Once you build a website, it is not enough to launch it. In case you want to stay afloat and provide your users with a high service level, you need to continually monitor your website’s efficiency and the satisfaction level of your visitors.
For this purpose, we prepared a list of tools to add to your website that will help you control website functionality comprehensively. But first, we will discuss why you should create a website for your business and crucial things to consider when building it.
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Reasons Why Your Business Needs A Website
Apart from a simple but apparent reason that digital presentation is a must, there are dozens of other reasons why you cannot do your business successfully today without a website. Let’s take a look at the advantages of having a website.
- A professional look. If you want to gain the credibility of users, you must build a website. Any type of business requires the availability of a website to show that it is worth cooperating with. Besides, you can show all achievements your company has via the website.
- The attraction of new customers via search engines. Your company won’t grow and succeed if the number of customers remains the same. The website allows your business to be visible on the Internet, and users can find you using Google or other search engines. And if you want to increase your website’s ranking, it will be necessary to use the website optimization tools below.
- Clear presentation of your services. Here, skilled UI/UX designers do their job. Using high-quality images, an intuitive and appealing design, the website shows your company’s products and services. And the website helps you promote services in the right way. So, designers from Cadabra Studio are ready to help you.
- Simplified communication process. The contact information can be visible and available on your website in one click. Many companies place their phone numbers and email addresses right in the footer. However, it may depend on the particularities and type of your website. You must add a visible and large “Contact Us” button to let customers communicate with you quickly — it will positively impact customer loyalty. Also, live chat on the homepage contributes to customer loyalty.
- Location. Google Maps API will help your visitors find your site quickly right on the map. Of course, you can place the address without a map, but visitors will need to use maps in Google on their own, it takes time. Thus, it may negatively affect the number of potential customers.
- Competitiveness. If your competitors are available online, and you are not —, you lose. The website aims to show your strong sides and why your company is better than competitors. When you have a website, you can promote your products and/or services, communicate with customers using content marketing, and it will be your chance to stand out among the competitors.
- Website is a long-term investment. Nobody knows about you until your company is represented online. Billions of people use the Internet every day, and word of mouth won’t be enough to promote your business. So website development is a must-have step. As well as a mobile app, but that’s another story.
Common Mistakes in Creating Websites
Making mistakes for business owners is a way of gaining experience. But some mistakes can be costly. So, if you want to save money, here’s a list of common mistakes you should avoid:
- Poor Navigation. Visitors are likely to leave quickly if the site’s navigation is confusing and difficult to use.
- Lack of Mobile Optimization. With a growing number of people accessing websites on their mobile devices, ensuring your website is optimized for mobile users is essential.
- Slow Loading Speed. Slow loading times can frustrate visitors and cause them to leave your site.
- Overuse of Flash. Flash is a technology that can be used to create animations and interactive elements on a website, but it can also slow down the site and may not be supported by some devices.
- Inadequate Content. Badly written or inadequate content can turn visitors off and provide insufficient information to help them make an informed decision.
- Lack of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). If your site is not optimized for search engines, it may not appear in search results, making it difficult for potential visitors to find.
- Overuse of Ads. Excessive ads can annoy visitors and distract them from the content they are trying to view.
- No Call-to-Action. If your site does not have a clear call-to-action, visitors may not know what to do next or how to interact with your site.
- Inconsistent Design. A site with inconsistent design can be confusing and difficult to navigate.
- Poor Use of Images. Poorly chosen or low-quality images can detract from your site’s overall look and feel.
Plan to cooperate with professionals to build a website? Cadabra Studio is what you need. Contact us to develop your project.
Essential Things To Keep In Mind When Creating A Website
When we have already dealt with mistakes we should not make, let’s consider the points to which we should pay attention. You better don`t ignore them if you want to save time and earn more money.
- Determine your target audience. It may sound weird, but the proper focus is possible only when you target the right audience. You must evaluate the market and determine your target audience to create a unique user experience (UX) design for your website.
- Keep up with the brand identity. The design team that will create your website may follow all your requirements. In order to acquaint the design team, you have to create a brand guide and share it with designers to explain to them thoughtfully what you exactly need. It will ensure your brand and logo will be consistent and that the website remains appealing.
- Make your website mobile-friendly. If your business doesn’t need a mobile app, it doesn’t mean you can ignore mobile users. Your website must be responsive. Consider the mobile-first approach in mind since most users prefer mobile devices to desktop ones.
- Add CTAs. The role of CTA, or call to action, and clever marketing strategy, in general, is to make users convert (i.e., perform the necessary step). Your website cannot exist without CTAs; they must be present almost on each page but use them right and unobtrusively. Clickable CTA buttons usually fit the website well.
