What is a successful website these days?
Mainly, it’s a website that makes money and works well while doing it. For most sites, that means it earns traffic and makes sales (or other conversions, like signups). And working well is important as that’s what will maximize both how many customers the site generates per 1000 users, and also it will be a huge factor in making sure users are happy as a result. With those boxes checked, almost any business can rely on their website to be a core part of their success, and at a cost that is much more cost effective than other IRL options like physical storefronts. Get traffic. Make sales. Make people happy.
What Makes a Great Website?
So what does it take to make a successful website that earns traffic and converts? Well in our eyes, there’s 10 steps all websites should take to ensure their set up for success, and after that it’s basically all marketing and order processing / CS and tweaking and tuning things from customer feedback. But for the website itself, these 10 steps below are core elements that can ensure any website performs as well as it can.
10 Steps to Make a Successful Website:
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Good Hosting (Fast + Low Cost)
A good host is a must have for a website to become competitive with performance, including SEO. Fast DNS, CDN, and servers themselves will be one of the biggest factors in your overall page speed as judged by Google. Slow sites lose users and Google will not rank a site highly that does not have a fast TTFB, server response time, and overall page speed.
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Good Platform (Open Source + Lots of Resources)
With your hosting in place, the CMS or platform that runs your content is pretty important, as that’s the core infrastructure for the growth of your content and site features ongoing. Wordpress is currently the best open source option, and Open Source options are always going to be cheaper and more reliable long term as long as the community and resources are large, which with WP, they are the largest.
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Easy Page Builder (DIVI)
Drag and drop is here to stay. No-code is the preferred code. An easy page builder makes managing your own site easy, changing page designs, moving content around, and never having to touch the codes.
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Nice Looking, Clean, Professional Design
This one pretty much speaks for itself. Clean and professional is the way to build trust with users and portray a brand image that can be successful with your audience. The only exception to this might be like really creative artsy sites, or for bands or something where dark or off-beat are the look you’re going for.
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Core Content (Pages, Posts, Products, Etc)
These are the core pages of any website – Home, About, Shop, Contact, My Account, Login, Reset Password, etc. After these core pages, you can add unlimited content to WordPress as either Pages, Blog Posts, or Products.
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SEO Content (Pages, Posts, Products, etc)
After the core pages are in place, additional content pages should be added regularly to expand upon the overall content net cast by the site as a whole. This should follow a content strategy to target certain keywords that a business’ potential customers would be searching, and should funnel consistently to landing pages relevant to target phrases.
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Social Proof
Google crawls social networks now, so you need to have your FB Page, IG Page, Google Business Page, and any other well known website where your business can exist with it’s name, address, and a link to your website. The more followers and posts you have, and the more recent they are, the better.
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3rd Party Integrations (and Verifications – Google, FB, etc)
With a solid site you’ll want to inevitably connect it to other services that can help you either with marketing, sales, or fulfillment. Google Ads, Google Merchant Center, Facebook, Instagram, are just a few that have plugins and/or integrations made for WooCommerce to work seamlessly with their services. Google Analytics is one that almost every site uses, for example, just to track site stats.
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Optimize Performance
Your site gets graded by Google over time. They look at how people experience your site, how long things take, how stable your design is, how usable it is, and if it meets all their standards for what they consider a “good experience”. This score affects your overall rank and thus affects your ability to get organic traffic. Optimizing speed is just one of many optimizations that are important if you want to make sure your site is competitive in every way possible. Beyond performance, SEO, UX, conversion, retention, and many other optimizations can be done to reach site goals.
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Quality Backlinks
One of the biggest factors in organic rankings is your backlink count and it’s quality, context, and relevancy. That means basically, the more sites that link to your website, the more clout you get in the search rankings. This is because it’s not easy to get other sites to link to your site for no reason, so Google sees this as a good metric. If every link for some phrase points to your website with links, and not the other way around, then your site will be #1 for that phrase as long as the other points in the list are satisfied (like performance on both desktop and mobile). There are a few ways to gain good backlinks, and we’ll cover that in another post.
With these parts done right, you can expect your site to do well consistently, and grow and overtake competing websites in your space when it comes to Google rank and overall performance.
And, with Rocket Ivy website packages, you know you’ll have everything on this list done right, every time. No competitors your size will be able to match your site’s performance.
Good luck, fellow Web Rocketeers!