How long have you been in business? Do you have enough client coverage? Is your customer base steadily increasing? What differentiates you from your competitors?
These are some valid questions for any business – whether it’s a start-up or a fully established business.
With changes in the framework within which modern business operates, the competitive landscape today is not just limited to the traditional brick and mortar concept anymore. Every organization needs to have a virtual presence. Virtual presence through a website assists not just in e-commerce but serves various secondary and tertiary goals of the company. Business development through new client and customer acquisition, CRM, reputation management, opinion building, image management, brand building are some of the roles a website can play.
A well performing website attracts traffic and assists in retaining them. A good website has to ensure that people not only return to it but also refer it to others.
What do we mean by a well performing website? What are some of the criteria of a great website? What can make a website perform well?
Beauty and Design
First impressions are visual in nature. Customers may like or dislike something in seconds – just by how it looks. It applies especially to websites.. It all begins with beauty, design and clarity. A beautifully designed website can be a monetarily effective mechanism to enhance traffic to a website and increase lead generation. In contrast, a badly designed website encourages the user leave the page even before it loads completely. This can result in lost business potential.
Design Compatibility
With enhanced penetration of mobile technology, more and more users are accessing website over their smart phones and tablets. A website’s performance is no longer limited to desktop.
How responsive and compatible a design is over slew of physical devices defines a website’s design ability. If a business lacks to provide a mobile friendly website to its customers, it is falling behind its competitors. To stay current with the times, most of the well established businesses have beautifully crafted, clear and responsive mobile friendly websites designs.
Analysis of User Behavior
Paying attention to site’s performance through regular supervision and revision is advised. For enhanced user engagement it is essential to use Google Analytics on a regular basis to analyze user behavior.
This involves studying customer’s navigation pattern and actions on various site pages. Working over visitor data gives insight into what users like about the site. Heat maps of the website can be generated through various tools which provide data on clicks.
What do they do and which pages are left unattended? Do the blog and content pages have acceptable readability? Are the goals of setting a website are in line with a visitor’s goal? Such questions aid in improvement and visitor re-engagement.