New startup founders and small business owners establishing an online presence quite often look out for an answer for this particular issue – what constitutes a good website?

If you go around asking this to a few developers, S.E.O experts or even a few web designers, you might not get what you are looking for.

Their answers might get you tensed since they have got an extensive lists on considering everything from generating keywords (not solely based on the number of searches) to analyzing whether those keywords actually work to maybe traffic analysis.

However, you might be able to deduce that most of their ideas revolve around the topic of website marketing goals.

So the first issue is around getting visitors to your site, that too in plentitude. If your site’s already showering you with sales, then it’s a good website.

The second issue is about conversion rate optimization by bringing in targeted traffic, and then making tweaks to site performance and running tests such as A/B testing, making the website more attractive and more engaging.

In order to fix this, your goals, from here-on-out, will determine what you really want to achieve with your good website.

Keeping that in mind let’s take a look at the elements that are common to the best websites that get a boatload of traffic and conversions out of that traffic.

Headlines and landing pages

You have at most 8 seconds to grab a visitor’s attention with a compelling headline and a landing page with a neat C.T.A (call to action). For both the headline and landing page, think about what you want your visitors to do, and make sure the message is getting across.

The more landing pages you have, the better it is.

As per data from HubSpot, a website with over 40 landing pages will generate 12 times more leads than those with five or less landing pages.

Also, try to engage people with a video on the landing page. Other things being equal, adding a product video on the landing page increases lead conversions by 144 percent.

Page loading speed

This is also undeniably important, both as part of the user experience of your website, and as a part of your on-site SEO.

A small 1-second improvement in page loading speed will directly increase your lead conversion by 7 percent.

Plus, faster loading websites are favored in search engine algorithms, so you get more traffic from the search engines, which in turn will result in more leads and conversions.

39% of people will stop engaging with a website if images won’t load or take too long to load. This only validates the effect of page loading speed on users and if that crazy amount of incoming traffic leave without even looking at your website, you can imagine how much sales you can actually get if you just tweak one of the things mentioned on this list.

Design

A recent study done by Stanford Web Credibility Research showed that 75% of users admit to making judgments about a company’s credibility based just on their good website design. This design that we talk about, shows not only the credibility but is also a key factor in finding out whether the website is usable and trustworthy or not.

3 Components (3 C’s) of Visually Appealing Web Design are

• Complexity:

  Strive for simplicity in your design.  Keep it simple, yet not so simple that it lacks appeal.

  Colors and fonts play a major role in building your brand. A big emotional factor is attached to the colors that you use so use carefully.

  Fiddle with the fonts as they need to be easy to read and make it absolute certain that your website’s design is user-friendly.  Keep the navigation straightforward and transform the design  based on how users would interact with the site.

• Clarity:

  By using images that best describe your product you are making it all the clearer to your users what your website is about and if you certainly need pictures to showcase your products.

  Try to explain it with depictive images, Make use of info-graphics or other such pictorial representations to depict your products in the best light possible. Make sure all images and graphics on the site are sharp.

• Consistency:

  Keep the design of the site (colors, fonts, button styles, heading sizes, etc.) consistent throughout the site.

A/B Testing

Making use of tests such as A/B testing to find out what works on your website and what doesn’t can result in an increase of up to 300 percent in your conversion rate.

All the top Internet retailers use it now, but a full 63 percent of marketers are still optimizing sites based on what they have read about or think will work.

A/B split testing is not a one-time investment. It’s an ongoing effort to continuously improve your website. Let’s learn how.

Say you now have an existing landing page (A – Control) without a video, and you send part of your traffic to a new one (B – Variation) with a video. If B does better, you discard A and keep B.

Next you add some social proof in the form of user reviews on yet another version (C) of the landing page, and you compare it’s performance against B. If C does better, you discard B, and so on.

Note that you need statistically significant results of 90, 95 or 99 percent.

A 90 percent confidence rating indicates that you might get a different results if you ran the same test again.

A 99 percent rating says that there’s only a 1 in 100 chance of this happening. The Z-score will likewise tell you if the change in conversions is because of the difference between the two versions, or just a random happening.

The P-value will tell you if your observed result could possibly be misleading you.

To summarize this whole effort in a nutshell – Do whatever it takes to acquire traffic, and then focus on optimizing those few things that will provide a huge bump in lead conversions. That’s what makes for a good website.

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