9 Essential Elements to a Successful Website

Starting up and creating a website is very different to how it was back several years ago. There have been algorithm updates to search engines, improvements in technology and devices and more that have all led to websites having to adapt to best suit the web user and gain the most amount of traffic. This shouldn’t put you off from starting a website in 2018, though. The internet is constantly expanding, creating new opportunities everyday for people to make successful websites. With this, if you are looking to create a website, here are 9 essential elements you should include with your website to make it successful.

1. Have a navigation menu – The navigation menu is a way for the web user to explore any part of your website. The best navigation menus expand upon hovering, enabling more options for the web user to explore.
2. Include an ‘About’ page – Web users are curious, especially with websites and how they originate. It is always a good idea to have a bit of information about your website, yourself and what it is about.
3. Optimize the homepage – The homepage tends to be left exactly the way it is based on the theme you are adopting. However, the homepage gets a large chunk of the traffic you generate. For this reason, it is worth optimizing it to make the most of the traffic heading to it (to make sure they don’t exit the page etc.).
4. Use https:// (SSL certificate) – Google has started to provide improved SEO ranking to websites that have an SSL certificate, since it is a securer connection and provideds a safer and better user experience for the web user.
5. Make the font larger than normal – The smaller the font, the harder it is to read and the more likely web users will give up and click off the page. Every week, test a different size font, going larger each time. You will soon enough find the ‘sweet spot’ for font size to retain the traffic.
6. Include a sidebar with useful widgets – The sidebar is good at providing some useful information to the web user. Such widgets that tend to be used include a search bar, categories, adverts, videos, messages and social media buttons.
7. Purchase a professional responsive theme – If you do not know how to create a theme, then let someone else do it for you. Although this will be at a cost, you will save yourself a lot of time and also get a very professional-looking theme at the end of it.
8. Use WordPress over Blogger – With Blogger, you don’t actually own the servers. Therefore, you don’t own any of the content that you publish: at any point, Google could pull the cord. This is one of the main reasons to be independent and go with WordPress.
9. Include security – Hackers are always trying to access websites. For this reason, make sure you have some sort of security for your website, be it inbuilt into whatever software you use or as a plugin with the likes of WordPress.