Of course, it’s hard to predict the future. But looking at trends now, you might know what will start becoming important years from now. It’s tempting to think that because technology is always changing, so too should your website.
But is this strategy any good? Is it going to help you stay ahead of your competitors? In 2023, do you want to be sporting a cutting-edge website or one that has served its purpose for decades?
We’ll cover some main points that people tend to fail on when it comes to website design and build that can make you stand out from the crowd in the years to come.
Mobile Optimisation
Everyone talks about it, including us, but it’s still often forgotten about. In fact, you should be designing and considering mobile-first for any new websites for multiple reasons.
- Mobile users across the globe account for more than 55% of web traffic
- Google will index your mobile site first
- Web technologies like Bootstrap use a mobile-first approach to development
- If your journey works on mobile then it will definitely work on tablet/desktop devices. Accounting for touch interactions instead of hovers will help improve this further.
Super Speed
What’s the most time you’d wait for a website to load? 30 seconds? 15 seconds? The reality is your site needs to load within a second to reduce the chance of users bouncing from your website.
To put that in perspective, if Amazon’s page load speed increased by 0.1 seconds it could result in a loss of $1.3 billion in sales over a year!
You can test your website’s load speed and score using Google’s Pagespeed Insights.
Email Integration
We’ve all seen the ‘10% Off when you sign up’ pop-ups before. They’re a great toll to entice a purchase and get people to subscribe to your emails.
But it’s what you do with that interaction that can be the key to success or failure. You should acknowledge that someone has signed up instantly with a welcome message or series of emails.
After all, email marketing is the most cost effective marketing channel with an average ROI of over 4,000%. Not only that but it costs 4x more getting new customers than it does nurturing the ones you have.
Checkout this basket
I still see websites not offering a guest or quick checkout option, instead forcing users to create an account to continue. This could harm your conversion rate and put people off ordering.
Another frustrating pitfall I’ve noticed is, now there’s more quick checkout options such and Paypal, Apple Pay etc there’s often a discount code box missing. It only appears if you continue with the ‘traditional’ checkout process, which is less convenient. I know I’ve given up ordering in this situation, so how many other people have done the same thing?
So, add a guest checkout and add discount code boxes at the basket stage, not the checkout.
Accessible for all
Inclusivity should be considered from the very start of designing a website, but it’s often overlooked. We think about usability as that is how someone is going to use the website to order. But what if I was colour blind? Would I be able to see certain buttons or text correctly?
It’s accounting for what seem like small things to most people, but will make a huge difference to a lot of people.
If you want to learn more about accessibility in email, you can read my blog post about it here.
Watch out for our new website launching soon. And if you need any help with a new website, get in touch today and we can provide design and development alongside our marketing services.
