What Makes a Good Website? 15 Need-To-Know Tips

A good website should be easy to navigate, consistent with your brand, and optimized for search engines, so people can discover your page. This can be done in many ways, including getting set up with a top website builder for beginners to guide you through the process.

If you’re already a bit intimidated by the website building process, have no fear. We’re here to distill the complicated jargon into some easily digestible steps that you can follow to take your website to the next level.

In this guide, you’ll learn some of the best tips for making sure your website is up to snuff, including how to design the site, what kind of content you should put on your site, and which website builders will be best suited for your particular needs.

Why Is Good Website Design Important?

A well-designed site isn’t just easy on the eye – it has the power to considerably improve business performance and profitability.

With 75% of browsers judging a company’s credibility on its website alone, first impressions matter with websites. So, if you want to avoid potential customers falling off at the first hurdle, making sure your site is well-designed and user-friendly is a must.

This doesn’t just mean choosing a sleek template and calling it a day: paying attention to details like navigation, typography, color palettes, and images makes users more likely to stay on your site for longer and potentially convert into paying customers.

Squarespace let us filter its professionally designed templates by topic, and business type. Source: Tech.co user testing

Prioritizing design also makes it more likely that browsers stumble across your brand in the first place. The relationship between website design and SEO is well documented, and there are a number of actions you can take to help your site show up favorably in the rankings, from making your page responsive to less obvious steps like using high-contrast colors.

These rules don’t just apply to traditional ecommerce businesses. Most types of businesses will benefit from having a well-designed, highly optimized site – from high street pizza delis to high-end designers. Fortunately, you don’t have to hire a web designer to create a website that converts, but doing your homework doesn’t help.

Follow our tips below for advice on creating a high-performing website. Pressed for time? Jump to our cheat sheet section to find out how to make a site in seven streamlined steps.

What Makes a Good Website? 15 Non-Negotiables

Now, there’s no silver bullet for creating a great website. But, if you stick to these 15 principles when creating your next blog, ecommerce site, portfolio, or business website, you’ll find creating a good website is easier than you think.

1. Clear purpose – Make sure you know what your site is for, and importantly, not for
2. Clear audience – Identify who your site is aimed at
3. Straightforward navigation – Prioritize user experience
4. Search engine optimization – Create a robust SEO strategy
5. The right style – Consider your website’s aesthetics
6. Complimentary colors – Choose a cohesive color scheme
7. High-quality imagery – Don’t cheapen your site with genetic, blurry images
8. The right fonts – Make sure your font matches the general style, and is legible
9. Engaging copy – Use compelling copy to entice your readers
10. Fast page speeds – Your visitors (and Google) require fast speeds to keep them engaged
11. Sensible sales points – Maximize conversions with compelling call-to-actions
12. Mobile first mindset – Make sure your site is responsive on mobiles
13. Trust signals – Use a trusted domain to increase your trustworthiness
14. Strong security safeguards – Keep your site secure to protect your and your customer’s data
15. Multilingual support – If you cater to a global audience, make sure your site is multilingual

In this guide:

• Why Is Good Website Design Important?
• 15 Must-Haves for a Great Website
• Web Design Cheat Sheet: How To Make a Great Website in 7 Steps
• Can Website Builders Help You Make a Good Website?

1. Clear Purpose

It’s absolutely essential that when you’re building your own website, you understand exactly what your site is going to do. For example, if you’re looking to create a site to sell products, selling products should be your absolute priority. With every decision you make, you should ask yourself – is this going to help users buy my products? Defining a clear purpose takes some time, and will impact how long it takes to build a website.

Good website examples include USA Sports. Its website makes it immediately clear that it’s an ecommerce company, and its College Collection display invites viewers to browse its selection of products straight away. The website displays USA Sports’ logo front and center, clearly communicating its brand identity, and its color scheme also draws from its logo, adding to the site’s overall cohesive look.

USA Sports’s website places its products front-and-center, making its purpose clear for the viewer. Source: USA Sports

USA Sports’s website also uses mixed media to communicate its purpose. For example, it features a video that outlines the company’s discount and reward system, that concludes with a clear CTA. This further incentivizes customers to buy from the company and makes the purpose of the website crystal clear.

