Having a website is now a basic need for any small business looking to tap into a thriving market. There are around 24 million e-commerce sites in the world, and even more websites that simply represent businesses that mainly operate offline.
A consumer report from Visual Objects reveals that 76% of consumers look for a company online before they ever visit in-person. In a largely digitalized world, one of your best assets is a legitimate website. Thankfully, setting one up is much easier now thanks to the vast array of website builders and other online tools out there.
If you’re still trying to pick a website builder for your business, make sure you look for some key variables that will maximize your results.
Customizability
When creating your business website, you need to establish credibility and your brand. You’ll want to stand out from the rest of your competitors and be able to give visitors a sense of your voice and style right away. This increases brand retention and keeps people on your site longer, which is essential if you want to get conversions or engagement.
A guide to the best website builders by Namechk lists Wix and Squarespace as some of the best and easiest builders for this purpose. Aside from being very simple to use, they also offer a wide range of templates that you can then tweak to really fit your business. Wix, in particular, even has a feature called Wix ADI that uses artificial intelligence to instantly build a personalized website based on your own answers to its queries.
Mobile Optimization
64.4% of the global population uses the internet. Of that huge market, around 4.32 billion actively use their mobile devices to use the internet. Whether you’re planning to establish an e-commerce site or simply beefing up your online presence, you don’t want to cut yourself off from such a huge section of people that primarily use their phone or tablet.
This means responsive design and navigation for different screen sizes, legible fonts and buttons for mobile, and fast load times for pages. Weebly and Jimdo are great at this kind of optimization and have tools that help you specifically optimize elements on your site to work for both desktop and mobile.
Scalability
When managing your business, scalability is something that remains top-of-mind. You want to make sure you are able to meet growing demand and adjust as needed, whether it’s a challenging time that requires you to scale back or a rapid moment of expansion that needs maximum productivity and adaptability.
Our article ‘Failing to Plan Ahead? These Tips Might Help You Create Solid Business Prediction’ goes into more detail about this, but you basically want to use tracking data to your advantage and analyze trends to help you adjust to any scenario. Google Analytics offers tools that you can use no matter what website builder you use, but you can get in-depth results with the likes of WordPress and Wix.
SEO and Marketing Integration
Digital marketing and search engine optimization are two cornerstones in building online visibility. If you want to establish your presence in the digital world and build trust with your audience, you want to be seen and and craft a reliable image in the mind of users. This also helps you get relevant traffic from users that are actually interested in your services or products.
Webflow is a website builder that has particularly advanced SEO and marketing tools that have built-in integrations. This is very helpful when customizing the content of your site so that you rank higher in search results from Google and Bing.
Ample Support
If a website builder doesn’t have good customer support, then you should steer clear. While users that make sites for portfolios or personal reasons have more leeway when it comes to downtime, errors, and other site issues, you cannot afford to have a janky website as a business owner.
75% of people make a judgement on a business’ credibility based on their website alone. Although many website builders make it easy for you to make a good-looking and functional website, you want to use one that can offer timely support in case something goes wrong.
For instance, an article on Search Engine Journal notes how a recent security update on WordPress backfired and caused tons of websites to break. You don’t want to have a headache trying to figure out a fix without knowledgeable and efficient resources.