- Make your website scalable. Build a website considering its further growth. We mean that the website cannot remain unchanged for many years. Updates, new features, redesign — everything must be implemented. That is why you need to discuss scalability with developers — a website can be modified easily if new market conditions demand it.
- Arrange the communication process. Let your future customers contact you or your support team quickly. Share all contact information like working hours, email, phone numbers, department heads’ names (if there are), responsible people, etc. Ensure your customers feel comfortable, and their feedback is crucial to you.
- Plan your budget. Don’t strive to spend too much money and build a complex website. It will be enough to make a minimum viable product for a start. Besides, some website creation tools may also require investments, so save your budget for future costs. Don’t ignore our article about software development budgeting, you will find some helpful info there.
Top 21 Website Tools Examples You Must Use For A Full-Fledged Functionality
Now we are discussing the tools your website must have if you want it to succeed. Remember that not all will be appropriate for your website at once. Besides, some types of websites won’t ever need specific tools from this list. But let’s not beat around the bush.
Best Tools For Site Analysis
Hotjar
The first tool in our list is the Hotjar tool. It is considered to be one of the most popular tools today. Hotjar helps website owners analyze the behavior of users and understand what users need. The Hotjar platform will allow you to see your target audience’s demands, increase conversions, detect and remove mistakes, etc.
This tool is perfect for its practicality and usefulness. You don’t need to guess how users behave on your website — you see an actual heatmap of users’ actions and clicks. You can collect feedback from users and contact them in real-time mode.
Lead Form
A Lead Form is a tool from Google that is necessary for your website to let visitors contact you quickly. Users fill out the form to indicate their contact information, like email and phone number (if required), and send their inquiries.
So, this is a straightforward but must-have tool that makes your visitors convert into leads. But make sure that there are no unnecessary fields since they can discourage users.
Search Console
Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) is a free web service for adding and verifying indexing status and further site optimization. This tool is used by both professionals for successful SEO promotion of the website and by newbies due to simple algorithms and a straightforward interface. GSC uses a Search Analytics sub-tool that helps select the strategy for rapid traffic growth.
You can monitor SERP (search engine results page) as a website owner when users input related keywords. Also, you can find out whether your website has indexing problems. And it is not a complete list of features; there are many other valuable functions.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is another tool used by every second website. The tool is designed for visitors’ behavior analysis on websites and apps. GA is a must-have tool for website owners and Internet marketers contributing to website SEO promotion.
Google Analytics allows you to monitor visitors’ actions, calculate conversions, conduct A/B testing, analyze the effectiveness of various advertising campaigns, etc. Today GA remains one of the best tools for websites.
Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg is an analytical web application that helps you form heatmaps. It will help you identify how users interact with your website. The tool generates heatmaps, showing where users made more clicks. Thus, you know where you need to focus. Also, the tool has scroll maps (how users scroll down the page, where they stop), an overlay tool (the number of clicks on your website), and a Confetti report (you see where visitors clicked on your website and what made them do it).
Ahrefs
It is not a plugin or tool but a beneficial service with multiple capabilities. Ahrefs is a robust SEO tool that can perform competitor analysis (you will know everything about competitors’ growth), keyword analysis, content analysis, organic traffic monitoring, and website audit. The latter is used for the improvement of your website, and optimization of available functionalities.
SE Ranking
Another toolkit for website owners and SEO specialists. It is used for website rank tracking (website popularity), SEO audit, backlinks monitoring (external links that lead to your website), competitor analysis, report builder, and marketing plan builder.
Moreover, SE Ranking makes it possible to use the White Label feature — create your corporate style following brand identity. Therefore, SE Ranking is a service you must use since it provides you with your website’s detailed analytics.
Captcha On Forms
Captcha is a tool you probably know since it is widespread protection from spammers. Remember when you entered a website, and the system asked you to input figures or letters written on the image to confirm that you are not a bot? It is a must-have tool if your website has a form to fill out. When users fill it out, they confirm that they are humans — it will prevent your website from being spammed.
There are captchas available from different companies; you can choose the one that meets your needs.
Hootsuite
Social media is a robust advertising channel, so we cannot ignore it. Hootsuite is a tool for social media management, and you can manage various social media channels to promote your business.
Hootsuite makes it possible to monitor social media and find mentions of your company and your competitors, schedule messaging to send messages 24/7; analyze your team’s performance level (how it solves issues related to social media channels). You need this tool if you use social media for your business presentation. Apart from Hootsuite, there are services like Buffer, Later, and other services that also have exciting features.
Best WordPress Plugins for SEO and Website Optimization
WP plugins can be installed easily on your WordPress website. We want to list four popular plugins that are worth your attention.