2. Clear Audience

Identifying who is going to be using your site is also crucial to building a good website. If you can understand what sort of people are going to be visiting your site, reading your blog posts, buying your products, or taking a look through your previous work, then you can build the site to suit them.

Establishing what your audience looks like is easier than you might think. Start off with good old common sense. For example, if you are selling artisan soap, then your target audience isn’t going to be 15-20 year-olds, like Snapchat’s was. Instead, your users might be 30-50 year-olds with more disposable income to spend on soap.

Create user personas

One useful tip is to break down your target users into different groups, by creating what is known as a user persona. These are generalized, fictional people who represent a group of users.

The best way to create these personas, especially if you’re just starting out, is to research your market.

• Look at other websites similar to yours: Is there another soap company you’d like to emulate – Burt’s Bees, for example? If so, find out what kind of people visit Burt’s Bees.
• Survey your users, or target users, to find out who they are and what they’re really like.
• Talk to family and friends about your site, and its competitors, and the impressions they give.
• If you’ve already made some sales, or have an existing readership, then you may have data about your website’s current audience. You can access this through tools like your payment platform, or Google Analytics.

Armed with this information, you can adjust your content to either match the needs of your existing audience, or attract a new one.

3. Straightforward Navigation

Once you’ve established the purpose of your site and your target audience, your top priority should be improving its user experience (UX) to make it as easy as possible for this audience to get around.

According to research, users spend an average of 54 seconds on a site before ditching. To make sure your audience gets to A to B within this time limit, and without expending too much mental effort, you need to consider your site structure.

Seat Geek’s search bar invites users to search for events and artists, increasing the amount of time they’ll spend on the site. Source: Seak Geek

A good website example that gets its navigation spot on is Seat Geek. As soon as the page loads, you’re greeted with a search bar. This encourages the user to search the site for whatever team, artist, event, or venue they’re looking for, saving them the time it would have taken to find results manually.

By contrast, try canceling your Amazon account. There’s no way to close your account from the My Account section, and even on the Contact Us pages; the process isn’t made clear.

Both of these are intentional: Seat Geek wants to make booking concert tickets as easy as possible. Amazon, on the other hand, wants to make closing your account as difficult as possible. So, when creating your site, you need to make it as easy as possible for users to get to the main bits of the site you want them to see – whether that’s buying a product, making an appointment, or sending you an email.

Here at Tech.co, we recommend using website builders to create your own website. The best website builders make it easy to create a navigable site structure, with different page categories and subsections.

4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is the process of improving your website’s ranking in the search engine result page (SERPs) and increasing the quantity and quality of your site traffic as a result. You could have the best-looking website in the world, but if your page doesn’t rank, you’re wasting your time.

Organic search optimization may be more time intensive than alternative marketing methods like paid search, but it’s much cheaper in the long run. And with organic search delivering 53% of all website traffic, SEO is no longer a trick businesses can afford to miss.

There are three main types of SEO: technical SEO, on-site SEO, and off-site SEO.

• Technical SEO is all about enhancing the technical aspects of a website to make it easier for search engines to crawl and index. Common strategies include improving mobile friendliness, image optimization, general usability, and site speed.
• On-site SEO, or content optimization, requires businesses to optimize their site for people and search engines. To ace this step, content needs to be keyword-rich, original, and error-free, and follow SEO protocol. Fortunately, due to rapidly evolving SEO features, like Wix’s AI mega tag creator, it’s now earlier than ever for you to boost your on-site SEO.
• Off-site SEO considers factors outside of your site, like healthy backlink profiles, social media engagement, and positive customer reviews.

Check out our guide to the best website builders for SEO to learn more

Wix offers a wide range of guides that helped us with building our site, like SEO. Source: Tech.co testing

To give your site the best chance of being picked up by search engine algorithms, you’ll need to focus on all three metrics. This may sound like a lot of work, but trust us it’s worth it.

5. The Right Style

A user’s first impression of a website is 94% related to design. With this in mind, carefully considering your site’s aesthetic – and its relationship to your brand’s message – is a must.

