10 Criteria in Making A High-Performance Website

It’s the world’s worst kept secret that people these days rely heavily on search engines, namely Google when it comes to gathering information. A website has become one of the very first channels to introduce your company to the world, both the world wide web and the actual world we live in. The big question now is, does your website really impress the audience to contact your salesperson to make a purchase?

We will take the long & winding road to see not all, but the ten most important factors you need to make sure to boost your website performance.

1. Easy to Find

As previously mentioned, people rely heavily on search engines to find what they need by utilizing search engines. If your website appears on the first page of the search engines’ result page, it surely will have a higher chance to be visited than the website that appears on the second page.

So the first step to making it search engine friendly is to optimize your website. There are hundreds of factors to be met for your website to win the competition among other websites. Click here to learn more about how to optimize your website.

2. Responsive

Half of the searching will be done on smartphones or tablets, hence the likelihood of your website to be viewed on such devices is high. Thus your website needs to be responsive and lightweight, which are very mobile friendly. In search engines’ complex algorithms, a mobile-friendly website is one of the key points to attract more visitors to your website.

Click here to read more about responsive website design

3. Attractive Landing Page

The first thing that comes on the web visitor screen when they visit your website is called the landing page. The key performance index (KPI) for a good landing page is a low bounce rate. Bounce rate is the percentage of web visitor who only takes a look at your landing page and didn’t bother to go to another page on your web. So the landing page is an important KPI to measure the website’s overall engagement.

Click here to learn about the tips to keep your bounce rate minimum

4. Keep It Alive

If your site stays updated with useful information about something specific or niche, people will remember your site and keep coming back for more information. Also, Google likes an updated site. So it isn’t surprising businesses who have their website updated frequently will generate more leads than those who don’t. Do note that the right content is different from powerful content.

Here are the top 10 reasons why you should upgrade your website

5. Hitting the Bullseye

Certain keywords have higher value traffic than the others, so simply filling up your website doesn’t significantly reduce your bounce rate or increase conversions. These high-value keywords will give you high-value customers.

High-value keywords are those keywords that support in-depth and powerful contents, therefore, will make your web readers eager to read more. The more time people spend on your site, the better it is because it shows they are keen to read more.

Hopefully, after spending some time on your site, they will come to trust you and that’s when you hit the bullseye. This process seems simple, but it will cut your bounce rate by half or even more.

6. First Impression Matters

In this case, the meta description is that first impression. We’re sure you’ve noticed this before. When you type a keyword into search engines, any word that matches your search term will be in bold. They do this to make it stands out from the rest and tell you to consider that result first before the others.

Meta descriptions are HTML attributes that will tell users what a particular web page is about. Search engines use these to display an excerpt what your website is about, so users can decide whether the description given matched with what they’re looking for or not.

The sweet spot for a meta description is 155 characters or slightly less. If you put too little, people won’t get a good grasp of what your website is about. On the other hand, if you put more than 155 characters, it will be shown as “(...)” at the end. Of course, this will hinder people and may cause a higher bounce rate.

7. Good & Organized Site Structure

One of many possible reasons people leave your site is because they feel lost in your website. Furthermore, they can’t find the information they were originally looking for. Those two are certainly not a good sign.

Having a good & organized site structure not only matters to us, humans, but to search engines as well. Once you have a good site structure, then you just increased your probability to rank higher in the search engines.

As a bonus search engines will provide site links for a website with good site structure. So people can find what they’re looking for with ease. This is a huge bonus, because site links are a massive SEO advantage. Seriously though, it’s huge, site links will lead to these following things:

• Increase site’s navigability

• Point users to the most relevant information

• Increase brand’s reputation

• Improve users trust

• Help you dominate SERPs

• Increase clickthrough rate

• Shorten the conversion funnel

8. Original Content Wins

Customers crave for originality in content. Mashable conducted a study & the result showed that 61% of customers prefer companies that create custom & original online material. Customers have the tendency to gravitate toward companies with fresh & unique advertising, using the train of thought, customers choose companies with strong content in order to buy their products or services.

It’s not rocket science how to use original material to drive more traffic to your site. Three simple steps to strengthen your company’s online presence & facilitate clickthroughs are embedding internal links, logos, and calls to action into your material. If your content is SEO-optimised, it will boost your search engine rankings, thus increasing your visibility and funneling potential leads to your site.

9. Clear Call to Action Buttons

The main goal of this whole shebang is to make customers buy the offered products or services. Call to action button will persuade the customer to take an action after they see the products/services information, thus it guides them towards your goal. Some call to action button examples is: Add to cart, free trial sign-up, and download button.

10. Great UI/UX Design

UI & UX design are like Siamese twins that go together everywhere they go. UI refers to the User Interface, hence the visuals of your website, essentially the aesthetics part of your products/services. Whilst the other, UX is User Experience. UX controls how your website functions, how you would navigate throughout the website, what will happen if you hover a specific text or click a button, and such things.

Your website should have these two functions easily recognizable. Ease of navigation covers but not limited to find the way to go to other pages, which page the users are on, and how to go to the next page. Let’s assume you have an e-commerce website, then a common route would look something like this: Home page, then a category page, and followed by a product page instead of being led away from your products. It’s also pivotal to make sure your graphics support the flow.

The UI/UX design of the website improves users experience and increase customer satisfaction, of course, this ultimately helps to increase the number of your website visitors.

UI/UX design also helps to win customers’ trust and confidence & make them use your website providing them what they are looking for. You can use the number of website visitors to measure as a benchmark of how successful your UI/UX design.