8 Essential Website Features Every Site Needs to be Successful

It’s important that a website looks nice, but it’s equally important that it functions right. If your website takes a long time to load up, lacks a proper navigation or is too cluttered, then it matters very little that it looks nice, as it will frustrate your visitors, causing them to leave earlier than expected. In this article, we discuss 8 essential website features that every site needs to be succssful.

It’s important that you put yourself in the shoes of the average visitor, that way you can see things from his/her perspective. You also want to keep your site up-to-date with new innovations. This way you can ensure that your visitors won’t be found wanting. Your site will contain all the latest technologies of other sites, which should keep your visitors happy.

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8 Essential Website Features

If you would like to learn about the essential website features elements that all websites should have, then look on further.

1. A Secure Website

The first thing you want to do, is ensure that you website is secure. This way, you can build trust between you and your visitors. Security is also important for websites that intend to sell a product or a service. This is the essential website features for every site.

Your hosting provider has an important role in your website’s safety. Get hosting from a reliable provider such as Verpex, so you do not have to worry about getting hacked. Before you do anything else, you want to make sure you have an SSL certificate running on your hosting account. For websites that will be selling things, they will need all sensitive information sent through the website encrypted. Besides hosting SSL, there are many options available in the market that comes with premium features and offers the same level of online security. A website will have many types of SSL certificates ranging from a single domain to multi domain. These SSL are available from many reputed brands like Comodo positiveSSL wildcard, RapidSSL, GeoTrust, GeoTrust, etc. A secured site always instills trust in users’ mindset.

2. User-Generated Reviews

Another, ettential website features, if your website is selling specific products or services, then you may want to consider customer reviews. Reviews from the customers is an excellent way to build trust with potential customers, which in turn boosts sales.

Recent reports puts the number at around 91%+ for the number of online shoppers that actually read reviews for products and services before making the decision to purchase something. Star rating systems tend to be the most effective, and they are easy to implement, so there’s no reason why your site shouldn’t have them. Reviews are one of the most effective ways of convincing potential clients, which can be even more compelling, when it’s mixed up with some negative reviews.

You might think that having some negative reviews will adversely affect your product sales, but the reality is that most shoppers will question the authenticity of the user generate reviews, if all of them are positive – throughout the entirety of the website. You want your website to feature a diversity of opinions, as this will give the shoppers the confidence to go out and purchase that which excites them.

3. Excellent Content

Your post has virtually no purpose if it’s not backed up with really great content.

You want your content to be optimised for the search engines, but that’s not all you need to think about.

You want content that is engaging. To do this, you will need to make your content useful and insightful, offering comprehensive advice and information on the topic covered in the article.

When it comes to producing content, there are a number of ways you can go about it. It’s best to use an assortment of mediums, such as photos, videos and infographics, but you’re not restricted in your choice.

4. Special Offers

If you offer time-based discounts on your site from time to time, this will result in an uptick in sales and traffic. If your customer believes that he/she is getting a good deal, then they will spend more time on your site buying. Impulse buying is also heightened by these kinds of special offer package deals.

Once you create these special offers, you want to notify your customers of them. To do that, you can use text messages or an email list, you’ve built up, over time. There are many methods that you can use to encourage them to buy into your special offer. Time-based discounts tend to be very effective, but you can also utilise buy-one-get-one-free kinds of offers, as they also tend to work well.

5. Integration of Social Media

There are tons of different social media platforms out there. All of which are potentially ideal for your website. You want to build some kind of presence on at least one of them, for your website, this is because social media can become a vital component of your marketing efforts. There are many websites out there that receive the vast majority of their traffic directly from these kinds of sites.

When you properly integrate these social platforms into your site, they can have a positive all around effect on your website. Social platforms are good for many things, but building a following or targeting customers, is one of the best ways to utilise it. It’s definitely worth having a presence on these types of sites, I’d recommend on at least one of them, but no more than two, as you want to be able to maintain the account. You will need to spend time on content submission and engagement to keep it active and relevant.

Social media will be around for as long as human beings socialise, so it’s definitely worth your time investing into it.

6. Wish Lists

If you’re running an eCommerce kind of website, then you definitely want to have a wish list component integrated into it.

Granting your customers with the option to create their own wish list of items that they would like to purchase, whether now or in the future, will help prompt them to purchase in no time. This kind of component can also remind them of products that they sought out in the past, encouraging them to purchase them, now that substantial time has passed.

In addition to this wish list component, you also may want to think about sharing it, or making it shareable with friends and family. As this will help in multiplying your sales, when end users share what they’re found with other potential customers.

7. Easy Navigation

If you want visitors to be able to engage with you, and learn about your brand, you need to adopt a navigational system that is easy to follow. The navigational path that you set, should not only allow visitors easy travel through your site, but should also highlight your main pages and products, so that visitors have a clear understanding of the products and services that you have on offer.

When you apply a responsive design to the site, you can make your navigation scalable. From a more collapsed menu system, for mobile users, to a much larger comprehensive navigation for desktop users. A large portion of visitors to your site will at some point visitor your main page, so you need to structure your navigational system from your home page to all your other site articles and product pages.

8. Customised Internal Search

One fairly crucial technology that is regularly overlooked on our websites today is a customised internal search feature. A lot of site owners tend to ignore having such a function, preferring to go with the common search feature in the service, products and blog sections of the site. But by going with a custom search functionality, visitors can quickly find content irrespective of where they are on the site.

Additionally, when you customise your search tool, you can configure it, so that visitors are directed down a specific path, for possible conversions, if that’s your thing.

Final Thoughts

That all you need to know 8 essential website features that you must have in your website. Thus, you will move your website to the next level.

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