14 Qualities of Highly Effective Websites

Characteristics of modern websites that work.

Everybody wants to build a website these days. And this is for a reason. It is a great place to market and sell your products. It is a central place for your brand. And you own it and get to decide how it looks, how it works, and what content is on it.

But how to do it right in 2022 so the website works for you and your business and it is not just a “glorified brochure”?

Let me give you some clues about what qualities and characteristics a modern and effective website should have in 2022.

1. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Every website should have KPIs and for most websites, there should be no more than 3–5 of them. Digital product purchase, white paper or ebook download, contact information filled, newsletter subscription, etc. I often see companies looking at things like the number of visitors, page views or bounce rate. But these metrics don’t really mean anything and should not be your KPIs. Increasing the number of visitors or lowering the bounce rate does not necessarily lead to any significant improvement in the performance of the website. They can only have an indirect effect. So let’s think about what is the purpose of our website and come up with 3 to 5 KPIs that we will monitor and improve over time.

2. Simple, flexible, consistent, reusable and responsive design

That’s a lot, I know. But all of these things are important. Times, when you could create a website and leave it for months or years without touching are long gone. Today, great websites change every day or sometimes even several times a day.

To make sure this process happens smoothly and without issues, you need a simple and modular design of your website. Developing good websites is hard. Believe me, I have been a web developer for many years now. And the more complex design the harder it is to make it right. But if it is simple, you have a better chance to succeed. Flashy animations or sophisticated graphics will not convince anybody to buy your product, especially if these animations and graphics make your website slow and clunky.

The design needs to be flexible because it needs to be able to accommodate different types of content; text, imagery, videos, different length and different sizes.

Consistency is obvious; colour schemes, imagery, overall style needs to be consistent across the website. Even if consistent means repetitive that is fine too.

You need to be able to reuse parts of the website to expand and build new things so you don’t have to go through the entire process of designing and coding every time you want to add new pages to your website or add a section to an already existing page. Like building blocks or lego bricks — reusable parts that enable us to create new and unique things.

Responsiveness is making the website work fine on desktop, tablet and mobile phones. Simplicity helps with the responsiveness too.

To achieve all of this, some kind of design system and guidelines would be ideal, especially for larger websites. For smaller websites, it is not necessary but it would be useful. Having the design system and guidelines are priceless when updating or adding new content to the website and make the whole job a lot easier.

3. Clear and intuitive home page and navigation

The main page of the website is called the home page for a reason. It is like home and it is a door to your entire website. This is where you will most likely have the most visits and it is often a place of lost opportunities. You need to feature there what is the most prominent, important and latest on your website. On this page, things need to change often (or at least regularly — depending on the size of the website) and it has to live. Social networks got at least this thing right early. Every time we visit LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook we see something different, we see something that is relatively recent and we see things that match our interest because they come from our network or somebody we follow. That is why it is never boring and we like to engage with it. Why not apply the same principle to the home page of our website?

And then there is typically top navigation with the links to main pages or sections of the website, bottom navigation in the footer and internal links in blog articles (if we have a blog) and other content. All of this needs to be coherent making navigating our website a breeze and the user experience seamless.

4. Speed

Nobody wants to wait for a website or the content of the website to load. Therefore website has to be light and fast (simple design helps here too, again!). To achieve this, static websites are a way to go in 2022. Today, regardless of what system you use for your website, WordPress, Drupal or a custom system, you should think about making a whole or at least part of your website static. Most no-code builders like Webflow generate static websites out of the box, others (among those mentioned earlier) require more thought and configuration but this pays back big time. Not to mention that speed is also a factor in SEO these days.

5. Security

Every now and then I come across a website without SSL (HTTPS) but luckily this is a rare situation these days. SSL (HTTPS) is a must in 2022. Also, if you use WordPress or any other CMS make sure that it is up to date and if you host your own website making sure the webserver software is up to date is also a must. If you have a login on your website, Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) is recommended (especially for any kind of administration panel for managing the website content). Also backup your website and database (if you have it) regularly — just in case.

6. Valuable?content

Information about your company and products on the website is not enough these days. Nobody will come to this website unless you are Disney or Coca-Cola. You need valuable content to attract users to your website and you need to deliver this valuable content on a regular basis for a long time. This is how you create brand and reputation and this is how you rank on search engines and have people come to your website. You won’t do it with 10 blog posts posted over a period of 2 months. This is a long term game. Talk less about you and your products and provide more useful information in your content. You won’t get far by pushing your products in every piece of content you produce. The same rule applies to social media content.

