Top 10 Must-Have Features for Your Small Business Website

If you just started a business and are wondering if you need a website for it, let me help you out there. You definitely need a website for your business, no matter what type of business you run. We are in the digital age, and almost all types of businesses need to have a unique website of their own. 

Now, you must wonder, what is the sole reason behind small business web development in the first place. It is pretty simple, you just have to, by all means. As you have set up your business, you must know that we turn to the Internet for all our needs. For whatever reason, we have the internet with us, to solve all our problems no matter how big or small. Whether you are on the lookout for a product review or a service review or trying to search for a local business nearby, the internet has got your back. 

As per some Key statistics on small business websites, it has been found that almost 80% of the total shoppers tend to do some online research on the business before buying a product and about 40% of the total users tend to abandon a website that is designed poorly.

So now, if you don’t opt to build a website for your small business at the startup phase, you will be practically invisible to the world and might have to let go of a major chunk of your target customers. In the current digital world, it is mandatory to have a website for your business if you aim to build credibility in front of your customers by establishing a strong online presence altogether. 

A website is considered an effective marketing tool for any business. It lets you connect with customers while sitting in any corner of the world, share stories with them through testimonials, educate the audience regarding your products and services, and do everything that is required from any particular marketing channel, only through an affordable web design for small business.

Top 10 Must-Have Features for Your Small Business Website

Now, before you lose interest and let go of the idea of developing a website for your business, let’s just dig into this blog and find out the 10 must-have features that you have to include in your web design. 

• Easy Navigation

When you have an idea for a small business website design, you need to consider the user experience if you want it to succeed in the digital space. The main and most critical aspect of a website is the navigation menu and how a user will possibly navigate through the website. 

Now what exactly is a navigation menu, in layman’s terms, it is a roadmap of your website to guide the user, therefore it has to be to the point and fairly simple to follow and understand for all. If by any chance your navigation menu is difficult to understand and gets the user all confused, there are chances they will immediately leave your website and avoid scrolling through. 

When you are in the starting phase of small business web development, you must ensure that the navigation menu is well-organized in a logical manner and has covered all the important sections of your website. You need to make the labels on the navigation map, short and easily understandable, but try to give a unique touch to it to get an edge over the competitors. 

Easy Navigation

• A Killer Homepage

If you want a visitor to stay on your website, your homepage will ultimately break the deal with them. You need to design the most appealing, free of flaws, and a simple yet perfect homepage for your website. 

When designing your homepage, you need to get in the minds of your target audience and simply ask yourself these questions, why are you here, what is in it for you, is it any good and what’s next? If a visitor comes to your website, they are here for a reason and you need to make sure that their requirements are fully met. For this purpose, you need to ensure that the visitor can identify with your business, the products and services and most importantly they can identify with your ideas altogether. 

Clearly, if the visitor is not interested in your business, they won’t stay on the website for longer. These are the visitors that you don’t even have to worry about as they are not your target audience in the first place. What is more important, is to create an appeal to your target audiences who might be interested in your products or services and the kind of value you will bring to them. 

An online report has emphasized upon the importance of design and user experience, sharing that about 48% of users get frustrated with poor mobile optimization and that visitors decide within milliseconds if they’ll stay on a site. This makes fast loading times and a clutter-free design crucial for small business web development trying to make a positive first impression.

Once you can grasp the attention of your target audience, you have to move to the what’s next part where you have to get them to engage with them one-on-one, entailing phrases like, find out more, keep scrolling, book an appointment, or get in touch with a consultant, etc. 

• Appropriate Use of Media in Web Design

The user experience and an attractive homepage are a given but did you know the “appropriate” use of visuals, infographics and other sorts of media throughout your website is another critical component that is valued by online users? Of course, the users need to consider your website as an attractive one amongst your competitors. So, for a web development company, what do they need to do regarding that?

Appropriate Use of Media in Web Design

You can use illustrations as audio, video, or an image to help you enhance the website’s overall appeal. Let’s be honest, users are not fond of reading a lot of content, it is due to the interesting media used across the website that can gain the attention of your target audiences and there are greater chances of repeated user visits to your site as well. 

