Introduction
Your website is your showcase on the Internet. It's important that your prospects or customers have a good experience right away when browsing your website.
But how do you go about having a high-performance website in 2024?
Throught his guide, we're going to show you the 4 essential points for improving your website to provide the best possible experience for your users.
1. A well-structured site
When we talk about website structure, we can differentiate between 2 aspects:
- the technical part and the structure of the code itself.
- content structure and SEO
Your website's code must be well-structured
Your website must be well constructed and comply with web standards. Indeed, it's the search engine robots that will read your data and then deduce whether your site is well-structured or not.
A well-structured website must include :
- A meta title
- A meta description
- URLs designed and optimized for SEO. For example, it's better to have a URL like www.monsite.fr/creation-site-internet/site-web-performant than one like www.monsite.fr/categorie1/01-5194884-les-5-elements-dun-site-web-performant.
- ALT and TITLE tags for your images
- A Robot.txt file
- Creation and submission of an XML sitemap (in Google Search Console, for example)
- An Open Graph
On the other hand, you also need to think about content structure
The content of your website (i.e. text and images) must be designed to give the best possible information to your users and search engines, and it's by creating original, high-quality content that you'll be able to attract visitors to your website.
It's very important to identify the keywords that your potential users use when searching, so that you can respond to their requests. Search engines will sort and evaluate the different contents present on websites to highlight the one that best answers the user s query.
The more you work your content to meet user expectations, the more visible you'll be in search engine results.
It's therefore very important to implement a real natural referencing (or SEO) strategy to increase your visibility on search engines.
2. Fast loading times
Website loading times are becoming increasingly important, both for users and for search engines.
Did you know that almost half of all users leave a page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load?
It's therefore becoming extremely important to work hard on your website to make sure it doesn't take too long to load.
To test your website s loading speed, you can use the PageSpeed Insights tool, which will analyze your web page and give you clues so you can improve loading times.
Here's an example of the results for our website:
It's also very important to look after your Core Web Vitals (or essential web signals) to improve the user experience of your site.
On these points, Webflow (the website creation CMS we use) is very powerful and enables us to meet these Essential Web Signals requirements.
This graph shows that in December 2021, 44.2% of websites created with Webflow have good Essential Web Signals compared with just 22.8% for websites created with WordPress or 24.6% for websites created with Squarespace.
You can find the data highlighted in these images in this comparison.
3. Your website must be optimized for all screens
Today, your website needs to be responsive on all devices. Mobile devices are becoming increasingly important as a means of accessing the Internet worldwide.
Your website must therefore be designed and optimized to display perfectly on cell phones and tablets. In fact, users consider that a website should display as quickly on a mobile as on a computer.
Making your website "mobile-responsive" is therefore a necessity today, both for your users and for search engines like Google, which can penalize you if you don't meet these standards.
4. Professional, modern, uncluttered design
Beyond the technical aspect, your website needs to be modern and uncluttered. Users don't want to waste time looking for information, so you need to give them what they're looking for straight away. And this means that the design must be pleasant and, above all, well-thought-out, so that the user feels at home on your website.
We're talking about web design here, the aim of which is to make information quickly understood on a website thanks to the graphic elements present. Images, colors, typography, layout... Everything must be thought out to make your website fluid and convey the image you want to convey of your company.
It's all about seducing the user. All this graphic work, which includes UI/UX work, should help create a climate of trust between your website and your users.
Conclusion
By following these 4 essential points, you have the keys to a modern, high-performance website.
Having a high-performance website in 2024 requires real hard work.
Your website needs to be constantly evolving to keep pace with web standards and changes in your business. That's why it's important to choose a high-performance, scalable website creation tool that can help you keep your website on the cutting edge.
At Ouiflow, we highly recommend the Webflow CMS, which enables you to create high-performance websites that correspond 100% to your business and, above all, evolve with your business.
Find out in this article why you should use Webflow to build your website.
