A website is a crucial part of businesses, brands and corporations today. It is practically the first-time potential customers can meet or interact with the brand. It is a virtual business card for the brand and corporate entity, helping in creating a lasting impression among loyal customers and first timers.

If brands and businesses alike are ready in developing a website that can convert first time visitors into customers but are not sure where to start from; they can start with by considering the practices listed below.

These practices are known to be among the best crucial to creating a successful website and are also crucial in creating the needed traffic, sales and revenue over the course of time.

How are web design and development so important?

Whenever a new website arrives on a server, its occurrence is among billions created daily. The number of websites today in the world is around 1.9 billion and it will only take some time before it grows to 2 billion.

Each website faces competition daily from others and the goal of website owners is to have loads of satisfied visitors who enjoy interacting with the website. For e-commerce website owners, their main goal is to make loads of sales.

Whether the website belongs to a large corporation or a niche business, the website should be able to get the job done. That way, website owners will have objectives in mind and the only way to achieve them is developing a website satisfying both the audience and the search engines.

Satisfying customers is understandable to all. But why satisfy search engines?

Search engines select pages from all the 1.9 billion websites on the planet to display on their results pages. However, those pages just do not get there in an instant. The design & development of the website play a significant role in how the website ranks in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Most clicks users make are on the first page of the search engine results. 68% of those clicks go to the first few results and 4% go to the last five results on the page. This leaves only 28% of clicks left to be split between the second and third pages of search engine results.

It can be quite difficult to get traffic to a website if it does not rank high in the search results. In order to ensure the website ranks high in the search results, the website has to follow the best design and practices in the business.

Top web development practices to follow

Whenever businesses are ready to develop their sites, it is important they follow the following guidelines recommended by professionals from top specialist in web design–

1. Make all pages responsive

Developing a responsive website is the first guideline because its important to the website at all costs. Whenever a user visits a responsive website, they can visit and view it on any device. It will respond and present the site elements in the same way it responded on the previous device.

If the website is not responsive on other platforms, say tablets and mobile; then users will not visit that website again due to lack of call to action buttons and images as well as other issues as well.

2. Enabling website analytics

Failure of site owners to understand important metrics on their website will lead site owners to a lack of understanding about their website. They may not be able to know what parts of the website are driving the results and which parts need improvement.

It is important that analytics be enabled. Enabling such helps include a predetermined code in the HTML of the page and important data for needed metrics then comes in.

The embedding of the analytics code helps users log in their analytics platform (Google Analytics for example) to set specific goals, track traffic, measure bounce rate and the like.

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3. Implementing website security

Website security is very important. If the website accepts sensitive information such as user information, credit card numbers etc. then its highly imperative that such kind of information be protected. Else, website owners will face hefty fines and lawsuits

Not only is site security one of the best features to have on any website but it also helps win more users and customers. It is imperative site owners implement an SSL certificate on their websites to prevent public servers from accessing users’ information.

4. Ensure faster loading time

Check the host, avert uploading large images and avoid excessive plugins to ensure faster loading time for the web page. Also you should avoid page redirects as much as possible.

5. Do on page and off page SEO

Search engine optimization is one of the crucial factors one can not ignore while doing web-development and marketing the product. SEO optimized website or software gains best attention from the search engines in turn increases the viewership of the sites.

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