At some point while running an online website "business", we are sure you wondered what made great websites great and how you can follow their footsteps.There are thousands of websites earning their owners a living online and whether you believe it or not - those website owners were in the same boat as you are when they started out or started growing.
Today, you are going to read exactly what great websites do differently to achieve their business goals and how you can do the same to be successful online.
- SEO Friendliness is a Must: If we had to condense everything we have learned about being a successful website owner in a single sentense, it would be this. Successful websites don't mess around when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. This single factor can be the difference between a high-traffic website and the one that doesn't get visited at all.
Having an SEO friendly website is a must in today's day and age. A crappy website that is poorly coded and doesn't honour search engine guidelines will always rank lower than a website that is well-coded and schema-ready.
The easiest way to ensure your website is SEO optimized, is by using a free plugin for WordPress called Yoast's SEO. It will help you add important SEO information to your website so that search engines can crawl it easily.
- A Good Design is a Must: A traditional website doesn't cut it anymore. This is 2016 and you should have a website that looks modern while at the same time it should be user-friendly, legible, and it should load fast. Different people are going to access your website from different devices so you must ensure that the design you have is responsive and looks good across all screen sizes. If you don't have the budget to hire a designer and a developer, it is better to chose a ready-made theme for your website.
- Don't Lose Your Content: According to a popular survey, 90% websites that suffer a data loss close down their website within 2 years. Don't be one of them and ensure you always have a backup ready in case something goes wrong or you accidentally delete your content. Most web hosts offer backup options with their hosting packages. There are a lot of 3rd party backup options availabe as well and some of the popular ones are Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, DropBox, Google Drive etc. You can easily have your website automatically backed up to any of these providers.
- Don't Make Your Visitors Wait: Amazon says that for every 100ms delay in their website load speed, they lose 1% sales. Considering Amazon does billions in sales a year, 1% comes out to be a huge amount for just 100ms slower website. Whether you have a small or big website, your website is giving you lower conversions and sales everytime it loads slower. Make sure your website is hosted on a fast web server and that you have optimized it to load very fast.
- Make Sure it is Secure: Always ensure that your website is secure and ready to handle any hacking attempts. Once your website starts to gain popularity, it will become a target for hackers. It is just a fact of life and you should be taking steps to ensure that hackers don't succeed in their attempts. Apart from choosing a secure web server.
I hope these words were helpful and if you follow the instructions, you should be golden. Many of website owners have been successful just following the instructions we gave you. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to let us know.