New website: 3 things you should be aware of

This article is produced in collaboration with Nicolai Sørensen. 

The cost of a new website can vary depending on what it needs to do. It is therefore almost impossible to answer the question...

What does a new website cost?

... without knowing the customer's needs and wishes. In this context, it can be a good idea to draw up a requirement and specification of what the site should contain. That way, you avoid disagreements and both parties have something concrete to relate to throughout the process.

When a customer is choosing a new website, it's often the visual and aesthetic aspects that can be appealing. However, it is also essential that the entire machinery works. It's often all these things that are not directly visible, but more indirectly have a big effect on the entire user experience on your site.

We've chosen to highlight 3 things you can't avoid discussing before choosing your new website provider. You can read more about these 3 things below.

Structure

It's important that the structure is in place. It's not something you just create, it requires thought behind action. Often you can lean on the well-known KISS model. keep-it-simple-stupid. There's no need to make it more complicated than that, but feel free to think need-to-have versus nice-to-have.

The structure also ensures a good user experience on the website. This can include the use of internal links to increase interaction and minimise these dead ends on your site. As a website owner, you never want your users to get stuck, there should always be something to interact with.

If you are good at this, you will also see a positive trend in your analytics behaviour. This can help improve bounce rate, time-spent-on-page and, not least, page views. Of course, this is also something you want to achieve from an SEO perspective.

A good way to build a good internal link structure is to outline it. Make a map of the website and link categories, pages and posts together. This makes it much easier to think about this at an early stage of development, rather than when the website is finalised.

Speed and speed

There's no getting round it. Speed is paramount, and is also somewhat related to that great user experience we mentioned in the previous section. With consumers becoming more and more impatient, we can't ignore website speed.

If the page loads slowly, it will negatively affect behaviour. The bounce rate will increase as the consumer will become impatient. This can also be detrimental to your conversion rate if you try Facebook ads where traffic is sent "click-to-website". That's why you see more and more people taking advantage of lead-ads, which can be quite effective for collecting emails, registrations, newsletters, etc.

There are a number of tools that can be used to analyse your website's loading speed. These include Google's own (PageSpeed Insights) or Pingdom Speed Test.

Restrict Plugins (if possible)

If possible, limit the use of plugins. Again, this is an area that doesn't directly affect the average consumer's experience if you look at the aesthetics of the website. But indirectly it can have an effect, precisely because the website will generally be more locked down, it can slow down the speed, as there is more to load, many of which may be superfluous.

Plugins shouldn't be seen as a bad thing, but overuse will require a good service agreement (updates), but sometimes you also have to accept that it can't be 100% as you want it to be, as the individual plugin controls the guidelines.