Top 3 Technical Considerations for Your New Website
Today, it takes more than a simple website to have a successful online presence. Competition is fierce, and your site must stand out in visual design and its technical abilities.
There’s a reason WordPress dominates the web design world: it’s easy to use and very flexible. The ability to select from literally thousands of design templates makes it easy to find a good design that sets the image for your business. However, it would help if you considered other technical aspects as you make decisions about your new business website. Here are my top 3 technical concerns you should think about when launching your new website
Responsive Design
Responsive design—or web design that scales its size automatically depending on the site visitor’s device—is critical. With more than 2.5 billion smartphones in use today, having a website that displays correctly in a mobile format is vital for any business. Therefore, it’s critical that Google now favors responsive websites in its ranking algorithms. That means that responsively designed sites rank better for the exact keywords than sites that aren’t responsive. That is why all UX design companies pay much attention to the site’s design and online presence.
When selecting design templates for your website, select only those that offer responsive design options. You’ll have to work a little harder to ensure the correct information shows up in the right places on your site’s tablet and mobile versions, but it will be worth it. Visitors who visit your site on their tablets or smartphones can find the exact information they want from your business. In addition, it will increase sales and help you develop the image that you are a severe and modern business that can be trusted, mainly if you are doing any eCommerce.
WordPress templates are often developed by third parties and sold through the WordPress system. Numerous templates offer responsive options. But because independent developers mostly make them, the codebase and other technical aspects may not be optimized for best use with every other part of the WordPress system. For alternatives, Duda, a professional website builder, has design templates developed in-house to fit seamlessly into their system.
Page Speed
With responsive design widely accepted as a necessity, page load times are the next critical issue that must be addressed. Since responsive website design is technically three designs in one, the amount of code that must be processed can slow pages down significantly.
Site visitors come to your site on their mobile devices because it’s convenient for them. They want a good site experience, whether riding the bus, sitting on their couch, or out for dinner. With this in mind, a poor user experience that delivers slow pages can undo all the work you put into a mobile design in the first place. Page load speed directly impacts the engagement you get from your website.
One part of the page speed issue is “render starts.” That’s the time it takes for the user’s device to start displaying your site’s content. It’s been shown that when sites start to display content in less than one second, there’s a nearly 50% increase in engagement actions over sites that load their content in 3-4 seconds.
It’s critical to have a site that’s not only responsive but also one that starts to display the content quickly. This is where WordPress might not be the best answer for small to medium-sized businesses. Remember, many of the perks and features of WordPress are developed as plugins or other add-ons that come from other developers. For the speediest performance, seek a unified solution, such as Duda, where the entire code base is written with speed optimization.
Marketing Program Integration
Today’s business websites must meet multiple demands—visual appeal, mobile-friendly, secure, and fast. The best websites also act as tools that help the business be more efficient. This is especially critical for small businesses, where “time is money,” and there never seems to be enough.
A critical area of concern for any business is marketing operations. This is where a website turns into a tool that’s much more than just a website. You should seek a platform that allows you to personalize your website user experience for individual users based on several factors, such as how many times a person has visited the site before or where they’re visiting from. This automated marketing personalization will pay big dividends for your small business.
The ideal platform should also allow you to customize pages for marketing campaigns, where visitors see content specific to an email they received or some other offer you have set up. Finding the tools and platform that allow you to design, implement, and track marketing campaigns save time and money and simultaneously adds value for your users. The bottom line: personalization pays off.
A Solution That’s More Than A Blogging Platform
When WordPress was launched in 2003, it was revolutionary. It was a great solution that helped businesses begin to build their online brand and publish on the internet. And as a content management system, it’s still relevant today. But the industry has changed. Duda is a robust, integrated solution that’s ultimately efficient and feature-packed; it easily meets the heavy technical demands of conducting transactional internet business.
If you’re looking for a website platform that can be flexible while still meeting the complex demands of conducting business on the internet, seek out a solution with a unified and efficient codebase and the ability to serve multiple business needs in a single package. The fully integrated Duda solution brings marketing functionality and optimized page speed that will help you stand out from the crowd and manage your business to success.