Animated videos, GIFs, and illustrations are some of the most important features when it comes to website design. These features help create a more customized website catering specifically to your business and also provide a better and unique user experience.

• Mobile Responsive

Currently, everyone has a mobile, and people tend to rely more upon their mobiles for gaining access to any information than anything else. Everything is easily accessible right at a mere swipe on the smartphones and if there’s anything that cannot be accessed, there are likely chances for it to fail. For any business, it is of utmost importance to create a website that is mobile-friendly to attract as much audience as possible. Mobile responsiveness is one of the most crucial factors when it comes to the success of small businesses. As much as 94% of small businesses are optimized for mobiles, both Android and iOS mobiles. 

Mobile Responsive

You need to give careful consideration while designing your website for big screens or small screens as well, as it can greatly increase the visitor’s site on your website. According to an online study, more than half of the Website traffic is driven by mobile devices. So, if your website is not optimized for mobiles, you are likely to miss out on a major chunk of traffic from your target audience. Even Google tends to prefer websites that are mobile-friendly. 

Here are some critical components before you come up with an appropriate plan for making your website mobile-optimized:

1. The content needs to be short, precise, and in-flow to easily fit the screens, despite the size of the screens. 
2. The design should be such that it works independently and you should be able to make changes to the font, images, the size of the images, the screen size, etc. 
3. The various page elements used on the website need to be relative. 

• The About Us Page

Some might think that the About Us page is not of much relevance to the visitor. But let me burst that bubble for you, it is of crucial importance. If you are starting up your business, you need to educate your website visitors about yourself, what you do, what are your products or services, who works for you, what is the unique aspect of your business that sets you apart from the competitors and who are the owners of the business. All of this information that we get on the About Us page is extremely important and cannot be overlooked under any circumstances. 

Some websites don’t seem to divulge much about their business or the owners or the board of directors and other information about the business operations to the public. This creates a gap between you and your audience and if you want to create a connection with your audience, you need to bridge this gap and share as much information as you can. 

It is this very section, where you can openly tell about your business’s story and build a one-on-one connection with your users at a personal level. This section allows you to create a brand’s personality, your business values, and the unique proposition you have to offer to the target audiences altogether. 

Here is a list of all the key elements you can include on your About Us page:

1. About your Company
2. Your Business Values
3. About the owners of the Business
4. Your Team
5. Testimonials
6. Call-to-action

We assure you that if you can develop a unique about us page for your business website, you will be able to build an instant connection with your target audiences.

• Client Testimonials 

As the owner of a small business, it is very important to build trust with potential clients to achieve success. There is one solution to this, you can make use of client testimonials and reviews on your website to attract the audiences and convince them of your products and services in an effective manner. We cannot overlook the role played by customer feedback in impacting the business. 

Evidently, positive reviews and feedback can help give a boost to your brand’s credibility, enhance overall sales, and eventually drive more sales in the long run. Research shows that around 84% of customers trust online reviews or testimonials and tend to value it as a personal recommendation. 

We are living in the age of AI and it is a common practice for businesses to display testimonials and reviews on their websites but can you believe half of the time these testimonials are not even genuine? These testimonials and clients’ bios are all generated by ChatGpt and only put on the website to bring a sort of credibility to the business. 

Now, if you want to convince the website visitors of your true performance as a business, make use of real people with their real raw images with genuine testimonials, not the ones with all the fancy grammar and the “bling”, only to entice the visitors. Secondly, you don’t have to rely upon any single expertise to try to cover a wide array of experiences to gain mass appeal.

Lastly, the placement of the testimonials is another essential part of your website. The visitors should not be looking out for the testimonials on the website. You need to try and put it, in the beginning, to build a strong credibility with the visitors and ensure that they do not lose interest in your products or services altogether. 

• Immediate Call-to-Action 

As a small business owner, your main focus is on motivating the visitors to the website for call-to-action, whether it is for making a purchase, booking a service, or getting a subscription for a newsletter. Call-to-action is the primary motive when designing a website for any sort of business and finally converting the website visitors into customers.

