Website Features: 13 Features Your Website Needs
Written by Denham Thompson
A website can be a very useful tool for businesses, especially when it has the right website features. They allow you to get your name out there, show off your products or services and reach new audiences.
Below we have outlined 13 features all websites should have in order to make using them a pleasant and beneficial experience:
1: Responsive User Interface Design
You will probably find that most visitors of your website will be from mobile devices. This can be for many reasons, but the main two are ease of use and speed. Our mobile phones are almost always switched on, and most people have access to the internet from these devices. It takes less than a minute to pull up Google and type in a question.
That is why it is important that the user interface of your website accommodates all screen sizes. This means it needs to be responsive and adapt its design based on the width of the screen it is being viewed with.
2: Clear Call to Actions
Call to Actions are buttons or links on websites that allow users to take action. These actions include:
- Loading new content
- Calling a phone number
- Composing an email
It is important to have clear call to actions within your site’s content in order to make it easier for your users to contact you.
Make sure your call to actions:
- Are clear and stand out
- Have unique wording (don’t repeat “read more”, “learn more”)
- Are big enough to click on smaller devices (mobile phones and tablets)
3: Consistent Branding
Every business wants to be recognisable. Use your website to show off your branding so that your users can point it out in a crowd. Your branding should be consistent, not only on your website, but also your social media pages, emails, newsletters and printed materials.
Remember:
- Use a consistent colour scheme across your website that align with your brand guidelines
- Place your logo within the header, sticky header and footer
- Pick two separate fonts for your regular text content and your titles
4: Reviews & Testimonials
When you run a business, feedback can be very useful to you. It can help you improve your operations, see where you are doing things right or wrong, and if you have positive reviews it can lead to more customers. If you do have great reviews, you need to show them off!
Place them on the home page or footer of your website, so that they can be seen by visitors. This could encourage them to seek out your products or services and gives your business more legitimacy.
You can use a service like Elfsight, which allows you to pull through your reviews on a carousel, making it easy to view.
5: Speedy Loading
If people click on your website and the content is taking a long time to load, there’s a good chance they will click away and use a different website instead. Having a fast loading website will allow you to keep users on your website for longer, and bring them back.
Use these top tips to make your website load fast
- Enable lazy loading on your images: This allows your web pages to load in the text content before the images. And the images are loaded as blurred versions to allow them to load quicker, and then are loaded in full definition afterwards.
- Compress your images: When you compress an image it takes up less memory, allowing it to load faster for your users. You can choose to compress your images before or after uploading them to your website, via free online tools or website image compression plugins.
- Change your website hosting: Websites are hosted on servers all across the world, but your website should be hosted on a server that is within the country you carry out your business. If your business is based in the UK, choose a hosting service that has servers in the UK.
- Enable Website Caching: Website caching is when a version of the website and its content is stored on the devices that it is accessed from. For example, if you were to visit our website for the second time, it will load faster as your device is loading content that it is already aware of. Note: when adding new content to your website, it is important to delete the cache across your website, so that the new content can be accessible to new users and returning users.
6: SEO Optimisation
For your website to be useful to you, your business and your potential customers, it needs to be seen and accessible. Search engine optimisation will help improve how your website and its webpages perform on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and many more.
The higher the quality of your website’s content, the better it will perform. Below is a checklist for your website’s SEO:
- Pick keywords that are relevant to your website’s content
- Assign 1 or 2 keywords per page to use within those pages’ content
- Include meta titles and meta descriptions using these keywords
- Use alt descriptions for images to accurately describe what they contain
- Try to write content on your website that contains 700 words or more
7: Social Media
There are many benefits to linking to your social media profiles on your website. Here are a few:
- Social media is another method your potential customers could use to get in touch with you
- If users like the content you provide on your website, and they see you are also providing quality content on social media, they may follow your pages or interact with your posts
- On your blog posts, providing a “share to” social media button will let users easily share a link to your content on various different social media platforms. This could increase the amount of traffic your website gets
8: Security
Providing security to your users and your website is a must. Have you entered a website that shows a warning before allowing you to load the page? Those websites don’t contain an SSL certificate, which makes the website insecure, and the information that you input into that website is possibly accessible to third parties.
What information do websites collect and/or use?
- Card details: these are typically only used on e-commerce websites
- Cookies: these show what other websites you have been using
- Contact details: these are typically collected through contact forms
Tips for securing your website:
- Purchase an SSL certificate for your domain name
- Add 2-factor authentication for logging into the backend of your website
- Use complicated passwords, and change them every few months
9: Easy To Use Navigation
The navigation menu of your website is incredibly important, as it allows your users to easily move from one page to another. Here are a few tips for keeping your navigation easy to use:
- On desktop, have your links on a single line
- Keep your page naming convention as simple as possible to avoid confusion (home, about, contact)
- On mobile, condense your menu into a burger menu. This will allow more space on the page, and keeps the navigation menu in an easy to find section at the top of the page
- Think about adding a sticky header to your website. This means the header and navigation menu will be present at the top of the screen, ready to use any time, no matter how far your users scroll
10: Footer
The footer of your website should be where all relevant and easy-to-consume information should be stored. This should include:
- Phone number
- Email address
- Social media links
- Address
- Useful links (FAQs, Privacy Policy, GDPR)
All that information should be easy to find and easy to use – so placing it within the footer on every web page of your website is ideal. Remember to make sure that all links that take you away from your website, should open in a new tab.
11: Versioned Backups & Staging Environments
Implement a staging server and version-controlled backups to roll out updates safely. This not only safeguards against accidental breakages but allows for thorough testing before changes go live.
Why is this useful?
Updating a website and its software is not difficult to do by any means. But now that websites have become far more complex and rely on a number of different softwares to maintain their functionality, updating can cause potential damage.
These different componants of websites that need to be updated can sometimes be incompatible with each other. This can cause a critical error on your website, rendering it unusable.
With staging environments and versioned backups you can test software updates, check that they work correctly, and safely push that version of the site to replace the current version. This means no downtime, and no errors that are visible to your users.
12: FAQs Section
A Frequently Asked Questions page helps address common customer concerns and reduces the need for direct support. It’s especially useful for explaining delivery times, return and refund policies, or service details.
Informative content such as an FAQ section can store all of the most vital information all in one place. This means your business won’t have to spend as much time or money on answering common questions to your customers.
13: Newsletter Signup
A simple email sign-up form lets you build a mailing list for promotions, news, or updates. This is ideal for marketing without relying solely on social media or ads.
Have you heard the expression, “data is the new oil”?
Well, even if you don’t have any current plans to produce a newsletter, it is still a great idea to be collecting user data that you can use in the future. This can give you a good idea of who your users are, what makes them alike, what differnces do they, so that you can use this data to adjust your marketing strategy.
Then once your newsletter is ready, an audience is already there waiting for your.
Must have website features
In summary, a well-designed website is crucial for businesses to showcase their products, engage with new audiences, and enhance user experience. Essential features include a responsive design for mobile devices, clear call-to-actions, consistent branding, SEO optimisation, easy navigation, and an informative footer. Implementing these elements ensures a website is user-friendly, accessible, and effective in meeting business goals.
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