6 Things to Remember if You’re Starting a Website in 2020

When you start a new website, you’re entering into a competitive world, where many players are competing for peoples’ attention and clicks.

It can be a daunting challenge starting a new site, but the nice thing is, you’re starting with a clean slate and have the perfect opportunity to build the strong foundations your website needs for success.

So, what thing’s do you need to remember if you’re starting a website in 2020 and how do you go about it?

Start with a Plan

It seems like a simple point, but your website needs to be organized in a logical manner and it’s much more difficult to do this if you don’t have a clear plan. When you start with a blank page it’s easy to build the structure that’s going to help people navigate your site and please the search engines; it’s much harder to go back and fix a website that’s poorly structured.

Think about your goals for your website and think about what kind of content you want to write. From here, you can start planning a structure that’s going to help you achieve those goals.

When you start a new website, you’ve got a perfect chance to do everything right and structure is a great place to start.

Make it Fast

If you’ve got a choice between simple and fast or complex and slower, simple and fast should win every time. Not only do Google and the other search engines place emphasis on websites being fast, but your users also expect your pages to load quickly.

If your site loads in 1-3 seconds, typical bounce rates are about 32%. If you add just 1 second to the load time the bounce rate jumps to around 90%! You simply can’t afford for your site to load slowly otherwise you’re going to lose customers and you’re going to lose revenue.

Make sure, when you start out, that you choose a hosting package that offers good speeds, and also go for a fast theme.

User Experience is Key

Clearly, people aren’t willing to wait extra seconds for a web page to load, and their patience runs thin when it comes to poor user experience as well.

You work hard to get people to your website, and you want to make the most of their visit. You don’t want them leaving because the page takes too long to load, and you don’t want them to get frustrated because of glitches and user experience problems.

 

Your website should lead people on a journey that culminates in them taking the action you want them to – buying something or registering as a lead. Every user experience issue you have is just another barrier to people taking this action.

Quality Content

Whatever your goals are, you’re unlikely to achieve them without quality content. If you’re not producing quality content, then your visitors are going to head to a site that is, and Google is going to help send them there.

Google’s most basic job is to send people to the content that best answers their queries, and if you’re site isn’t doing that then you’re not going to get ranked. If you want to be ranked at the top of the search engines, then you’ve got to create content that’s worthy of being at the top of the rankings.

Even if organic traffic isn’t a big concern for you, you still need good content to engage people and get them taking the actions you want them to take. The better your content is, the more people will come back to your site, helping you build a relationship with them and turn them from promising lead into loyal customer.

Make sure you’re mixing up your content and including video on your website. Working with professionals like its bernard videographer, you can greatly improve the way people interact with your site.

 

Link Building

Google wants to send its users to the best content on the web, but at the same time, it’s got to ensure that those websites are authoritative and trustworthy. It’s no use if the search engines send people to highly entertaining content but all the information’s wrong.

To make sure your website is offering people true value, Google uses different metrics to establish EAT – expertise, authority, trustworthiness. If your website can’t show that it’s an authoritative source, then it’s going to struggle to rank well, particularly for competitive keywords.

One of the ways to start building your authority is getting backlinks from quality websites in your niche. For example, if you’re writing about the Moon and you get a backlink from Nasa’s official website, this is a pretty good sign you know what you’re talking about!

Link building can occur naturally, particularly if you have good content, but the chances are you’re going to have to do some outreach and try and actively build these links. Don’t get carried away with spammy links but look for high quality links that are relevant to your website.

This will help build your authority and give you a better chance of ranking.

 

Optimize for Mobile

Maybe it’s because we generally build our website on desktop that we can often neglect mobile performance. In 2020 this is a terrible mistake to make though, as mobile now makes up the majority of internet traffic.

Your website has to look as good and perform as well on mobile as it does desktop, otherwise you’re just throwing away potential clicks.

Through Google Search Console, you have all the tools you need to find out how your website is performing on mobile and get suggestions for how to fix any problems. If you’re not confident on the technical side, then it’s worth looking at your theme and the plugins you have to try and trim them back and make sure they’re extremely mobile friendly.

Making your site work better on mobile can give you a huge boost in performance and allow you to get that bit more out of your website.