How to make your website as good as possible: Seven key tips

Having a website has been an essential part of every startup for over 25 years now and they remain the main go-to place for customers to find out more about your business. Even in the era of social media, websites have a key role to play and getting it right (or wrong) can be the difference between your startup being a success or a failure.

Web design has evolved over the years so a good website built in 2024 will look wildly different to a good website built in 2014. So, regardless of whether you are looking to improve your current website or build a brand new one, here are seven key tips on how to make it as useful, attractive, and efficient as possible.

How to make your website as good as possible

Strong calls to action

Calls to action are an absolute necessity on every website. Visitors need to feel like they have an end-goal when they visit a website so ensure you have calls to action scattered throughout your website. Simply having them on your website isn’t enough, though.

It’s no good having a ‘sign up’ link/button merged into a paragraph of text as skimmers will miss them entirely. Design your calls to action so they are strong, unique and stand out as soon as you click onto the webpage.

Use keywords in headlines and headings

Make sure you undertake keyword research into the types of things that your target customers are searching for so that you can provide them with a service that they need and want.

Once you have discovered these keywords, make sure to include them in headlines and headings on your website. Not only will help your website to rank higher on Google for those search terms but it will also help your customers know exactly where to look when they land on your site.

Use bullet points

You may well be an expert in your field and can reel off pages of information about topics related to your startup but unfortunately, that is going to simply bore your audience and make them go elsewhere.

Try to condense key information into bullet points to help your customers digest it simply. We live in an era where people are lazy online – they don’t want to read too much and prefer just skimming through websites. Therefore, bullet points can be your best friend.

Make it mobile-friendly

The vast majority of people (92.3%) use mobile phones now to browse the internet so designing a website purely for desktop users is utterly pointless in 2024.

Therefore, you need to ensure all elements and text work well when loaded on mobile phones. This means ensuring headings and paragraphs are short, increasing the size of your text and making images as light as possible.

Welcome white space

In years gone by, people have been paranoid about white space on websites as they felt it was effectively ‘wasted’ space. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth. The reality is that cluttered websites with little or no white space are just difficult to read and have higher bounce rates than those with plenty of white space.

White space around text is said to increase user attention by 20% and it will also make your website look more open and welcoming.

Update it regularly

There is nothing worse than loading a website up to find that it uses themes that were common five years ago. It’s not only unattractive but gives the impression that your business is either stuck in the past or no longer active.

What’s more, websites that aren’t updated regularly rank poorly on Google. Therefore, if you want to attract new customers through google searches then you are going to need to keep on top of updates.

Optomise load speed

People expect speed when browsing the internet in this day and age and aren’t prepared to sit and wait around while a page takes forever to load. In fact, recent statistics indicate that five extra seconds of waiting results in a 20% increase in a website’s bounce rate.

One of the quickest and easiest ways to optimise and improve your load speed is to compress all images on your website. Large images take longer to load which can be a nightmare for load speeds.