Whether it is a small or a large business, websites have become an essential factor for the business growth. But the online presence can only be effective if you showcase it in a presentable way to attract your customers.
In the case of small business websites, a well-designed website can bring substantial growth to the table. On the other hand, websites with a bad design don’t bring any benefits to the business.
To help you design your business website and stand out among other businesses, we have brought compressive website design tips for small business websites. So, stay tuned and read this blog till the end.
Website Design Tips for Small Business Websites
There are various tips for designing a website that you can implement on your business website to make it look great and enhance its performance. Some of them are mentioned below.
- Proper Business Contact Details
- Remove Pages with Default Content
- Proper Navigation
- Keep the Website Mobile Friendly
- Avoid Heavy Page Builders
- Avoid Excessive Plugins Installation
- Optimizing Media
- Use Light-Coded Themes
- Include XML Sitemap
Let’s take a look at all tips for designing a website in detail.
1. Remove Pages with Default Content
It is one of the most important and ignored tips for designing a website. When you just get started with designing your website, some default content is provided by website designing platforms.
The content can be present in the form of text or media files.
Most users get ahead with designing their websites without removing the default content. It is provided to help you get started and it doesn’t resonate with your site’s content.
Your customers might encounter that default content while scrolling through your website that doesn’t have any correlation with the content of your website. It can interrupt their content-consuming experience and will put a bad impression of your business in your website visitor’s minds.
To avoid that and provide a smooth content-consuming experience to your website visitors make sure to eliminate all the default content present on your website. You can remove the default content with the help of the WordPress editor.
So, if you don’t want to put a bad impression of your business website on your website visitors then make sure to remove all the default content present on your business website.
2. Proper Navigation
Imagine you visit a website to gather some information but couldn’t access the webpage due to its complex navigation. In such a scenario, the majority of the people will keep trying for a minute and then leave the website right away.
I’m sure you don’t want this to happen with your website as well, therefore to avoid that make sure to set up simple navigation on your business website. Simple and proper navigation makes it easy for website visitors to explore your website and as a result, they will automatically spend more time on your business website.
To make the navigation simple, make sure to categorize your content depending on the products listed on your business website so, the customers can find the content of their choice without any hassle.
Interlink the content on your website as it will make it easy for the website visitors to go from one web page to another webpage. Anchor links allow website owners to know about the content posted on a particular web page hence don’t forget to include them on your website.
To make the website exploration journey more convenient for your website visitors, it is a must to add a search bar to your website. With the help of a search bar your website visitors will be directly able to search for a particular piece of content. After embedding a search bar on your business website make sure to check whether it works properly or not and add related search results to it.
Google also gives priority to websites having proper navigation over websites having improper navigation in the search engine rankings.
So, make sure to implement this tip for designing a website and experience an increased retention rate and search engine rankings on your business website.
3. Keep the Website Mobile Friendly
In an era, where individuals are constantly using their phones to access the internet, it is a must that you optimize your business websites for mobile phones.
Having a mobile-friendly website will make it easy for your customers and website visitors to surf through your website on their mobile phones without any hassle.
Optimizing your business website for mobile phones will make it fit and look great on each mobile screen.
As we talked about earlier, the majority of people use their phones to access the internet, hence a mobile-friendly business website will allow you to target that huge internet user base and drive more traffic to your website.
Mobile friendliness is one of the overall website’s search engine optimization parameters. Hence, having a mobile-optimized website can substantially improve for your search engine rankings.
So, if you want to capture a larger customer base and improve your rankings in the SERPS, then don’t forget to optimize your business website for mobile devices.
4. Avoid Heavy Page Builders
Page builders are the tools used to change the layout and appearance of a website without proper knowledge of coding. They might seem useful tools and tips for designing a website but they aren’t much useful in terms of accuracy.
The biggest issue with page builders is that they hardly create clean and efficient code. They also impact the loading speed and performance of a website negatively by initiating multiple HTTP responses.
The bloated code created by the heavy page builders causes rendering issues. As a result, your website visitors have to wait for a longer duration to access your business website. It creates a bad user experience and increased the bounce rate on your business website.
Ultimately, heavy page builders are going to cause more damage to your business website than benefit. Hence, it is advised not to go with them to change the layout and appearance of your website.
Instead, you can stick to an open-source platform like WordPress to design your website. It will not cause any negative impact on the performance and loading speed of your website. At the same time, the various customizing features provided by WordPress will allow you to design and give a personalized touch to your business website.
