As a developer, your goal is to give your visitors a pleasant website that lets them solve their problems. Yet it very often happens that a website falls short of its intended goal, and that your visitors leave frustrated every time, unable to find a piece of information or complete a specific action. This happens because your website isn’t of good quality.
In this article, we’ll introduce the ten elements that make a website a quality website. We’ll also explain, with supporting examples, how these elements influence your website’s quality, and finally we’ll help you improve these ten points by giving you the resources you need.
1- Effectiveness
A quality website must achieve its goal. It should be designed to lead users toward the action they need to take (buying an e-book, filling out a contact form, subscribing to a newsletter, etc.).
A website’s ability to accomplish its goal is its main quality. A site that meets its objectives is, as a result, rarely criticized on other aspects (design, appeal, etc.).
To improve your site’s effectiveness, you need to use CTAs (Call To Action). A call-to-action is a part of the site that prompts a user to take a specific action. It can be used in many ways (inside a text, on the homepage, in a modal window, etc.) but must be used enough to push the user to take the action.
2- Content
A quality website must have good-quality content. Good content is content that is readable, accurate, free of grammar and spelling mistakes, and optimized for search engines through keywords.
A website’s content improves its quality because it makes the site easier to rank on search engines, on top of providing a clear, precise solution to users’ problems. If you want a good-quality site, it’s in your best interest to focus first on good content, because that is what will connect you with your visitors.
To improve your website’s content, you can use plugins such as Yoast SEO on WordPress, or use other tips available at this link.
3- Performance
A quality website must be fast, meaning its pages load quickly. How many times have you left a site simply because it took too long to load? Surely several times. Quite simply because a slow-loading website tends to bore, disengage and discourage its visitors.
A website’s loading speed is very important. A fast website is greatly appreciated by users because they can more quickly find what they are looking for. It is also a useful factor for ranking on search engines like Google.
To find out your site’s loading speed, we recommend the GT Metrix platform (available in a free version), which gives you important metrics such as load time, the number of HTTP requests made, page size, your performance score, as well as tips to help you optimize your website. If you want to improve your website’s performance, check out this link.
4- Usability
A quality website must have a consistent visual hierarchy. Users should not feel any discomfort or difficulty when trying to find information on the site. The homepage must be clear, simple and precise; the site should avoid as much as possible containing complex animations and other superfluous gadgets that can distract users from their mission. Menus must be accessible and intuitive, and most operations should be doable in three clicks or fewer.
Usability plays a crucial role within a website. It is what eases the relationship between the user and the site, and good usability guarantees visitor loyalty.
Boosting a website’s usability is generally not an easy task, because it is an activity that draws on aesthetic, cognitive and psychological skills that only a web design professional can guarantee. Still, you can start by following this list of tips to improve your website’s usability, and if the result does not convince you, do not hesitate to contact us for a custom design.
5- Visibility
A quality website must be easily visible on search engines. To improve a site’s visibility on search engines, we carry out an activity called SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
SEO plays an important role in a website because it makes the site easier for visitors to reach. It also lets the site gain more visitors, which is good for its reputation.
To improve your website’s visibility, we invite you to follow the following link. It gives you tips to improve your site’s organic ranking. For example, you can ask sites more famous than yours to mention you in one of their articles (off-site backlink).
6- Adaptability (responsive)
A quality website must be able to adapt to every type of device. It must keep a pleasant, consistent look whether on a computer, a tablet or a smartphone. In English, we say it must be responsive.
These days, a responsive site has more advantages, because 80% of people connected to the internet do so from a smartphone. As a result, a site that does not display correctly on smartphones will tend to push all its users away and will not have the same audience rate as a responsive site.
To make your site responsive, the solution is to use responsive templates, frameworks such as Bootstrap, or to work through CSS code using media queries.
7- Compatibility
A website must be compatible with as many browsers as possible (Google Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, UCWeb, etc.).
When designing your website, keep in mind that a site is just a collection of web pages. And to display these web pages, we go through a browser. Now, your many users do not all use the same browser. That is why your site must keep the same appearance across as many browsers as possible.
To improve your website’s compatibility, we advise calling on a web development professional such as MboaGeek to solve the various compatibility issues.
8- Reliability
A quality website must be reliable. That means it should not contain bugs or dead links. It should also have a secure admin area and not be overloaded with spam and scams of all kinds in its comments.
A website’s reliability and security have a big impact on its credibility. A site that lacks reliability, that is full of bugs, dead links, spam and so on, will tend to put visitors off and keep them from coming back. This can really harm the site’s growth over the long term, especially for an e-commerce site.
To improve your website’s reliability, we suggest several simple tips such as using a spam filter (Akismet on WordPress, for example), frequent updates handled by a professional for security issues, and other tips available here.
9- Maintainability
A good-quality website must be easily maintainable. Your site should be easy to update, whether in terms of content or style. On top of that, search engines favor sites whose content is updated regularly.
A site’s maintainability is necessary because it supports good organic ranking by making the site easier to update. For example, your site should be easy to modify without the involvement of a seasoned developer.
Improving a website’s maintainability depends heavily on the early choices made when designing the site, such as the choice of platform. Some platforms such as WordPress and Prestashop offer default admin interfaces that help the user a lot. If your site has no admin interface and has content that constantly changes, do not hesitate to contact us to get a solution to your problem.
10- Scalability
A site’s maintainability is necessary because it supports good organic ranking by making the site easier to update. For example, your site should be easy to modify without the involvement of a seasoned developer.
Improving a website’s maintainability depends heavily on the early choices made when designing the site, such as the choice of platform. Some platforms such as WordPress and Prestashop offer default admin interfaces that help the user a lot. If your site has no admin interface and has content that constantly changes, do not hesitate to contact us to get a solution to your problem.