Call-to-Action

If your website lacks appropriate call-to-action, the visitor might just leave your website without any action, eventually resulting in opportunities loss and revenues. To create effective CTAs, you need to make sure that they are quite prominent, clear, and to the point. Use CTAs that are action-oriented such as, Book your appointment today, Get a Quick Consultation, and Buy Now!

• Contact Details

You might assume that adding contact information may not be as beneficial as you might think it is. Firstly, the confusion lies with what should be the page tagged as, should it be Contact Us or simply Contact?

A quick stats on how much small businesses divulge on the Contact Us page, you will be surprised to know that about 68% of small businesses lack essential contact information on the homepages like the email address or the physical location of the business, etc. This results in a negative impact on building trust with the website visitors that can potentially turn into your customers as well. 

It all depends upon the kind of business you are running. Here is a list of what can be added to your Contact Us information page:

1. Company Name & Registered Office: Include company registration number, tax number, and location.
2. Contact Information: Provide the direct phone numbers and e-mails of each member of the team along with the role in the company next to their photos.
3. Inquiry Form: Keep it simple—fields for name, email, phone number, and a message will make it complete for the completion rate.
4. Locations: Include a map of the business locations especially if they have an open office location where the actual customer service is done face-to-face.
5. Operating Hours: Include if it exists.
6. Extra Information: Any other thing that the business wants the customers to know.

• Social Media Integration 

Social Media is used by a major chunk of the population all over the world. Nowadays, businesses, no matter how big or small, aim to drive more traffic to their websites through active engagement on their social media platforms. In a study published in the year 2022, it was found that the mere Sharing of memes can actually contribute massively to the increase of internet traffic altogether. 

It is a simple process, businesses actively share website links on social media posts to easily drive traffic through their small business web development. If you get to engage with your target audiences and do repeat postings on your social media platforms, there are greater chances of driving increased traffic to your website. 

Social Media Integration

All you need to do is tap into the minds of your target audience and build curiosity amongst them by placing CTAs or links on your stories, to direct the traffic to the website. This is quite effective as we tend to be on social media more than anything else. Some popular social media platforms include LinkedIn, Facebook, X, and Instagram which are widely used by business owners to drive more traffic to their websites.

• Search Engine Optimization

When you have built a website for your business, SEO is one of the most important aspects that requires adequate consideration. Why, you must wonder? Because it is due to correct techniques of SEO that help you drive traffic to your websites. And let’s be honest, that is the ultimate goal, more visitors to your website, means more traffic and eventually more business for you. 

Search Engine Optimization

To optimize your website, here are a few tips for you:

1. Websites should have easy navigation and a friendly user interface for starters. As much as your content is organized in categories and subcategories and the navigation menu is easy to use, the user is likely to stay for more time on the website with limited bounce rates. 
2. The meta tags, the keyword use, and interlinking on your web pages, all should logically be in place without any errors. 
3. Most importantly, the content on your website must be of high quality. If your content lacks relevance and fails to engage the audience, there is no chance for it to attract more traffic in the long term. 

If SEO features are well incorporated into your website, it has the potential to enhance your online visibility by attracting more visitors to the website and driving up the business in no time.

Final Thoughts

To sum it up, if you are planning to start up a business or you already are the owner of a small business, you need a website to gain mass appeal from your target audience. Now, small business web development is not as easy as it may sound, it requires as much hard work as it would require for a well-established business as well. You need to give adequate consideration to all the tiny little details involved in the development of your website. 

We have covered all the features that are critical for a small business setting. When you design a website, you need to make sure that it is easy to navigate, the homepage must be appealing to the eyes of the visitors, mobile friendly, the media use must be appropriate, and all the contact details that your visitor might be looking up for along with features like social media integration and search engine optimization as well. 

There is no single feature that may weigh in to be more important than the other, the collective use of all these features is the ultimate solution to achieving growth for your business. The growth is not limited to your online traffic only but it also involves attracting potential customers for greater profitability of your business overall. 

TekRevol is one such company that can contribute immensely to driving up your online traffic with the ideal small business web design for your business needs. Get in touch with the experts at TekRevol today and get on with this unique digital journey for your small business.