When looking at examples of other websites, Mr. Porter offers a clean, fuss-free style, designed to showcase the high-quality, luxury products it sells, and the service it delivers.

Oi Polloi, on the other hand, offers a different proposition – a friendlier face, sure, but it still might feel intimidating to those not familiar with the brand. Oi Polloi’s site is less aloof than Mr. Porter’s, but at the same time, it is specifically designed with an ‘in-crowd’ in mind.

Our Wix site is very customizable, offering lots of design options across every page. Source: Tech.co testing

It’s also worth keeping an eye on general web design trends. For example, scrolling textures and ‘flat’ elements are great design styles to keep your website looking fresh, as well as make it easier to use.

You should try and avoid design styles based on skeuomorphism – a type of design that mimics the style of real things

In general, you should avoid design styles based on skeuomorphism. Skeuomorphic design refers to objects that are designed to mimic the style of real things, whilst offering a different function. This design style isn’t mobile-friendly and can make your website seem kitsch, which could put off some users.

In contrast, it’s advised to opt for flat design when creating a site, a minimalist user interface design style that uses simpler, two-dimensional images. You don’t need to be an expert to nail your vision either. Tools like Squarespace offer industry-leading design tools that do most of the hard work for you.

6. Complimentary Colors

Color is one of the most central components of your website design. Research by Colorcom suggests that people make a subconscious judgment about a product within 90 seconds of viewing it, and 90% of that assessment is based on color alone. The same theory applies to your website. Selecting the right palette makes it easier for viewers to remember your site and connect with it on an emotional level. 

Being mindful of colors also considerably improves the user experience, increasing dwell time and even conversion rates as a result. You don’t need to be a master in color theory to nail a perfect color palette, either. However, we’d recommend choosing colors that communicate your brand, keeping it relatively simple by using two or three shades and following one of the main types of color schemes below instead of picking at random. 

According to Tictoc Digital, websites should use monochromatic, analogous, complimentary, or split complementary color schemes. Source: Tictoc Digital

There are also some technical aspects to bear in mind. Choosing low-contrast colors like pink and red can make the text on your site less legible, resulting in a poorer browsing experience for the user. Like using a small font, having low-contrast colors on your site can make your page less optimized for search engines, so it is important to make sure that your choice of colors isn’t too overwhelming, and that they make the text on your page as legible as possible.

7. High-Quality Imagery

Once you’ve got your site’s general design nailed down, it’s time to move on to the individual design components.

All the best websites feature images, and whether it’s to showcase products they’re selling, create a certain mood, or illustrate something else, they need to be high quality, particularly for artists creating their own websites to sell or showcase art.

Blurry images, or an overreliance on joyless stock images, will make a website seem amateurish. Instead, you should pick a style and stick to it. Take a look at the images on Apple’s site. They are all clear images that reflect the brand, and are targeted towards the users of that specific product.

For example, the MacBook Air’s page features images on a light-colored background to emphasize that the device is light and transportable. The Mac Mini, on the other hand, uses darker, moodier images to reinforce that it’s a powerful device for professionals (If you do use a Mac, find out why Wix is the best Mac website builder here).

You’ll also want to know the best practices for keeping your website disability friendly for those with vision impairments, from alt tags to strong color contrasts.

With the best design score on record, our research and user testing suggest Squarespace is the best website builder for showcasing powerful images and graphics. If you don’t have your own imagery, the platform’s image gallery lets users can insert, edit, and format free images from Unsplash, or premium images from Getty Images, to enhance the quality of their page too.

8. The Right Fonts

A typeface might seem relatively inconsequential. However, picking the right font helps to set the correct tone for your website, and can have massive implications on user experience, accessibility, and brand engagement.

Wired and the Guardian, for example, both use serif fonts (the ones with the little lines on the end of each letter) to emphasize that they are serious publishing businesses, with an established presence and serious journalistic weight. However, Wired, drops the serif fonts in its headings and standfirsts. Why? To make the biggest impression on the page. Sans-serif fonts are typically more attention-grabbing and easier to read.

