What a company website needs to bring in clients
A website can be beautiful and not bring in a single call. These are the things that make the difference, and a list to check yours in five minutes.
For most businesses, the website is the first place a client checks whether it is worth calling. It can be beautiful and still not bring in a single call: what decides whether it works is not the design on its own, but a handful of fairly specific things.
It loads quickly on a phone
Most visits come from a phone, often on a worse connection than the office one. A website that takes a long time to load loses people before they read a single line.
Speed depends a great deal on how the website is built. Websites made with heavy builders load code nobody uses; a website with its own code loads only what it needs.
It can be understood in a few seconds
Whoever lands on your website needs to know two things straight away: what your company offers and what they can do next. If they have to look for it, they leave.
That is not solved with design, but with order: deciding what comes first, what is left out and what the visitor is offered on each page. The copy matters as much as the images.
It looks like your company
Bought templates have one advantage, speed, and one problem: hundreds of companies use them. A custom-built website starts from the business’s identity, and that shows in the trust it conveys.
Google understands it from day one
There is a part of the website visitors never see that decides whether Google finds it: the tags that describe each page, speed, properly declared language versions and the structured data that tells Google what each thing is. Getting it right when the website is built costs far less than fixing it later.
It is yours
It is the part that gets checked least and causes the most trouble. The domain, the hosting and the code should be in your name. If one day you decide to change provider, you must be able to take everything with you without asking anyone’s permission.
A website that is not in your name is not entirely yours: it is a rental.
You can update it yourself
Opening hours, services, photos: some parts of a website change often. If every change depends on someone else, the website ends up outdated. The sensible thing is for those parts to be editable without touching the code.
Check yours in five minutes
- Open it on your phone using mobile data, not wifi: does it load quickly?
- Show it to someone who does not know your company: do they understand within a few seconds what you do?
- Is there a clear way to get in touch from every page?
- Is the domain registered in your name? You can check it in your provider’s control panel.
- Can you change a piece of text or a photo without depending on anyone?
- Search for your company’s name on Google: does your website appear first?
If any answer is “no”, you already know where to start. And if you would rather review it together, at BENAMAR we build custom company websites, in your name from day one.
