More than 88% of the consumers say that testimonials incorporate purchase decisions.Similarly, websites with testimonials also have a 45% increase in traffic than websites with no testimonials. When looking to improve your own website, make sure to incorporate customer feedback and testimonials.

3. Skimmable Content
   

   Picture this: You visit a website, and you’re greeted with a wall of text. Information gets extremely difficult to comprehend and make sense of, and you do not find what you came to look for. According to a study, “Users spend an average of 5.59 seconds looking at a website’s written content”. This is a very small amount of time to get your message across.Skimmable content breaks your message down in easy-to-consume packets, so your views retain more information in a smaller amount of time.  This can be done by writing things down in bullet points or shorter and easy-to-understand sentences.

4. Mobile-First Design
   

   Never paid attention to how your website’s mobile interface looked? Here are some hard-hitting statistics coming your way:85% of adults think that a company’s website should be as good or better than its desktop website when viewed on a mobile device.Average smartphone conversion rates are up 64% compared to desktop conversion rates.We could go on and on, and it still wouldn’t adequately explain how important your website’s mobile interface is. Your average consumers are not using desktop computers. Instead, every individual is on the phone. And this is why having a mobile-friendly website is necessary. It’s time to adapt and conquer!

5. Contact Information That Makes You Look Accessible

   Suppose you successfully grasp your customer’s attention and visitors like what they see. But now they want to contact you and are having a hard time locating your contact information. All your hard work will come down to nothing if they get frustrated and walk away.

   Making yourself look easily accessible is also a great way to start a relationship with your newfound consumers. They will get a sense that you are there, and they will not have to chase you down –  something no customer wants to do.

   And this is why we advise you to put your contact information on each webpage on your site. It should be so that your visitors can quickly locate the data. You can also look into creating a separate ‘Contact Us’ page to make it easy to find. Putting a Google map will add more points.

6. Design-Oriented Images
   

   Let’s get back to the topic we preached the most: Design. Images are a huge part of the design of your website. We all know that too few images on your interface can be very drab and boring. But there is also such a thing as too many visuals. Try to find the right balance when designing your own website. Users spend an average of 5.94 seconds looking at a website’s main image.Another important to make sure, other than ensuring that the visuals are all aesthetically aligned, is that they do not take a long time to load. Slow-loading websites cost retailers $2.6 billion in lost sales each year.

7. Social Media Tabs

   The majority of internet users today use one or the other social media applications. They also search for individuals and businesses online on these apps to judge their credibility. Most people attach a sense of reliability to businesses with an active social media account. It means the business is modern and up-to-the-minute.

   Putting up social media icons on your webpage provides your customers access to your social media profiles. Also, even if they don’t look you up on LinkedIn, they would know you are there through your webpage icon, and that is enough of a representation.

   However, this goes hand-in-hand with creating a solid social media marketing policy and having active accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. 

8. A Solid ‘About Us’ Page
   

   We’ve seen too many examples of companies with brilliant ideas but downright terrible execution when it comes to translating them into words. An ‘About Us’ page is singlehandedly one of the most important features of a good website. According to a recent study, 52% of respondents said the first thing they want to see when they land on a website is a company’s ‘About Us page.Make sure your ‘About Us’ page is in top condition and is a great depiction of who you are and what your website is about. And if it doesn’t exist on your website right now – well, then make it a priority right away! Not sure where to start? Follow the tips and examples in this article that shows you how to write a good ‘About us’ page.

9. A Call to Action
   

   For a B2B or B2C business, one of the most important features is that the visiting consumer sells through their website. And contrary to popular belief, a customer can totally be convinced to make a purchase when the website, even if they had no intention of buying anything.

   A well-placed Call-To-Action (CTA) is a massive help in this. However, 70% of small business websites lack a Call to Action on their homepage. This can gravely affect your sales since a customer won’t know what to do in order to make a purchase.

   Here is an example from a content site, LuckyMag showing how you can add catchy buttons to improve conversion.

10. Optimize Your Webpage And Content

    Creating a good user experience is one of the essential features of a good business website. However, that is not the only critical factor in determining a popular webpage.

    A good webpage that does not yield massive traffic is still not a success. And this is why you must also optimize your web page on search engines.

    So, for example, an internet user opens a web browser such as Google Chrome and types ‘kitchen renovations in Colorado.’ If your webpage is effectively optimized, your content should pop up at the top of the search. If that is not the case, other businesses will take the lead and bag all the potential customers and sales.

11. Add A Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) Section

    Your website will always fall short of some information, even if you believe you provided it. Your website visitors will have numerous questions that you cannot always answer through your webpage information. The customers will also find it cumbersome to put up queries for basic questions. And this is where FAQs come into action.

    Frequently asked questions are a set of queries that new visitors often enquire about. For example, if you are a company that sells goods, one FAQ that you can put up is how to track a placed order. As a result, your customers will not have to reach out to you through lengthy calls or emails. Instead, they can quickly know the process by skimming through your FAQs.

Don’t: 4 Things to Avoid On Your Business Website

When asking yourself, “What should a good business website include?” it’s important to also ask which things should be avoided or omitted entirely. Often, major defining elements are shunned from a web design, or new methods are adopted that are a big No.

Some of the major Don’ts for the web design feature list are:

1. Typos and Inaccuracies
   

   Get out your spellcheck app and go through your entire website because a study by Website Planet states that U.S. businesses with bad grammar and spelling mistakes on their websites will lose almost double the number of potential customers than those with typo-free sites. Typos and other redundant inaccuracies may seem harmless and be shrugged off as small mistakes that can be fixed late, but they have huge implications. They do an excellent job in decreasing your website’s credibility and being an all-over turn-off for visitors.

2. Black Hat SEO Tactics
   

   Black Hat SEO, also known as Spamdexing, is “the deliberate manipulation of search engine indexes.” This is a disapproved method of increasing your website’s relevance or prominence in a search engine. This is done by using keywords and manipulating the search engine’s algorithm into thinking your website is something that it’s not. Generally frowned upon, and rightfully so, our advice to you is to focus on making engaging content that aligns with basic SEO guidelines. Quality is what your website should have; the rest will follow.

3. A Blog That’s Never Updated
   

   This is a huge pet peeve of ours! And quite honestly, a big turn-off for website visitors as well. Nothing screams “inactive” or “careless” quite like a non-updated blog section of a website. Users judge how active a website is and how much attention they pay to its content by visiting their blog.77% of internet users read blogs. However, only 38% of bloggers are actually updating older articles. Blogs are a great source of inserting index-driven keywords into your website, and also naturally increase your SEO outreach.

4. Designing The Website Yourself

   It is not a good idea unless you are a pro web developer. Also, those free-of-cost web hosting sites where you can create your webpage will not give out an excellent impression.

   Website development is a task that only experts should tackle. It requires professional skills and techniques. Attractive web design gives out an elite user experience. If your business is mainly through your web page, you must invest some good bucks into the construction of the webpage.

Final Thoughts

For a business, a successful website highlights the features while ensuring the customer experience is top-notch. However, it takes a lot more than showcasing the website features to make a good website.

The key is to think like your website visitors. Ask yourself what they would want to see rather than wondering what a business website should have to increase its sales. 

All-in-all, we hope that these Do’s, and Don’ts help you improve your website to a version that ends up being even more accepted and loved by your users. 

What do you think?

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