A business's website strategy should align with its overall strategic goals. Often, a business's website strategy focuses on engaging target customers through web design best practices such as optimizing for site speed and mobile compatibility.
Statistics show that the majority of customers look for products and services online and close to half visit a company’s official website to learn more before making a purchase. What's more, estimates suggest that 95% of all purchases will be made online by the year 2040.
An effective website strategy helps businesses engage people searching for your products and services online, especially through mobile. A website strategy is a plan to create and develop a business website that aligns with your business overall strategy.
A website strategy often closely aligns with web design best practices such as optimizing for mobile and designing for functionality. Consider hiring a web design firm to design or help redesign your website to achieve your website strategy goals.
Optimize for Site Speed
We're living in an age of speed and convenience. People want and expect things to be delivered to them quickly and easily, without any unnecessary delay. This is especially true online: 39% of website visitors will leave a website if it's too slow to load.
It's absolutely vital, therefore, to make sure that your site loads quickly and efficiently every time a user visits it. Close to 80% of the top 100 retail sites have load times under 3 seconds. These impressive speeds help to keep users on the site and engaged with the various products, pages, and calls to action.
Achieving this sort of site load speed requires technical expertise: If you do not maintain the ability to develop in-house, consider partnering with a web developer to structure your website to load and operate at the speed customers expect.
Invest In Mobile Compatibility
Nearly 70% of all website visits in 2020 came from mobile devices. To meet users where they are, mobile compatibility has to be at the top of your website strategy.
Etsy, for example, has a mobile site with a clear search bar and bold, labeled buttons to allow users to shop by category.
This structure provides the same functionalities as its desktop version but is geared specifically toward users who visit the site on mobile devices. This consistency between versions helps improves your e-commerce customer experience by creating an intuitive process for users to navigate and purchase from your website no matter how they access your site.
Innovate Through Navigation
Navigation is a huge part of website strategy and general web design. In this day and age, business websites can't afford to be clunky or obtuse in their navigational systems. They need to be easy to use, with clear categories and buttons to help users navigate through your website with relative ease.
It also helps if you can make the navigation system clever or innovative in some way to add personality to your site.
The Good Burger has a clean and simple navigation system on their site. The homepage, however, features a little burger icon in the top right. When users click the burger, a menu opens up, offering quick, simple access to the site's main sections.
This burger icon remains on screen at all times, so even as you browse around, you can always click that burger and switch to another section of the site at a moment's notice. This approach helps users navigate to key pages while maintaining focus on your brand.
Blend Aesthetics and Functionality
Reports show that 38% of website users will stop engaging with a website if they find it to be unattractive. At the same time, many users will also click away from a site and look elsewhere if they can't find what they need, or if they feel that the site is awkward to use in some way.
Effective website strategy takes this into account: Combining aesthetics and function are key user experience metrics that should be high on your business website design or redesign checklist.
Zillow illustrates this balance of functionality and aesthetics with an easy-to-use search bar that sits at the center on the home page and a minimalist navigation bar at the top.
It's very clean and clear, with lots of negative space to draw user attention to the things that matter, rather than being filled with unnecessary images or obtuse ads that may distract users from taking the desired action of searching for a property.
Business Website Strategy Focuses on Your Audiences
Website strategy ultimately is about targeting your key audience in the most efficient and engaging ways. Developing a website that is clean, attractive, fast, and reliable across different devices helps to achieve your business goals through your website.