50+ Website features that makes running a business easier

According to Google.com, it’s web crawlers gather information from hundreds of billions of webpages worldwide. Some websites are static with a few pages, and others are more sophisticated with many bells and whistles and hundreds of pages. 

Today, websites have become the front door to the internet world, where people from across the globe use them to learn about businesses, products, and services and make purchasing decisions.

Websites have evolved from a nice-to-have to one of the most critical business tools for survival. When the pandemic hit, businesses with a good web presence quickly pivoted online and continued to thrive.

Thanks to website builders, you can easily create a website with just a few clicks. The websites also got a lot smarter, with many automation and integration features that reduced manual work. With appropriate features, you can easily save a lot of time and grow your business.

Beyond providing information for site visitors, modern websites do a lot of work, including bringing in new leads, converting prospects, generating sales, and supporting customers. 

In this article, we’ll highlight 50+ features and provide a roadmap on how to start and evolve your website over time from where it is today. Websites require continuous improvement. I hope this roadmap will make your website journey a bit easier!

Web Design Features

The web design features are some of the common features that every website must have. Whether it is single page or hundreds of pages, these features set the standard and make it easier to introduce additional pages in the future. Some of the web design features are:

• Sitemaps
• Branding
• Themes & Layout
• Graphics Design
• Responsive Design
• SEO Friendly
• Security
• Compliance
• Accessibility
• Performance
• Domain & hosting

Sitemap

Sitemap is a diagram or file that shows the hierarchical structure of the web contents – pages, images, videos, etc. The sitemap structure shows the following:

• High-level web contents 
• Sub contents 
• Relationships between the contents and sub contents

A sitemap diagram is a visual representation of the website. This helps site visitors to understand the layout and navigate through the website. In the past, many websites used to display the sitemap diagram in the website for visitors. We do not see it anymore as the search engines got better at tracking the websites. 

A SEO friendly sitemap file (XML) is a markup file that shows the structure of the website that is easy to understand by the search engines – Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. Search engines use the sitemap file to properly find, track and index web contents. A good sitemap file can improve your SEO drastically. 

If you’re starting a new website project, sitemap is a good place to start. It is as a very useful tool as it makes to think through the different aspects of web design, and organize content appropriately for both site visitors and search engines. If the website is more complex with tens of hundreds of pages, then you can organize into multiple sitemaps. 

You can create a sitemap diagram using PowerPoint or one of the design tools such as Miro, Canva or Figma. You can create SEO sitemaps using notepad or SEO generators. Once you have the sitemap file, you can upload the file into your main website folder. The search engines can start crawling and indexing the pages.

If you already have a website, but not sure whether there is a sitemap, you can easily check using <your website domain url>/sitemap.xml. If there is no sitemap, create one and upload it.

Branding

Website branding focuses on how you want your customers to perceive or interact with your brand. Website is one of the first interaction you may have with your prospective customer, and hence, it is a good place to establish your brand.

Branding is a big topic and involves strategy, planning and execution. Brand evolves over time, so don’t have to figure everything out upfront. Having a branding toolkit, which includes Logos, colors, typography, images, and messages is a good starting point.

Themes & Layout

Once you have the branding, it is time to think through the themes and layouts. 

Theme focuses on the general look and feel of the website. This includes pages, sections, colors, fonts, images, and graphics. 

Layout focuses on navigation  (how visitors navigate and interact with your website.) This includes headings, captions,  menus, bars, buttons, links, etc. 

Depending upon the industry or business type, there are several standard themes and layout available in the market. For example, if yours is a retail business, then choose a suitable retail theme that customers are already familiar with. For design ideas, visit Themeforest or 99designs.

Graphics Design

Once you have the website outline complete, you can focus on the graphics design – visual aspects of the pages. This includes page sections, photos, images, videos, etc. The branding toolkit should drive the graphics design forward. Like everything else, graphics design is evolving fast with many options such as 2D, 3D, Metaverse, etc. Choose the right type of design based on your brand guidelines. 

You can create custom designs, or buy designs from third party providers such as UnSplash, ShutterStock, 99designs, etc.

Responsive Design

Users access websites from different devices – desktop, phone, tablet, etc. Each device comes with different sizes, resolutions, etc. Responsive website adjusts the website content based on the visitor’s device settings. 

Having a good content is important, but ensuring the content is usable from different devices is key to success.There are several responsive web design testing available to use.

As it is not realistic to test all combinations of devices and resolutions, as a first step, you can test key devices based on the target customer demographics. For example, if your target audience is younger generation, then mobile responsiveness is much more important to other devices.

SEO Friendly

Many businesses – big and small have successfully used search engines to generate traffic, leads and revenue. Optimizing web design for search engines is not only a good design, but improves the bottom line. 

SEO is a big topic, however, there are two main items to think about – on-page and off-site SEO. The on-page SEO focuses on the steps you can take to improve internal pages, while off-site focuses are external items that can improve search results.

At the design stage, you can identify the target keywords, title, descriptions and meta-tags. SEO takes time and requires continuous improvement, and hence, starting early is worthwhile. 

Lighthouse offers a chrome extension that you can use to audit your website and collect valuable SEO insights. 

Security

Cybersecurity is a growing threat, and many websites suffer from frequent cyber attacks. Having a secured website increases customer confidence and trust using your website. Modern websites come with several security options from digital certificates, two-factor authentication, spam filters, and more. 

The good news is that many hosting providers such as Google, AWS, and Godaddy provide security filters out of the box. Bare minimum, enabling HTTPS would keep the network traffic encrypted, which would protect from several known vulnerabilities. 

Compliance

Website involves adhering to laws and regulations. Depending on the geographical location or where you do business, many local, regional and international regulations may apply. Some of the common compliance includes cookie policy, GDPR, user agreements, ADA, etc. 

You can find many standard templates available in the market. To start with, you can use standard templates, and make necessary adjustments based on your business needs. Legal counsel can help establish more comprehensive compliance documents.

Accessibility

As responsive design focuses on devices, accessibility focuses on ensuring all website users, especially people with disabilities can effectively use the site.

There are several compliance and accessibility standards such as ADA, W3C, WCAG, and  508 available to use. Depending on the target audience, you can use appropriate standards that can provide the best user experience for your users. 

Please checkout W3.org for several accessibility tools and testing options. 

Performance 

We’re living in a fast paced world. People’s attention span is gradually decreasing, and we got less than 10 seconds to get the message across. The Neilpatel website recommends a page load speed of 0 to 2 seconds. When the page load time increases, the bounce rate increases. 

Website performance starts from design. Optimizing images for speed, devices, lazy loading – all can help improve the loading time.

Many factors such as web page size, network bandwidth, infrastructure can all impact the performance. As a first step, use one of the speed test tools such as lighthouse to speed test the website. The tools provide insights and the steps you can take to improve the page performance.

Domain & Hosting

Domain is the address (URL) the site visitors use to access the website over the internet. This is key to digital presence. Choosing a domain name that matches your business name is the best, however, it is increasingly becoming difficult to find an exact match as most of the domain names are already taken.

If the domain name with .COM extension is unavailable, you can choose the next best alternative extensions such as .io, .net, .org, etc. You can use one of the domain registrars such as Google Domains or Godaddy to register the domain. 

Once you’ve the domain name registered, it is time to find a home for your website. Many hosting providers such as Godaddy, Bluehost rent their space for a monthly fee. There are also cloud hosting providers such as Google Cloud, AWS and Azure that provide various hosting services. Pick and choose the right package that is suitable for your business size and traffic.