There are hundred thousands of websites on the Internet today, where will your website stand in that mega list?
This becomes one of the most crucial questions when it comes to investing money for your online presence. Simply making a good website won’t generate enough business for you, what is important is it should be user-friendly and optimized for search engines.
Today, in this post we will discuss on how can you ensure if your website is up to the marks. There are two major aspects, where you can test your website, they are:
- Appearance
- Functionality
Let’s take a detailed look at every point.
#1. Good Website, Good Appearance
While you are designing your website, or it is already designed you need to ensure that it is easy to skim through your website. The appearance of your website plays a vital role in holding on a visitor on your website. If it takes time for the user to understand your website, there are chances that he may leave your site and may look for something better. This will make you lose your visitors and eventually will increase bounce rates.
A good appearing site is not only good for your visitors but is also good for the search engines. When they crawl your site, the look and feel of your website do matter a lot! You need to ensure that your website meets most of or all of the below given aspects.
a). Responsive
A responsive website is a one which looks equally beautiful on all the devices. With the increasing usage of mobile Internet, it is mandatory that your website looks good on mobile and tablets as well. Search engines have changed their algorithms and now they focus more on responsive sites. If your site is not responsive, there are fewer chances that it will appear on the first page of a search engine.
b). Good Color Combination
I am sure; you would not have liked to see this website if it had no decent look! This is where a great design plays a vital role in holding on your visitors. Your website’s color combination has a considerable effect on your reader. You can choose light or contrast matching colors and taking a help from an expert web designer is always a better option.
c). Readability
While you are designing a good website, you need to ensure that the fonts you use are readable. The readability of your text should be equally good on all the devices like mobile, tablets and PCs. A pro tip for font selection is not to select very uncommon fonts! Some browsers may not support your uncommon fonts, and this may lead to a weird looking web page.
d). Appropriate Images
An image says a thousand words, agree? If yes, you need to ensure all your images are of good quality yet smaller in size. One of the very common mistakes seen in good websites is stretched images on various pages and especially in the sliders. While you or your developer uploads images to the site, see to it that they maintain their original aspect ratio or they will get distorted. One of the finest ways to get rid of this problem is to develop your custom images with the help of a designer. This will ensure perfect and relevant images on your site.
If these things are taken care, your website will have a good look and feel. Along with the users, search engines too will have good experience with your website. After clear understanding about the looks of your website, let’s have a glance at functionality.
#2. Functionality
The functionality of a good website will have a great impact on its users. The functionality of a website can basically be divided into two major types, viz. ‘Front End’ and ‘Back End’. Front end functionalities will include the user interaction and the JavaScript codes. Whereas, the back end functionality is what takes place on your server.
Let’s take a detailed look at every aspect of the functionality of your website.
a). Simplicity
Does not matter how complex is it to make your website functional for your business at the back end, but it should be extremely simple at the front end. Your business logic might be a rocket science, but your user should not feel the load for the same. So, while designing the site you need to be user-centric, i.e. where you prioritize your user’s viewpoint.
b). Fast Loading Pages
If your site is taking too long to load, it is a red alert! A slow loading site is neither good for user nor for the search engines. Higher the loading time, higher will be your bounce rates. To ensure smooth loading of your site, one of the most important factors is the image sizes. You can use optimized images that have good quality and clarity but are smaller in size. You can evaluate your website’s performance with Google’s PageSpeed Insights and can get a detailed review on how can you optimize it further. Above this, using minified JS and CSS files will reduce the size of your web page.
c). Proper Navigation
User’s like to explore your website, if it is easy for them, or else they have other options! So, you need to be very conscious while designing the flow of your website. The easier it will be to navigate, more the user will explore. This also helps in increasing the number of clicks on your site. The SEO juice flow should be redirected from one page to the other and eventually should maintain consistency.
d). Cross Browser Functionality
Before going live, you need to test the functionality on various platforms and various browsers. There are chances that your website may look good on one of the browsers and may not look the same in other. If this is the case, you may approach your developer to get it fixed.
This makes up your checklist for ensuring yours is a good website. If your site is fulfilling all the above mentioned criteria it is for sure a ‘GOOD WEBSITE’.
