8 Must-Have Elements for Your Website

Over 5.6 billion Google searches are made every day; that is 3.8 million searches per minute.

Let those numbers sink in for a moment. That should be the very last pitch made to emphasize just how critical it is to have a well-designed, strategically-crafted, and user-friendly website. If your website isn’t reaching those marks, it’s time to audit what you have and take it to the next level.

Every website will look different, but the successful ones have a few critical elements in common. Including these elements is essential to making navigation easy, boosting customer loyalty, and increasing conversion rates.

Footer Design

Add an Informational Footer to ground your website design and provide a map for your users.

There is a reason every professional website has a footer: the footer is where users go when they have trouble finding information — especially contact information. If users have to spend more than a few seconds looking for your contact page, they will likely give up and go back to their original Google search, eventually investing their money in someone else’s services.

The footer could also include links to your FAQ, Privacy Policies, and Terms of Services pages, as well as any disclaimers and other pages that are necessary to have accessible to users but not needed in your main navigation. A well-designed informational footer can also help keep your primary navigation clean while miscellaneous and social media links live at the bottom of your site on every page.

Contact Form

Add a Contact Form to collect the information you want and need from interested customers.

There has been some debate over whether businesses should have a contact form or their email/phone number on their website—but not much. Contact forms are widely regarded as the better option for many reasons. They are user-friendly, don’t prompt pop-ups, and, for service-based brands, can help collect additional information like the reason for inquiring, project budgets, referral mechanisms, and more.

Contact forms are also a great way to grow your audience. If you use a program like MailChimp, a contact form allows you to collect email addresses and send newsletters and batch emails.

As an added bonus, contact forms also limit the number of spam emails you receive when putting your email address directly on your site.

Striking Hero Design

Add Eye-Catching Imagery or Headline Text to immediately engage and intrigue your audience.

The main focus on your website’s home page is usually what shows “above the fold,” also known as the Hero design. You must make a good first impression to keep your audience on your website and encourage them to click through your web pages.

Eye-catching imagery, high-quality photos, and large, readable header text are surefire ways to make sure you grab and keep attention.

Social Media Links

Add a Social Media Integration so potential customers have a more personal opportunity to engage with you.

Social media is one of the best ways to boost traffic to your site and increase conversion rates. It is essential to be active on whatever social media platforms you have accounts on; however, ensuring other people share your content is vital for growth. Make sharing easier for your users by including buttons that allow them to share instantly from your web page.

Social media can increase your web traffic, but the opposite is true, too. In addition to having share buttons on every post and web page, it is a good idea to have your social media feeds visible on your website like displaying your Instagram feed as a gallery above your footer. This will allow users to find your social media profiles easily, enabling you to grow your following on social media, too.

About Page

Add an About page that authentically showcases who you are and what you do.

When customers decide to invest, they’re not only investing in a product or service — they’re investing in the people behind the company.

This means that showing your audience who you are and what you care about is essential. While your pricing and professionalism appeal to the logical side of the brain, telling your story appeals to the emotional side of the brain.

Creating a website that appeals to both sides of the brain gives you a decisive advantage over competitors who provide little to no information about themselves.

Write a compelling About page to tells your story and allow your potential customers to get to know you or your product. Better yet, hire a professional copywriter to create your About page for you. Professional copywriters know how to tell your story in a way that appeals to your specific audience.

Optimized Meta Data

Add meta tags and descriptions, use alt text, and optimize SEO.

Meta tags are one of the fundamental aspects of search engine optimization (SEO) and are among the first things to affect rankings. They are the words hidden in your website’s code that allow search engines to “read” your site and place it in search results.

Meta tags are everywhere on your site, which is why everything from the title of your blog posts to your site description must use the best keywords to get your site high up in the search results. Platforms with built-in SEO, like Squarespace, make it easier to integrate meta tags and see which ones bring in the most traffic.

FAQs

Add a FAQ page if you find yourself answering the same questions every day.

No matter how much detail you put into your website, customers will still have questions. They always do. Instead of cluttering up your main pages trying to answer them all, create an FAQ page.

This will allow you to remain brief and concise on your main web pages while still providing your potential customers the answers they seek. As your business grows and you receive more customer questions, you can expand your FAQ page rather than rewriting your main web pages.

Your FAQ page should also be easy for users to find. The best option? Link to it in your informational footer. Not only is your footer the first place users go to for your contact page, it’s also where users go for FAQs.

Frequent Updates

Lastly, don’t forget to update your site frequently to keep your visitors engaged and reliant on you as the expert.

Your website needs to be updated frequently to keep users coming back. Unless you are putting out new and valuable blog posts and information, your audience won’t see any reason to return or share your site, and neither will search engines. Your website is a living entity. If there is no new content and no updates, search engines see your website as irrelevant or “dead.”

Adding new content and updating old content encourages search engines to keep visiting and re-indexing your site. This does not necessarily mean you will show up higher in the search results (the quality of your SEO determines that), but it will give you more opportunities to receive higher rankings.

Keep in mind, however, that while frequent updates are useful, quality updates are truly what help your rankings and boost your traffic.

All of these elements encourage your audience to stay on your website, which increases the likelihood that they will invest in you and your business.

Investing in professional web design is one of the best ways to ensure that all of these elements are included on your website in a user-friendly, aesthetically pleasing way.