A website is a beneficial tool for your business and among the best tools to attract more clients and improve your business. However, it has to be good to fulfil that purpose. If you have a website that is battling low conversion rates, traffic, and high bounce rates, your website could be missing some crucial elements. The reason could be that visitors are finding it difficult to use for lack of accessibility elements, which you need to carry out a website accessibility audit to know.

But what exactly makes a good or a bad website? Here are five top website elements must-haves that can make the difference between a good and a bad website.

Clear Purpose on Homepage

There are many entry channels to a website, such as blogs and links to specific pages shared elsewhere, but the homepage remains the most visited page on a website. It’s therefore crucial that you have a clear message that allows users to understand your site’s purpose and want to look deeper. A visitor will form an impression and judge your company’s credibility and professionalism from the first glance.

It’s also where visitors get a guided direction on the actions to take. It works as a preview of your entire site, and therefore, visitors need to like what they see. That means the menus, headings, content, logo, and business name need to make sense and be easy to understand.

Clear Site Navigation and Architecture

As earlier stated, visitors can get to the site from various links and not necessarily through the website’s homepage. These are links from search engines, blogs, or social media, and they drop visitors in the middle of a website. That’s why consistent and persistent navigation is crucial in all pages so that your visitors can get to the other pages on the site.

Observe hierarchy in your layout. In the ADA compliance website checklist, you’ll find that navigation needs to be accessible to persons using assistive technology tools like screen readers. That means you need excellent site architecture that can allow navigation by keyboard only or other keyboard equivalents. Page information should be well-organized and structured. Consider using site architecture tools.

Responsive Web design

Mobile devices make online content accessible on the go making mobile web users higher than traditional PC users due to convenience. A responsive site is more likely to engage visitors for longer, which increases their chances of eventually converting to customers. A responsive website design is not just about its use on smartphones but its adaptability to any screen a user chooses to use, including tablets.

Excellent Content

Your website content is one of the reasons visitors are on your site. It also plays a significant role in your ranking on search engines when written well and specifically for the web. It should be in a language that your audience understands and written with their needs in mind. Ensure it’s scannable to enable visitors to find what they’re looking for quickly.

If you have no idea how to craft web content, a professional copywriter will be more than glad to do that. They can help you generate excellent content for the About Us page, news, or blog. Always use alternative text (ALT text) for any images, videos, and audio content on the site for accessible web design. Remember VPAT compliance is crucial for your website as it measures your site’s compliance level of compliance with accessibility guidelines. 

A Clear Call to Action (CTA)

Ultimately, there’s something you want your web visitors to do. It could be to place an order, subscribe to services, call customer support, send an email, etc. The end goal of your website should be clear to the visitor. Ensure your CTA buttons attract enough attention without being distracting. However, you should make the checkout process easy.

A complicated process will make visitors leave before completing the action. Avoid hustling visitors to register an account first before checking out. You can make it easier by only asking for their name and number or email in a quick and easy process. In that way, you’ll also have their contact information to reach them should a need arise.

Takeaway

Building a website should always put the user first, making the user experience vital to generating more traffic, improving bounce rates, and increasing conversion rates. Overall, a website needs to be user-friendly in design and function, accessible, and usable.