Having a website for your business is vital in our ever growing digital landscape. With consumers turning to the internet for instant gratification and access to goods and services at their fingertips, a website serves as a central hub for your business online. While embarking on the journey of building and maintaining a website, it’s easy to overlook key elements that make or break your online success. Whether you’re digging into the tech yourself or hiring professionals, here are 5 critical items you don’t want to forget when launching your website.
1. Comprehensive testing & mobile responsiveness:
After putting in the painstaking effort of crafting your brand’s perfect logo and web design, the last thing you want is a website that’s broken depending on which screen it’s being viewed on. Not all browsers are created equal, and they differ from desktop to mobile device, so ensuring your website looks its best in multiple browsers and across a variety of mobile devices is essential to putting your brands best foot forward.
Not only is it crucial your website looks great but it’s important to make sure it’s functioning seamlessly on all devices. This includes meticulous testing of your website’s aesthetics, links and functionalities before launch. Given the complexities involved and the rapid pace of changing technology, enlisting the help of a web development professional can be invaluable to a successful launch. They bring the expertise needed to navigate a complex digital landscape, ensuring your website is optimized for every user’s experience
2. SEO fundamentals:
While crafting a visually appealing website is crucial, ensuring it’s discoverable by your target audience is equally as important. A common misconception is that simply having a website guarantees traffic; however, without implementing basic on-page SEO and a strategic SEO strategy, your online visibility may fall short. Your website’s content should provide value to your audience and be structured in a way that search engines believe your website is worth showing to users. This includes using semantic HTML to organize content and incorporating relevant meta tags and alt attributes to describe images and content which enhances your sites visibility and accessibility. Using tools like SEMRush or Moz that offer insights and analytics will bolster your SEO strategies.
Given the intricacies of SEO and the constant evolving nature of search engine algorithms, navigating SEO can seem overwhelming. This is where the expertise of a web development professional is invaluable. Professionals stay up-to-date on the latest trends and algorithm updates, ensuring that your website meets current standards and is adaptable for future changes. Enlisting help with your keyword research, on-page optimization, and ongoing content creation will free you up to focus on running your business.
3. Security:
Having a secure website not only protects your website from hackers; it helps protect your users as well. A simple but sometimes overlooked step in securing your website is to have an SSL certificate installed, which encrypts data that is transmitted between a user’s browser and your website protecting sensitive information.
Security doesn’t just stop at an SSL certificate. Secure hosting, strong password policies, and regular website maintenance to address security updates are very important and often overlooked. Hackers are always finding new ways to breach security, so it’s important to keep your website healthy and secure. While this is not all it takes to keep a website secure, enlisting the help of a web development professional will help give you peace of mind by implementing best practice security measures. A proactive approach to website security can help protect your website and your business.
4. Legal compliance:
As the internet evolves so do legal policies protecting users and businesses. A must have on every website is a clear privacy policy that explains how your website collects, uses and stores users data. There are specific regulations like GDPR for European users and CCPA for California residents which require very specific policies. Websites also need to include things like a terms of service/user policy that detail guidelines for using the website, cookie consent that complies with laws like GDPR and obtains consent from users, copyright and e-commerce regulations. Tools like Termly can help generate the neccassary documents; however, it’s important to consult with a legal professional to help draw up the appropriate policies for your business. Web development professionals stay up to date on policies and will help implement best practices on your website saving you the time of figuring this out on your own.
5. Analytics:
A key to your website’s success will be understanding how your website is being used allowing you to make key decisions about marketing needs for your business. Tracking things like visitor insights will give valuable data including, demographics, geographic locations which will help you market your business more effectively. Understanding your traffic sources will help you allocate your marketing resources to the appropriate channels more effectively. Analyzing user behavior will help inform decisions that will increase conversions. This just scratches the service but are key ingredients to a successful website that will provide data to inform decisions for your SEO, paid media and marketing strategies to help grow your business.
Launching a website is a huge step in establishing your digital footprint; however, it involves a lot more than just going live. Properly implementing comprehensive testing, SEO, security, legal compliance and leveraging analytics play a pivotal role in your website’s success.
While the task of launching a website may seem daunting, remember you don’t have to do it alone. Enlisting the help of web development professionals can help alleviate this burden and ensure your website not only works and looks great but gives you the time freedom to focus on your business success.