Building a business website is not easy. Or it will be better to say that building a business website is easy but tapping its full potential and maximizing revenue generation from it is not easy. That requires focusing on a number of important things that affect the functionality of your site and the resources of your business. If you do not focus on them, you will end up with a website that generates little-to-no revenue but eats up a substantial chunk of your revenue on the other hand.
That is why we decided to create this list of 8 things you must consider while creating your business website. You should focus on them because they allow you to tap the full potential of your site. Let’s take a look on them:
1. User experience
One of the first things that determine the success of your business website is how easy and convenient is it to use. There are a number of elements that are considered detrimental for the user experience of a website, like too many animations, JavaScript’s, layouts that don’t load properly in all screen sizes, fonts that are hard to read, colour combinations that make comprehension difficult at a quick glance, and so on.
All these elements can prove very costly for your business if not considered carefully while building your business website. You should choose a responsive theme for your website that loads properly in all screen sizes, avoid the use of too many colours in your pages, and too many animations or graphics that can slow down your site. These are some of the basics for best user experience. If you have not designed websites before, it will be better that you hire a professional web designer to take care of your user experience.
2. Budget planning
Managing the budget of your website is also necessary. If you end up spending a ton of money on those features that you don’t necessarily need in your site, you’ll soon learn that instead of generating revenue for your business your website has become a money-eating machine. That’s why you should keep your website’s expenses under check and spend only as much as you can afford to spend. If you need some necessary functionality that’s too expensive to add, try to find out an open-source or any other kind of free alternative for it. Such alternatives exist for almost every functionality today, and with enough searching you can find them for no matter what feature you want to add.
3. Security
According to a survey commissioned by National Cybersecurity Alliance in 2019, every year 25% of the businesses targeted with a cyberattack file for bankruptcy, while 10% shut down permanently. Clearly, the cost of being hacked is a lot, so the next important thing about your business website security. Without proper security mechanisms in place, you’ll be at the mercy of cybercriminals who can hack your website and steal user data or harm your business in any other way. To ensure that it doesn’t happen you must install an SSL certificate, protect all your software with Code signing certificate and all your documents with digital signatures. That will ensure that none of the applications being used to power your website or documents uploaded to it can be altered by anyone else except you.
4. Marketing
The marketing of your website is also an important factor in determining how much business can your get from it. Nowadays most websites are promoted primarily through search engine and social media marketing, so you too would want to promote it that way. But you should also explore other ways of marketing your website, like traditional means of advertising, events, and so on. Content marketing is another hot trend that can help you generate a ton of traffic and leads without necessarily requiring lots of investment. Another major trend is influencer marketing, where brands use the power of influencers on social media to promote their products and services. You should consider each of these marketing channels for your website.
5. Conversion rate
We just talked about marketing – but marketing isn’t limited to generating traffic alone. If your traffic isn’t converting into leads and customers, there’s a problem because you’re not earning anything from your website. Therefore, you should pay attention to your conversion rate too if you want to leverage it for earning some good amount of revenue. The art of conversion optimization is called A/B testing, and it can be used to significantly increase your conversion rate (i.e. the percentage of your visitors that convert into leads and customers). There are dedicated professionals who understand this thing, and you can hire them to get it done for your site.
6. ROI
This particular point is also related to marketing. The dollars that you spend to generate all that traffic compared against the revenue generated by the traffic is known as ROI or Return on Investment. If your ROI is not positive, you’re simply wasting money that could have been put to better use. So it’s also important to keep tracking your ROI of your marketing $$$ with help of various analytics tools that are available in the market for this purpose, like Google Analytics, BuzzSumo, HootSuite, SEMRush, etc. You should also focus on the right metrics while tracking your ROI, like number of unique visitors, bounce rate, session duration, average time on page, etc.
7. Marketplace functionality (if building an e-commerce site)
Last, but certainly not least, if you are going to build an e-commerce site, you should also consider the marketplace functionality and how can it be added to your site. There are several solutions that must be integrated in a proper manner for an e-commerce site to work. They include a payment gateway, a shopping cart solution, an e-commerce friendly CMS, e-commerce friendly theme, etc. You must integrate all of them, and you must also learn to use all of them because they will constitute everything from backend to frontend of your site. Most of these things will also cost money, which becomes another reason to pay even more attention to each of them.
8. Mobile friendliness
Finally, we would like to sum things up with something related to the same point that we discussed in the beginning of this article: user experience! Having a mobile-friendly website is such an important part of user experience that it was necessary to discuss it separately. More than half of the world’s internet traffic comes from mobile devices, which means that half of your website visitors will also want to browse the site on their smartphones. That’s why you should specially consider your website from a mobile-first perspective.
9. Hosting
Depending on the CMS you or your web creator choose to build your site with, you’ll need to address the issue of hosting. If you opt for the most common platform, WordPress, you’re going to need to sign up to a hosting service. There are a variety of standalone platforms (such as Kinsta and Hostgator) that provide hosting for fixed prices. Alternatively, you can build your WordPress website using Elementor. The latter now offers built-in cloud hosting for WordPress features.
Conclusion
So that was a small list of things you must consider while building your business website. In absence of any of these things you can’t unlock the full potential of your site to generate as much revenue as possible. So, start focusing on them from today.
We hope we you get the full recipe of a successful business website after reading this article. But if you think there’s something else that should also be mentioned in this list, share it in the comments. We would love to hear it and discuss about it!