Your website is much more than your small business’ digital footprint. It is a brand channel and a means of building credibility with your customers. Consumers increasingly prefer digital-first experiences these days. The more well-rounded your website, the better your sales.
However, ensuring your business website ticks all boxes is challenging. Data privacy laws and other standards force businesses to reconsider their design options. For instance, have you thought about how your website collects cookies?
Here are five factors you must consider before launching your new business website.
Performance
What’s worse than a poorly designed website? A poorly designed website that takes ages to load. Page speed and performance are design components these days. Many small business owners load their websites with fancy digital features, sacrificing page speed in the process.
For instance, you might be tempted to include a light box to capture more emails. However, if the light box slows down page load speeds, your customers will click away before the asset even loads.
Page performance is also an important pillar of search engine optimization (SEO.) Google penalizes websites that perform poorly. You can test your page loading speeds on Google’s Search Console and make adjustments as needed.
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Accessibility
Online standards have a range of abbreviations. HTTP, GDPR, CCPA, CRPA, etc. You can add ADA and WCAG to that mix. These abbreviations refer to laws that ensure websites do not exclude those with disabilities.
Ignoring these rules can have serious consequences. Small and medium-sized businesses are increasingly facing lawsuits over accessibility non-compliance. Everything from your mobile website to downloadable content must adhere to ADA and WCAG standards.
Web accessibility checker accessScan allows organizations to easily test the accessibility of their website and discover if it meets ADA and WCAG requirements. Simply enter your domain, and you will receive a detailed audit with results for every section of the scan for full visibility into your current state of accessibility.
Privacy Policy And Terms Of Use
Websites these days must contain a ton of legal information. You cannot design a website on a free builder and publish it. You must define and create a privacy policy that outlines how you will use visitor data. Your terms of use document will also outline this information.
Privacy policies are under the scanner following the passing of laws like GDPR. These laws define what you can and cannot do with visitor data. For instance, you must offer your users a choice to opt in to cookie storage these days. If your visitors are from the EU, you must offer them the option to select individual cookies or opt-out entirely.
If you use analytics programs to track visitor behavior, your privacy policy must disclose this information. You must also offer transparency into how you store visitor data and the ways you’ll use it. Your privacy policy’s language will change depending on usage.
Websites that contain a “contact us” form must have a privacy policy, at the very least. Fail to do so, and you might find yourself on the wrong end of a lawsuit. You can use tools such as Termly to generate a privacy policy.
Testimonials
More small businesses than ever have migrated online, including your competitors. How are you going to stand out? Testimonials help you achieve this goal easily. They offer your visitors social proof and remove any barriers to purchasing your product.
Some business owners’ fake testimonials, believing visitors will fall for them. However, consumers can easily spot a fake these days. Instead of starting your business relationship off with deceit, incentivize your initial few customers to leave you favorable reviews.
You can even offer scaled-down services for lower costs in exchange for reviews. Do not use fake review services since the likes of Google and Trustpilot sniff them out easily. Take the time to respond to reviews, and you’ll find more people using your service over time.
Once you have a good rating, display your review badges or consider highlighting individual testimonials in special sections on your website. These elements build trust with your audience and will help you generate more sales.
Social Media Connections
Your degree of activity on social media depends on the type of business you’re in. However, every business must have a social media profile and remain active on it. For instance, if you’re in a B2B niche, Instagram might not make much sense, but LinkedIn certainly does.
Make sure you connect your website to social media by linking to your profiles. For instance, if you publish a blog on your website, leave a link to your social media profile so that people can respond there or share your content.
Tying social media and your website together gives your customers more ways to contact you, ultimately leading to more revenues down the road.
Challenging, Yet Rewarding
Launching a business website is a challenging task. However, the result is worth the effort since you’ll generate higher revenues, increase your brand presence and build trust with your customers. Use this checklist to make sure you’ve ticked all the right boxes before launch!