Yoast SEO
It is the first plugin that helps your website rank higher in search results. Yoast SEO is an SEO plugin with an extensive range of features like URLs and meta tags, such as SEO improvements, XML sitemaps, meta descriptions, title templating, etc. Also, your website starts loading faster due to the advanced way of managing data in WordPress.
Easy FAQs
It is an essential tool to provide your customers with an answer to their questions. Easy FAQs lets you set up a FAQ page in a few minutes. You can insert a list of your FAQs in one or more categories or add a FAQ page on any page or sidebar.
WP Schema
Schema is a code snippet that provides Google and other search engines with more detailed information about your website. WP Schema plugin allows you to create more attractive and helpful user search results. Using WP Schema, your website will get more relevant results, leading to increased traffic.
MonsterInsights
It is a plugin that simplifies the management and tracking of Google Analytics data. MonsterInsights allows you to monitor all necessary data on the WordPress website. It has all the required analytics functions: user data tracking, events, and statistics monitoring.
Social Media Pixels
A pixel is a snippet of code embedded into your website, allowing tracking of user movements and behavior. And social media pixels are targeted at learning user behavior in social media channels.
There are two most popular pixels: Facebook And LinkedIn. Facebook pixel makes it possible to find out demographic data like gender, age, location, etc. LinkedIn pixel is perfect for B2B businesses. You will get all valuable information about visitors like company name, size, job titles, functions, etc. Pixels allow you to track conversions as well, considering your custom settings.
Google Tag Manager
Google Tag Manager is closely linked to pixels — we recommend installing Google Tag Manager to use social media pixels. GTM is a system for managing JavaScript and HTML with tags, and the involvement of developers is not required.
GMT enables data sending to Google Analytics, AppsFlyer, and other analytics systems; for example, you can place custom HTML scripts on your website for banner display. Or for A/B testing.
Kraken.io
As a large amount of web traffic is made up of images today. And you need a tool for image optimization and compression to speed up the website’s performance. Kraken is the right tool to use. It is possible to optimize images in two ways: using an URL of the image or uploading the image directly to Kraken.io API. The main advantage of Kraken.io is that it doesn’t impact image quality, and it still remains high after compression.
Cookiebot
A cloud-driven solution that helps you evaluate whether cookies on your website meet GDPR and CCPA requirements. The system imitates a user behavior on the page, following links and menu buttons, and collects data about cookies. The bot automatically creates and updates the policy of working with cookie files, and it displays a banner for users where they can consent to personal data processing.
HubSpot CRM
HubSpot CRM is a tool included in an extensive HubSpot toolkit (it covers all Internet marketing fields, including SEO, content management, blogs, sales tools, etc.). HubSpot CRM is a high-functional and accessible solution for customer relationship management.
It allows you to store customers’ contact details in the database, their organizations, and bargains data; you can track where a new customer came from and the history of their activity; communicate with customers, schedule calls and meetings with customers, receive tickets from customers, etc.
You need a CRM system to keep track of all your customers and store their information in one place. You can find out more in our article about CRM definition and its advantages for businesses.
Sumo
Sumo is a toolset that makes it possible to increase traffic, generate social engagement, and increase conversion rate. It allows you to add share buttons for social media, let users share images from your website with Image Sharer features, and share highlighted text parts using Highlighter. Then, you can use List Builder to create pop-ups with CTAs to sign up and subscribe.
Then, Sumo is used for integration with Google Analytics. You can deal with content analytics and heatmaps as well. Based on this, Sumo is an all-in-one tool you must consider.
Disqus
Disqus is a blog comment hosting service required for comment management. It helps keep users engaged on your website with a better-commenting experience. Also, you can set up notifications for users to keep them loyal and motivate them to return to your website. Besides, SEO ranking can be improved with user-generated content. Finally, Disqus even has an anti-spam filter to protect your site from spammers.
Chatbot Services
And, of course, you need chatbots for your website. Chatbots will communicate with customers 24/7, and they will help generate more potential customers, boost their engagement, and make your sales grow. You can use many chatbot services, but we can recommend two of the most popular and convenient ones — Intercom and Crisp. These live chat services will help you build tighter relationships with customers and let your sales grow.
If you don’t know what tools fit your website better, you need a consultation with specialists. Contact Cadabra Studio and share your concerns.
Another Secret Of Successful Website Development
But even the list of tools above won’t be enough if your website was created in the wrong way by non-qualified specialists. The first thing you need to do is find a qualified design and development team to build your website considering all particularities.
Cadabra Studio has existed in the software development market for more than five years, and we have already gained a reputation as a reliable and responsible development company. We always get everything done and never retreat in the face of difficulties. Complicated software development helps us become stronger and more experienced.
Don’t waste your time, and contact Cadabra Studio to start creating your website right now. Our goal is to troubleshoot, and we never give up our principles.
