Ensuring a positive, smooth user experience on your company website can be a challenge. To make navigating your site as simple as possible, business leaders should break content on their site into clearly defined website sections.
Updated August 17, 2022
No matter what kind of company you're running, it's important to have your own business website.
There are countless studies, reports, and analytical explanations of how and why business websites matter. What's more, the importance of business sites is only set to increase as the number of internet users rises and more people make use of computers and phones to buy goods and services.
However, simply having a functional website isn't enough. Your site needs to be well-designed, fast, reliable, secure, informative, and effective when it comes to engaging visitors, generating leads, and making sales. This is why experts recommend that every business website have certain key sections.
This guide will look at the most important sections every site should have.
5 Key Parts of a Website
Need help with creating a new website or putting together different sections? Hire a web design agency or web development company to assist your team.
The Homepage
Every website needs a homepage. In many ways, this page is the most important part of your entire site.
It's usually the most-visited page of any site and it's the one that users typically land on the first time they come to your site. In other words, your homepage is what many people will be using to develop their first impressions of your business site.
Quality homepages, therefore, need to do a lot of work to introduce your brand and set the tone for the rest of the site. Additionally, the homepage needs to get user attention and encourage them to look at other sections and pages. These pages need to have attractive designs, engaging content, good use of images and videos, and reliable navigation systems.
Thirty-eight percent (38%) of people will stop using a website if the content or layout is unappealing to them, and it takes less than a second for users to form an opinion of your site based on the homepage. It can make all the difference to ensure that your homepage is of the highest quality, with a functional and pleasing aesthetic, useful CTAs (call-to-action), and other key features.
Additional Reading: '3 Ways to Make Landing Pages That Convert'
The About Page
When visiting many company websites, you may notice lots of different designs and elements, but most of them have one key thing in common: they all tend to have an "About" section.
This website section may be called "About Us" or "About Our Company" or even something more unique like "Our Story" or “Our Vision”.
Either way, these pages are designed to provide information about the company itself, and they can be vital for building up your brand in the eyes of your customers.
In essence, the About section gives you a chance to tell users what makes your company special and why they should work with you. It's a place where you can sell your brand, so it needs to have engaging, persuasive copy, as well as an honest, authentic tone.
Read this: 'How Header Text Impacts SEO'
The Products and Services Pages
Ultimately, the aim of most business websites is to generate leads and make sales. So you need to have pages that are dedicated to the products and services your company has to offer.
A fashion brand, for example, will usually have product pages for its various clothing items and accessories, while an SEO (search engine optimization) company might have important pages about the kinds of SEO services and campaigns it offers.
In many cases, products and services pages make up the bulk of business websites, especially for e-commerce businesses with goods to sell through online stores. These pages need to be informative and engaging, often with visuals of the products in question and quality, concise copy that provides product descriptions and pricing to sell each product.
These pages can also include testimonials from past customers that can promote your product to potential prospectives.
After all, the aim of any product or service page is to encourage users to buy the product or service being discussed. Copy is therefore of the highest importance on these kinds of pages, and many brands work with professional copywriters to get the best product descriptions and CTAs for their products and services pages.
The Contact Page
The Contact section is where you list ways for people to get in touch with you through the key contact information like social media accounts, phone numbers, emails, etc. This is a section that can sometimes go overlooked by certain businesses.
Statistics show that modern users value customer support; they want companies to offer good customer support solutions like email addresses and live chat windows where they can ask questions and get answers.
If users can't even find a way to get in contact with your company, they'll naturally be frustrated and less likely to work with you in the future. They may also simply leave the site entirely if they can't find a Contact section, and they'll be less likely to refer your company to others. Make sure that section is either at the top of the page or within the sidebar with clear call-to-action buttons.
It's therefore imperative to include a Contact page with a list of contact methods or built-in contact form.
The Blog Pages
These days, many business websites also have blogs. Blogs are where you can post articles on all kinds of subjects, usually discussing things that are related to your business.
For example, a mattress company might have a blog with articles like “The Healthiest Sleeping Habits” or “Best Ways to Get More Sleep Each Night”.
Not only are blog posts useful to share information and ideas with your customers, but they can also do wonders for your business through the power of SEO. SEO is all about boosting your site up the Google rankings.
With Google dominating the search engine industry, it's vital for businesses to use keyword-rich blog posts to appear higher in Google listings and get more clicks.
Additional Reading: '10 Questions to Ask Before You Start a Content Marketing Strategy'
Successful Business Websites Are Built on These Key Sections
These five sections are absolutely vital for modern business websites, forming the main skeleton of the site. They each have a part to play, helping to engage users, make sales, strengthen Google results, and build your brand's value over time.
No website should be without these page sections in their main menu:
- The homepage
- The about page
- The products and services pages
- The contact information page
- The blog page
Make sure that all five web sections are featured in your business website if you hope to generate leads, increase subscribers, and increase revenue online.
Interested in learning more about website design? Check out our small business report.