The Verge uses a variety of different fonts, all with unique purposes. Source: The Verge

The Verge, on the other hand, uses a mixture of Georgia Ref Regular, Gevher Heavy alongside its own besboke fonts to communicate its brand identity, and to pull the readers attention to different parts of the page. While The Verge just about gets away with mixing and matching fonts, we’d recommend sticking to a maximim of two or three to make your site look cohesive and clutter-free.

When building your site, you should try out different font styles to find the right one. Remember to always keep your site’s purpose and users in mind. Opting for unusual, heavily stylized fonts is fine for brand names, but you don’t want long paragraphs of text in cursive style fonts. If you’re unsure take a look at your favorite sites to gather ideas for a website.

9. Engaging Copy

So, you’ve picked your design, you’ve got your images sorted, and you’ve found the right font (or fonts). Now you need to fill your site with the right words.

Again, users and purpose are at the forefront of any copy you craft for your site. You’ll want to make sure it’s engaging, easy to read, and has a consistent tone. If one page on your website is written in the style of a Buzzfeed listicle and the next page written like a legal contract, your users will be confused and turned off by your site.

Make sure your copy is to-the-point and clear. If you’re selling products, give your users the information they need to know about the product. If you’re trying to drum up customers for your business, consider getting testimonials from other customers, and being clear about the service your business provides.

Whatever you’re doing, your copy should point users to an action without overdoing it – whether that’s buying a product, making an appointment, or enquiring about a service.

GoDaddy’s builder includes an AI text generator on all plans. Image: Tech.co

Struggling for inspiration? Most builders, like Wix, GoDaddy, and Shopify, include AI text generators to help get the ball rolling when you’re making copy for your website. These tools can provide a lifeline to users who are struggling to get started, but remember to always double-check text created by AI and to edit the content to ensure its human-sounding and compelling.

10. Fast Page Speeds

It may seem trivial, but the reality is that every single second counts when it comes to page speeds and retaining visitors. There are literally dozens of stats out there that show customers will leave and never come back to your site for even just a few seconds of delay.

Don’t trust us? Well here are some statistics to convince you that page speed needs to be a priority for your website.

• 1 in 4 visitors abandon a website after waiting for 4 seconds
• 46% of visitors will never revisit a slow web page
• Bounce rate increases by 32% when a page load time went from one to three seconds

Sounds pretty serious, right? To make matters worse, studies have shown that a simple 1 second delay on your site results in 16% less customer satisfaction, 11% less page views, and 7% reduced conversions.

Loading speed plays a crucial role in determining your site’s overall UX. But aside from the experience of your audience, Google takes page speeds and bounce rates into account when it comes to SEO, which means you need to have a fast website with positive engagement to rank in search results. Fortunately, Google offers a great speed test to get a better idea of how you are performing.

The best way to build a speedy website is to choose a website builder that prioritizes fast loading speeds. After testing websites made by the top providers, we found that Squarespace and IONOS created the sites with the fastest response times, while sites created by BigCommerce had some of the longest loading times.

Learn more about Squarespace in our Squarespace website builder review.

11. Sensible Sale Points

If you’re using your content to drive conversions, the value of sensible sale points cannot be understated. After all, you’re trying to get potential customers to start the journey to a purchase, the the only way to do that is with a call-to-action (CTA) that not only makes sense but is also enticing.

Not quite sure about the power of a good CTA? Optimization efforts in many businesses have yielded very positive results, with companies like SAP and Performable noting 20% to 35% conversion rate increases from something as simple as a color change.

Wix provided us with lots of options when it came to displaying products on our site. Source: Tech.co testing

So how can you improve your sales points? The honest truth is that you need to find that out for your particular brand, and the best way to do that is to do some testing. Collect data, try different strategies, and find out what the most effective sales points are moving forward.

After you’ve identified your sales point, it’s important to move forwards with the right ecommerce builder. With templates that have been specifically designed to boost profits, and countless sales extensions available, Shopify is the best website builder we researched for maximizing sales. And if Shopify is out of your budget, Wix and Squarespace offer a range of advanced sales features too.

