You don’t need us to tell you how many options customers have when looking for a website to buy from. No matter what products/services you provide, your customers will have a wealth of options at their disposal. Getting your store noticed is one of the primary challenges that you’ll face in your quest to grow your business.
You can increase your chances of acquiring and retaining customers by having a website that delivers exactly what they’re looking for. And, of course, that’ll naturally be beneficial for your business, too.
Below, we’ll run through some key essentials that all websites should have, so make sure that your website has them all!
Keep Things Simple
Your customers will be inundated with digital content just through the course of using the internet. As such, it’s important that your website provides a pleasant experience compared with the mania of the rest of the web. It’s best to take a ‘less is more’ approach, and simply include information that your customers will genuinely find useful as opposed to cluttering it with unnecessary pages.
The benefit to your business is that your visitors will easily be able to navigate to the page they need, which increases the likelihood that they’ll become customers.
Make It Easy to Find
Your website won’t be useful for anyone if your potential customers can’t find it. There are two ways to make your website easy to find; the first is to have a domain name that’s easy to remember. There’s zero point in having a clever but complicated website name if your customers can’t remember what it is. The second is to work with an SEO agency to ensure that your website appears high up on search engine results pages. If you’ve got a great product/service, then your customers will be looking for you — and it’s your site’s SEO credentials that ensure that they can.
The business benefit of this is pretty simple: the greater the number of people that can visit your website, the greater the likelihood that you’ll make sales.
Include Contact Information
You’d be amazed at how many websites fail to include their contact information. This can have a pretty significant impact on the number of sales you make, simply because visitors are less likely to trust a website if they can’t see how to get in touch with the people behind it. Including your contact information can also enhance SEO, making it an absolute staple.
So, what contact information should you include? Your phone number, email address, social media accounts, and ideally your mailing address are recommended. In doing so, you’ll know that any customer who has questions about your products/services/how to order/anything else will easily be able to get in touch.
Make it Lighting Fast
Internet users are pretty impatient. If they see that your site is taking longer to load than it should, then there’s every chance that they’ll close the tab and find a competitor instead. After all, as we said at the beginning of the article, they’ll have plenty of websites to choose from! Running tests on your website to determine the loading speed is recommended, since how fast pages load for you is not necessarily how fast they’ll load for others. You should also check that your website is fast-loading across all devices and browsers.
Let Customers Browse From Multiple Devices
And on that note: your website should absolutely work across all types of devices. There’s been a huge upswing in the number of consumers making searches via their smartphone, and if your website doesn’t offer a great mobile experience, then you’ll be giving them an incentive to go elsewhere. Most modern websites have responsive design, but it’s still worth checking. What smartphone users look for and what desktop users look for can differ significantly.
Cut to the Chase
Finally, an often overlooked element of keeping your customers happy is to respect their time. You’ve got products to sell, they want to buy — making things more complicated than they need to be is good for no one. One area where many websites fall short in this area is by having checkout processes that are longer than they need to be. You don’t need your customers to go through eight different checkout pages before they click ‘Buy,’ and they shouldn’t have to use an unusual payment method, either. Keep things slick, streamlined, and convenient by offering multiple payment methods, and you’ll find that you can avoid abandoned shopping carts and turbocharge your sales.