Do you run a small business and looking for your website development? This blog post may help you!
Although there are tones of features that a website could have but due to the limited budget, a small business owner can’t have all of them.
In this blog post, I have shared 6 essential yet basic features that your business website must have.
So, even if you have hired an affordable website developer to build your website, you must ensure that he or she incorporates all of these essential features on your website.
Let’s get started.
#1 Responsive web design
A responsive design for any website is as important as its existence in the very first place.
If you don’t have a responsive design for your website, it is unlikely that you will get enough traffic & sales on your website.
Majorly, there are 2 important reasons to have a responsive design:
- A responsive website has higher chances to rank on search engines.
- A responsive website provides excellent browsing experience to the device users.
#2 High quality images
How images can help your website:
- To attract the attention of your website visitors.
- To present a piece of information nicely.
- To trigger emotions in your users.
- To keep your visitors engaged with your webpages.
All of the above can happen only when you use high-quality images on your website. At the same time, I do understand that most of the stock image websites do charge some amount to use their images. And most of the small business owners don’t want to invest their money to buy these images.
But did you know that there are several websites that allow you to use their images without paying anything?
Yes, there are some great websites like pixabay.com or pexels.com that allow you to download high-quality images from their database and use them on your website.
#3 SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
The primary object to build a website is to get business out of it. And to get business out of any website, you do need massive yet relevant traffic on your website.
SEO (search engine optimization) is one of the best mediums to attract quality traffic on your website.
Although, there are hundreds of activities that need to be done for ranking your website on search engines. But SEO starts from the website itself. If your website is not well-optimized for search engines, chances are less that you will get significant traffic from them.
Here are few essential yet important things that your website developer can do for your website’s SEO (without increasing the website design cost):
- Meta tags placement
- SEO-friendly URLs
- Google Analytics integration
- Google Webmasters integration
- Fast loading webpages
- Responsive website design
Recommended post: 5 Ways In Which Web Developers Can Help In Your WordPress SEO
#4 CTA (Call-To-Action)
Call-to-action (CTA) elements encourage your website visitors to take an action. In the absence of appropriate CTA elements on your website, the users may not know what to do next.
Let’s take an example.
If you want your users to submit their emails in order to get some free stuff from you, the CTA on your website must clearly mention the action message (“Submit your email” or “Subscribe Now” in this case).
If you have an e-commerce website, your CTA could be “Add to cart”, “Add to bag” or “Checkout”.
The key here is place these call-to-action elements appropriately on your webpages so that its easy for your visitors to find them and take necessary action.
#5 CMS (content management system)
We all know that the website development is not a one-time thing. Every now and then, we may be required to add or edit the contents of the website.
If you hire a web designer every time you need to update your website, you may end up paying a lot of money to them.
Therefore, CMS (content management system) has rather become a necessity for small businesses so that they can manage the content of their websites without hiring & paying the web developers each time.
There are many CMS platforms that you or your website developer can use to build your website. One of these best CMS platforms is WordPress. There are several benefits of using WordPress to create your website, some of them being:
- WordPress is free to use.
- There are tons of free plugins & themes that you can use for your WordPress website.
- There is no scarcity of WordPress developers. As a result, you can hire these developer at affordable price.
- WordPress websites are loved by search engines.
- WordPress backend is easy-to-use.
#6 Security
Security of any website is as important as its existence. Therefore, it must be considered as one of the basic features of your website development.
Most of the web developers don’t take responsibility of securing their clients’ websites. Check with your website developer before you hire him or her. What all steps they will take to secure you website.
If your website developer has been using WordPress to build your website, here are but few important things that he or she can do to secure your website to a large extent:
- Choosing plugins & themes carefully.
- Setting up website lockdown.
- Renaming the login URL.
- Protecting important files such as wp-config.
- Customizing default admin username.
- Changing database default prefix.
Recommended post: 10 Ways To Secure Your WordPress Website From Hackers & Malicious Codes
Conclusion:
A website, if developed correctly can really make a difference in your small business. Therefore, you must ensure that your website has at least all of the above features to begin with.
Incorporating the above features is really not a big deal for your web developer.