If you’re planning for business growth, you have to consider how your company will meet the demands of that growth. You’ll need to market effectively and provide more products and services to customers. A company website must also meet the demands of company growth, or you will lose business to competitors.
Consider these tips for improving your website.
What your website needs to do
A business owner should think about what an improved website needs to do for customers. Youngstartups.com offers several tips to create an effective website:
Attractive visual presentation
When a prospect or client visits your site, your website needs to present an attractive home page. Most people performing a Google search never go past the home page of a website. Your site needs to grab their attention and interest.
Ease of navigation
Once a prospect decides to visit your site, they need simple and clear tools to move from one page to another. Buttons, drop down menus and page titles need to be easy to use. The website should not be too crowded with information or advertising.
Speed of website
No one likes to wait for pages to load. Your website needs to load pages fast enough to keep the customer engaged.
Content
Google remains the number one search engine on the web. In recent years, Google has made interesting content an important criteria to more up in search rankings. If you provide content that’s useful for your audience, people will use your website frequently.
Call to action
Once prospects are on your website, ask them to do something. That step is referred to as a call to action, or CTA. A CTA can be an opt-in button, for example. An opt-in gives the prospect a chance to sign up for a newsletter, in exchange for providing their email address. Your CTA may ask the client to call you for more information, or a free quote.
How web hosting supports your website
In order to offer a professional website, you need a great web hosting company. Your web hosting firm is the engine that runs your website. To select the right company, you need to understand what services they provide.
Web hosting from iPage includes many of the services necessary for website management, including:
Tools to build the website
Nearly all web hosting firms provide templates you can use to build your site’s web pages. Many companies offer WordPress as an option. WordPress software allows the user to build beautiful website pages using a variety of templates.
Security
A web hosting firm can offer IT security. Security protects client data from fraud or theft. If your customers purchase goods or services using ecommerce, IT security is particularly important.
Data storage
Many web hosting business offer unlimited backup of website data using cloud backup.
Moving to a new web hosting firm
If you make the decision to move to a new web hosting company, your new firm can walk you through the conversion process. Designcoral explains the steps that you’ll take to move your site:
- Join your new hosting company before cancelling your old hosting service. This ensures that you won’t lose important website data during the move.
- The new hosting company can help you migrate your website and supporting files to your new hosting firm.
- Once your site is hosted on the new company’s system, you’ll need to change your Domain Name Server (DNS). The DNS will direct website traffic to your new hosting location.
In order to grow your business, you need tools to support that growth. Make sure that your web hosting company can manage your website’s increase in traffic.