Responsiveness is key
The first thing that comes to mind is design. But designing a website is more than just choosing a color scheme and fonts. Your layout has to shift, depending on the device. On mobile phones, a good website looks like an app.
But that's obvious. Let's dive deeper.
Speed is crucial
If a user, and therefore a potential client, has to wait for too long, they will leave. You can see some statistics by Google here.
There are useful tools to measure your website's speed along with more metrics, such as Google's PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix.
If you want to unleash your pro developer skills, go ahead and use unlighthouse. With that tool, you can analyze many subpages at once and get a nice report:
If you have node.js installed, you can simply use it by running:
npx unlighthouse --site <url>Speed is not just server power
It's also about how your website is built. When your website requires a lot of large scripts and images, it will be slow.
However, where your content is placed on the website is also important. If the user has to scroll to an image first, it's not detrimental if the image is large, because you can defer loading.
A client wanted a slider by slider revolution in the hero area of their WordPress website. The scripts required aren't optimized though, so the largest contentful paint element was the element you were supposed to see first. That ruined their pagespeed metrics.
The solution was to use a different, more lightweight slider because it was a requirement to have a slider in the hero area. If that wasn't a requirement, I would have suggested to remove the slider altogether and replace it with either stylized text or a static image.
Cloudflare is a must
Especially if you serve your website internationally, you should use a CDN. Cloudflare is a great choice because it's free and easy to set up. It also offers a lot of other features, such as a firewall, which is also free.
Cloudflare acts like a global network of helpers that remember your website's data. When someone visits your site, the nearest Cloudflare helper quickly shows them a saved copy of your site, making it load faster for people far away from where your website is actually hosted.
In a different project where I have access to metrics, I could see that around 50 % of traffic was served from Cloudflare's cache. That's a lot of saved server power and therefore money if you have around 12k monthly visitors.
Accessibility has never been easier
Using PageSpeed Insights or unlighthouse, you can also check your website's accessibility. It's important to make your website accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities.
If you don't, people who require a screen reader will only hear the word "Button" and not know what to make of it. That makes your website inaccessible, literally.
And if you don't care about people with disabilities, at least care about your SEO. Google ranks websites higher that are accessible to everyone.
Conclusion
A good website is fast, accessible, and responsive. It's not just about design. If you want to know more about how to make your website better or need help improving your pagespeed, contact me.