Terri Despite all the uniform design of social media platforms, templated websites, and more, hosting your own business website with unique, suitable features will always be an appropriate hub for your brand. Not only do you have direct control over it, but can manage the features you utilize carefully. Think of Amazon, PayPal, and other essential platforms – without their main website, their presence would fail to be half as necessary as they are now.
For this reason, it’s important to keep your website moving with the times. New standards, web technologies and more can come into force, and for this reason, web users may demand more from you. In this post, we’ll discuss six of the most essential:
1. Enhance Mobile Responsiveness
Almost 96% of the online population have used a mobile device to access the internet. Arguably, a website that works best on mobile is more important than on desktop, but of course, both should be focused on. You can achieve this by ensuring the correct aspect ratio of images and layouts, template features that don’t require user scripts, and compressing elements like those images to load more quickly.
2. Integrate Social Media
Social media shouldn’t be run away from, of course. In fact, integrating it with embeds can inspire visitors to check out your other platforms. That might mean a running X feed, or integration to open your WhatsApp business chat.
3. Optimize for SEO
Raising your backlink profile via dedicated blog posts and outsourcing, ensuring pages load well, that content has appropriate keywords targeting your local area, and you run a regular site through platforms like AhRefs to identify issues can go a long way in keeping your presence organic.
4. Add Customer Testimonials
Customer testimonials are simple, and quick, and add the social proof that marketers consider liquid gold. Make sure they’re real, not templated or randomly generated, and add authentic excerpts from authentic people. If you can link this to a portfolio of work conducted, that’s even better.
5. Implement Live Chat Support
A quick widget that allows you to live chat with an AI bot or live chat agent or send an email means visitors don’t have to hunt down your “contact us” page and then go through many annoying questions just to get to a human. It’s right there, on any page, especially customer account pages. It also means you can adequately filter out any unneeded support requests with FAQ referrals.
6. More Payment Options
If you sell products or subscriptions on your website, then it’s important to have helpful payment options. Just credit card processing isn’t enough, Google, Apple Pay and PayPal are becoming more common, but some websites even take cryptocurrencies depending on their particular niche. This is where integrating a payment API for developers to tweak over the course of your business operation can make such a massive difference. It allows you to constantly review security, utility and upkeep.