5. Avoid Excessive Plugin Installation
We are all aware of the benefits plugins bring to the table for a website. It may be elements or various functionalities; you can add anything to your website with the help of a plugin.
No doubt plugins are very useful but as we all know ‘’excess of anything is bad” and it applies to your plugin usage too. Installing multiple plugins on your website will negatively impact the performance of your business website.
Excessive plugins tend to put a lot of loads on the server increasing its work and as a result, your website starts to have rendering issues. The loading speed of your website drops and the waiting time for your website visitors increases.
As a result, your website visitors leave your website without exploring it further and the engagement rate of your website decreases. You might lose your search engine rankings and visibility as Google doesn’t give priority to websites having slow loading speeds in the SERPs.
Therefore, to avoid the consequences of excessive plugin usage you must limit the installation of plugins on your business website. It doesn’t mean that you don’t have to install any plugins at all on your website.
Only install the ones that are filled with essential and useful features. You can also consider using multifunctional plugins for your websites. A multifunctional plugin is a single plugin that consists of various features. Jetpack is one of the most popular multifunctional plugins provided by WordPress, it can enrich your sites with features like security, SEO, customizations etc.
6. Optimizing Media
Adding media is a great way to help your website visitors to engage with your content more effectively. Media allows website visitors to get a better understanding of the content posted on your website. But it can only happen if the media files posted on your website are well-optimized.
Optimizing the images from the website makes them fit the layout and dimensions of visitor’s device screen. On the other hand, non-optimized media doesn’t fit the layout and dimensions of your website and it can ruin the website surfing experience of your website visitors.
In addition, non-compressed media such as images or videos put a lot of loads on the server. This tend to decrease loading speed and engagement rate of your business website.
Hence, it is a must that you optimize the media files before uploading them to your website. Compress the images before uploading them to the website. You can use the image compressor plugins such as Optimus, Imagify to do the work.
Instead of uploading videos directly on your website hosting, you can simply embed them. Video embedment will not consume storage space and at the same time will not put a load on the server. You can also enable lazy loading for media files. Lazy loading will make website to load images only when they appear on the screen of the website visitors.
7. Use Light Coded Themes
Themes allow you to enhance the appearance of your business website in minutes, without putting any effort into coding.
They also onboard various modern website designing trends that brings beautiful and flashy elements to your business website. But these themes can also alter the performance of your website.
Yes! You heard it right. Themes with flashy elements tend to be built with heavy and unnecessary code. Such themes can slow down the speed and overall performance of your business website.
Therefore, to maintain optimal performance and a great appearance at the same time on your website you can stick to a light-coded theme. A light-coded theme will enhance the appearance of your website without altering its performance and loading speed.
On the other, a poorly coded or heavily coded theme will slow down the loading speed. Slow loading site makes visitors to wait for longer durations to access website. As a result, the bounce rate of your website will increase affecting your visibility in search engine rankings.
Light-coded Premium WordPress template are the perfect choice for small business websites. If you aren’t satisfied with the features and elements provided in theme, then you can always add external plugins to add functionalities.
8. Input Complete Business Contact Details
Providing proper business contact details is one of the most important tips for designing a business website.
Your customers might try to contact you for some help or raise a query about a product listed on your website.
For such a scenario, you must provide contact details to your customers so, they can reach out to you. It gives a sense of importance to the customer and allows you to build a strong relationship with them.
A contact us page is the best way to provide business contact details to your customers. It is an important element so, make sure to place it where, it can be easily visible.
9. Include XML Sitemap
A sitemap helps Google bots and web crawlers to reach your website and access its web pages. Google bots will not be able crawl your website if you haven’t created and submitted sitemap in the Googles search console.
To create a sitemap, you have to visit an online sitemap creator tool and submit the URL of your website. Within a few minutes, your website’s sitemap will be created. Now you have to submit this sitemap in the Google search console.
Sitemap will approve ownership for your website. Once it gets approve, Google web crawlers will start indexing your webisite’s pages.
Final Thoughts
In conclusion, small business website design is essential in today’s digital world. A well-designed website can set your business apart from your competitors, increase engagement and drive sales.
By following above website design tips, you can create a website that reflects brand, and provides a great user experience.
Remember, the key to success is to focus on your target audience, make the website visually appealing, and ensure that it is easy to navigate.
With the right design elements and user-friendly features, you can create a website that meets the needs of customers and takes business to the next level.