12. Mobile First Mindset

It’s 2024, and smartphones are used for everything from payment to entertainment. In fact, mobile commerce statistics show that smartphone spending is substantially on the rise. Subsequently, your website absolutely needs to be accessible and well-designed for mobile usage, otherwise you’re going to have some serious trouble getting visitors, let alone making conversions.

Restaurant websites, for example, receive more than 50% of traffic from mobile devices. Subsequently, you’ll want a restaurant website builder that can guarantee you have a mobile page that is easy to navigate.

In fact, 61% of consumers insist that they’d be more likely to buy from a website if it was mobile-friendly. This means the majority of users want to make purchase on their smartphone, but are turned off by issues like security concerns, poorly designed sites, and messy detail-input systems.

Again, this isn’t just about customer experience either. Google takes into consideration the mobile functionality of a website when it comes to search rankings. And with 96% of mobile searches found on Google, it’s safe to say that’s an important avenue to lock down.

Pixpa lets you check how responsive your site is on mobile. Source: Tech.co 

Lots of website builders will show you how your website looks like on mobile in its main interface, and Pixpa even lets you access the view by right-clicking and inspecting the page. Using website builders like this makes it easier for you to adapt your website to mobile devices.

13. Trust Signals

Asking someone to buy something from your website is a tall order. Yes, people do it every day, but if they have no reason to trust you, it’s going to be almost impossible to convert.

This is where trust signals come in. They are a means of establishing your website and your business as a trustworthy source of content, as well as a secure point of sales. From about us pages and author bios to contact information and support options, there are lots of ways to show your customers that you actually care.

After all, if you’re hiding something, it’s going to be obvious that you can’t be trusted with a customer’s credit card information.

The Wix free plan requires your URL to be branded, making it harder to rank on search engines like Google. Image: Tech.co testing

One of the best ways to improve the trustworthiness of your website is to create a custom, reputable domain. By including a keyword in your domain and making it original and representative of your brand identity, it will showcase your authority to viewers.

However, getting a custom URL is something you’ll have to pay for. No free website builders let you pick your own domain, so check out our website cost guide to learn how much you’ll have to pay.

14. Strong Security Safeguards

With 73% of small businesses reporting some type of cybersecurity incident in 2023, website security is something you should be taking very seriously. Not only does your business have an obligation to keep viewers safe, but data breaches can also compromise sensitive company data, and damage a brand’s reputation as a result. 

As a bare minimum, we recommend using an SSL certificate from a valid Certificate Authority (CA) to keep your site secure. This helps to encrypt site data and keep information private. To play things safe, using anti-malware software is also a good idea if your hosing company doesn’t already provide malware and virus scanning services as part of their basic package.

For extra guidance on how to keep your company’s data on lockdown, check out some useful data hygiene tips.

15. Multilingual Support

If you have a global audience – or even attract the odd foreign visitor – your site should offer multi-language support. Multi-language websites are capable of reaching wider audiences, have lower bounce rates, and rank more competitively in countries other than their own. However, if you want to improve your international ranking, you’ll have to translate 100% of your site, including metadata, your URL, and subdomains. 

While this sounds like heaps of work, lots of website builders boast multilingual capabilities and carry out a lot of leg work for the user. For example, builders like Wix, Squarespace, and Shopify create multiple versions of your website for you, saving you from having to duplicate your site yourself and edit multiple pages each time you make a change.

Using these capabilities is straightforward too. Typically, the most you’ll have to do is select your primary and secondary languages and click on the text you want to translate. Most builders are integrated with Google Translate, but if you want to translate text manually you’re usually able to edit the textbox too. 

Squarespace integrates with WeGlot, so you can make your site multilingual in a few clicks. Source: Tech.co testing

If your chosen builder doesn’t offer multi-lingual support, rest assured. Lots of third-party apps like Weglot Translate, Multilingualizer, and Bablic, offer this service so all you have to do is subscribe to a paid service or free trial and then let the add-on get to work. 