7. Online?product

Even if you are a brick and mortar business you should think about some kind of digital product. Whether this is an ebook, an online course, consulting service. These are the things that pretty much every business can create these days. Even a local barbershop or a bakery. If you are a more offline business it is time to change it and diversify your revenue by investing online and developing digital products. There’s never been a better time to do it and the longer you wait the more you lose. The best time to go online was 10 years ago, the second-best time is today.

8. Personalisation

Personalisation is scary and sounds complex for most people but it doesn’t have to be. You don’t have to use A.I. and Machine Learning algorithms (although you can!) for personalisation. What you can do though is you can modify the content of your home page and internal pages on the fly as the person browses your website. Some of the techniques include personalisation based on the referral (where the user comes from), based on the UTM parameters of the campaign, based on already visited content, the number of visits (new or repeated visitors), time spent on the website, device (desktop, tablet, mobile) or location. As you can see there are plenty of options to explore. Personalisation is the way to go in 2022.

9. At least one social media channel that is?active

The keyword here is active. You can post once a week or every day but make it consistent and don’t leave a social media profile unattended for a long period of time. You can use tools like Buffer to schedule posts in advance so you don’t have to remember when to publish them. Active social media not only means posting but it also means socialising (hello, it is a social network after all). It means asking questions, engaging in conversations on other accounts (not only your own), acknowledging comments, responding to comments, sending direct messages etc. The more you do it the more you see your followers and engagement grow. However, same as with KPIs, the number of followers is not an indication of a successful social media account. It is better to have a smaller but active and engaged group of followers. If you know the concept of 1,000 True Fans you know what I mean.

10. Newsletter

Curated content is on a rise and so are newsletters (including paid ones). Again, don’t focus on directly promoting your products in the newsletter. Focus on providing value to the readers. Nobody will open, read and interact with purely promotional content. And also give an option to the readers to unsubscribe and reply. Newsletters from no-reply@… email addresses are a big NO-NO. Do companies that do it don’t want to hear from their customers? To me this is strange.

11. Address and contact us email or?form

I know companies that deliberately bury this information on the website so it is not easy to find but this should not be you! Make sure that contact information is easy to find. Also, keep an eye on your social media direct messages because in this omnichannel world, you can expect to get a message from anywhere. Encourage people that visit your website to contact you. Not only to buy products but also to ask questions and provide feedback. It is a great source of ideas for future improvements.

12. Analytics

Can somebody live without analytics in 2022? Probably not many people. But there is a difference between having an analytics system implemented on your website, like Google Analytics, and actually using it to improve the performance of your website. So track but most importantly analyse the data and implement improvements on your website based on this analysis. As a matter of fact, analytics is one of the most important factors of a successful website and you can and you should look at it often and review your KPIs using analytics and make improvements that will lead to a better performance of your website.

13. Automation

One of my favourite topics. The idea is to automate boring and repetitive tasks related to your website. It can mean the process of updating your website and collecting information from documents, spreadsheets or note-taking apps, processing it and publishing directly to your website. The process of creating graphics for your social media posts. The process of posting to social media and collecting analytics. The process of creating reports about the performance of your website. And much more. Look at tasks people do today that are mundane and repetitive and see if they can be done by a robot rather than a human. Automation is a huge time a cost-saver, especially for large websites where small improvements create huge benefits.

14. Accessibility

Last but not least is web accessibility. Very often overlooked concept. It means designing and coding a website so people with disabilities can use them. This is another area where the overall concept of simplicity helps. Colours, font sizes, navigation, speech to text, meaningful description of images (alt text). These are just some of the areas to pay attention to when developing an accessible website.

Conclusion

This may sound like a simple list of 14 points but if you can implement all of them on your website, you will be well ahead of most of your competition.

Just don’t try to accomplish all of this at once. Build something simple and solid foundations and over time build on this and expand.

Elon Musk and SpaceX want to go to Mars. But they don’t try to do this all at once. They do it step by step. First, they developed a rocket, then they went to orbit, then they went to International Space Station (ISS), then they sent cargo to ISS, then they sent people to ISS and back. Before they go to Mars, they will probably go to the Moon and other places, but all of this, although being an achievement on its own, lead to the ultimate goal of going to Mars. They’ve tried new things, they’ve failed a lot along the way but they’ve also learnt a lot and accomplished a lot and it will probably continue this way. It’s “only” taken them 20 years to do it so far.

I’m not saying that it should take you 20 years to build your website but you get the idea; don’t try to build it all at once and be successful from the get-go.

Use Kaizen, Lean, Six Sigma or just improve things every day with your website to make it better and you will certainly arrive at your desired destination.

Do it like U.S. Navy Seals say: “Slow Is Smooth and Smooth Is Fast”.

Good luck.