I don’t want to sound like a politician but the short answer is that “it depends.” You can use a website builder or customize a premade theme and purchase web hosting yourself for as little as $200 if you have want to take the time to learn how to do it. You can also hire a creative agency and pay $20,000 or more just for web design and development for that same website.
Google is constantly tweaking its algorithm to improve its user experience by providing more relevant search engine results. Although the SEO landscape has greatly evolved over the years, how Google defines a beautiful, functional website has not. The most important factors are still quick loading time, responsive design and an engaging user experience. Here, we will discuss the elements of what makes up a great website that Google loves and preferentially ranks.
For every second slower that your website loads, you will get 11% fewer page views, 16% less customer satisfaction and 7% loss in conversions and sales. Furthermore, your slow website could also hamper your SEO, user experience, engagement, brand reputation and Adwords quality score which means that you will be paying more than your faster loading competitors. So how fast is fast enough? 47% of consumers expect websites to load in two seconds or less and 40% will leave a website that takes longer than three seconds to load. In order to speed up your website, we have to checkout your current loading time which you can do with Pingdom. If you have not optimized your website for speed, chances are, you are in for a rude awakening. Not to worry – we will reveal some simple ways here to optimize the speed and performance of your WordPress website.
A plugin extends the features and functionality of a WordPress website without you knowing any code. There are over 55,000 plugins so there’s a plugin for anything you need. That’s a whole lot of plugins and you may be wondering which plugins are compatible with the latest WordPress version, play well with other plugins, are customizable and work the best. It is important to note that installing too many plugins will dramatically slow down or even crash your site. Research shows that websites that take longer than 3 seconds to load will lose over 40% of their visitors so it is crucial to install only what is absolutely necessary.
Ever wonder why some websites start with http while others start with https? HTTPS means that the website has been encrypted with a SSL certificate. SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer which encrypts sensitive data like account logins, credit card numbers and other personal information transmitted between a website and your browser so that no one can intercept it.
Whether you are designing a new website or overhauling an existing one, your homepage is a good place to start since it drives the bulk of your traffic. You never get a second chance to make a first impression so what you include on there will determine how effectively your visitors will convert. Your homepage needs to drive traffic, generate leads and educate visitors. Here are some critical items that you must include on your homepage to be successful.