Web Design Cheat Sheet: How To Make a Great Website in 7 Steps

Feeling overwhelmed or need to build a site in a hurry? We’ve condensed the information in the article into seven actionable steps for you to use as a jumping-off point:

1. Research the competition – Before you build your site you need to know what you’re up against. We recommend analyzing the sites of at least seven competitors before you start reflecting on how to make your own. You can also build a website for free, but the options for limited and so is the site functionality.
2. Define your purpose – What makes your business different from others? What is your website setting out to achieve? Who is your target audience? You need to answer these questions before you begin creating your website.
3. Choose a builder – If you’re opting for the DIY approach, you’ll need to select a website builder that’s capable of meeting your needs. Keep scrolling to learn more.
4. Personalize your site content – After you’ve chosen your template, start uploading your business’s information, content, images, and products if you’re selling online.
5. Enhance your site’s design – Now it’s time to play around. Customize the site to your liking by experimenting with different fonts, colors, and images. Make sure that all the creative choices you make are aligned with your brand, promote responsive design, and display information as clearly as possible.
6. Improve your SEO – To increase the chance of your site getting seen, you need to optimize your website for search engines. This includes focusing on technical SEO, on-site SEO, and off-site SEO.
7. Make sure it’s secure – To keep your company and your customer’s data safe, you need to follow security protocols like buying an SSL certificate and using anti-virus software.

Can Website Builders Help You Make a Good Website?

If all of the above sounds complicated and intimidating, it shouldn’t. Millions of people create and manage their own websites using website builders, such as Wix and Squarespace.

Website builders make it super easy to create well-designed websites with templates, drag-and-drop editors, and plenty of tools and plugins for extra features.

Some website builders, including Wix, can even create the basis of a website for you with their artificial design intelligence services. Squarespace, on the other hand, makes managing your site structure a piece of cake, and offers some of the best professional-looking website templates on the market.

Find out how the best AI website builders compare.

Tech.co has done a lot of research on the features, pricing, and customizability of website builders, and you can take advantage of that by answering a few questions about your website builder needs. We’ll then pair you with three options that fit your criteria for a great website.

Wix

When it comes to website builders, you can’t get much better than Wix, which came out top in our website builder research. With pricing plans starting at only $17 per month, this platform provides everything you need to get your website going and then some. With Wix, you can even build a website with AI, using the provider’s Wix ADI feature.

Wix’s drag-and-drop design features let me have granular control over my site’s appearance. Source: Tech.co

Between the truly unmatched feature catalog and the easy-to-use drag-and-drop design system, you won’t feel over or underwhelmed by what you can do. Wix also leads the way when it comes to SEO, offering a handy SEO checklist and advanced options like canonical tags, making it one of the best options for businesses serious about improving their ranking.

Plus, with advanced functionality like a CRM, Wix is easily our best website builder for small business and any type of business, as well as our number one choice for those who want to build an online store.

Squarespace

Wix is great, but Squarespace is hot on its heels performing just behind Wix in our research and testing. Squarespace provides a massive catalog of features for any type of business and pairs it with an intuitive interface that beginners won’t be completely baffled by.

What’s more, with Fluid Engine, the platform’s drag-and-drop editor, designing a specialist and unique website is now easier than ever, particularly with generative AI features to add content. All in all, Squarespace positive user experience, and top-tier design features make it the obvious choice for creative businesses like retailers, designers, or photographers – especially if they’re building a site for the first time.

Squarespace let me generate new copy in a matter of seconds, with its AI-text generator. Source: Tech.co user testing

For only $16 per month – just one dollar below Wix’s Light plan – you’ll get access to over 110 of the best-looking templates currently on the market. See how the provider compares to our frontrunner in our Wix vs Squarespace guide.

Shopify

If you’re building an online store, look no further than Shopify. While its entry price of $29 per month is slightly higher than Wix’s $17 per month (unless you’re just selling through social media) its industry-leading e-commerce sales features make it the natural fit for larger ecommerce stores that are managing slightly more complex operations.

Shopify offered us a wide range of themes to choose from, some free and some paid, for an online store. Source: Tech.co testing

Shopify also offers some of the best user experience out of any other website builder we tested. When we tested it out its highly intuitive software made finding features easy, and the setup process was incredibly straightforward too.

Learn more about the website builder and its price-point in our Shopify review.