Introduction
Your website is your storefront on the internet. Your prospects and customers should have a good experience from the moment they land on it.
How do you build a high-performing website in 2024?
In this guide, we walk you through the 4 key points to improve your website and give your users the best possible experience.
1. A well-structured site
Website structure covers 2 aspects:
- the technical side and the structure of the code itself
- the structure of the content and organic search
Your website's code must be well structured
Your website must be well built and follow web standards. Search engine crawlers read your data and judge whether your site is well structured or not.
A well-structured website includes:
- a meta title
- a meta description
- URLs designed and optimized for organic search. A URL like www.mysite.com/website-creation/high-performing-website works better than a URL like www.mysite.com/category1/01-5194884-the-5-elements-of-a-high-performing-website
- ALT and TITLE attributes for your images
- a robots.txt file
- an XML sitemap, created and then submitted (in Google Search Console, for example)
- Open Graph tags
Content structure matters too
Your website's content (text and images) should be designed to give the best possible information to your users and to search engines. Creating original, quality content is how you attract visitors to your website.
Start by identifying the keywords your potential users type into their searches, so you can answer what they are looking for. Search engines sort and assess the content of different websites to highlight the one that best answers the user's query.
The better your content meets users' expectations, the more visible you will be in search engine results.
So put a real organic search (SEO) strategy in place to increase your visibility on search engines.
2. Fast loading times
Website loading time matters more and more, for users and for search engines.
Nearly half of users leave a page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
So work on your website to keep loading times short.
To test your website's loading speed, use PageSpeed Insights. It analyzes your web page and gives you pointers to improve loading times.
Here are the results for our own website.
Also take care of your Core Web Vitals to improve your site's user experience.
On these points, Webflow (the website building CMS we use) meets Core Web Vitals requirements well.
This chart shows that in December 2021, 44.2% of websites built with Webflow had good Core Web Vitals, compared with 22.8% of websites built with WordPress and 24.6% of websites built with Squarespace.
The data in these images is available in this CMS comparison.
3. Your website must be optimized for every screen
Today, your website must be responsive on every device. Mobile is a growing access point to the internet worldwide.
Your website must therefore be designed and optimized to display perfectly on mobile phones and tablets. Users also expect a website to load as fast on mobile as on desktop.
Making your website "mobile-responsive" is a necessity today, for your users and for search engines. Google can penalize you if you do not meet these standards.
4. A professional, modern and clean design
Beyond the technical side, your website must be modern and clean. Users do not want to waste time looking for information, so give them what they are looking for right away. That takes a pleasant and, above all, well-thought-out design, so users feel at ease on your website.
This is the role of web design, which aims to get information across quickly on a website through graphic elements. Images, colors, typography and the layout of elements should make your website smooth and convey the image you want to give of your company.
The goal is to win the user over. This graphic work, which involves UI/UX work, builds trust between your website and your users.
Conclusion
With these 4 key points, you have the basics for a modern, high-performing website.
Having a high-performing website in 2024 takes real, in-depth work.
Your website must keep evolving to follow web standards and changes in your business. So choose a powerful, scalable website building tool that will help you keep your site up to date.
At Ouiflow, we recommend the Webflow CMS. It lets you build high-performing websites that fit your business 100% and grow with it.
Find out in our article on the advantages of Webflow why you should use Webflow to build your website.