By Suhaib Zaheer, HostGator
Having a
strong online presence is the key to business success in today’s digital world,
especially for small and midsized retailers that need to employ savvy
strategies to be seen and convert visitors to customers both online and off.
Although getting online has never been easier, the competition has never been fiercer,
so having a top-notch web site, from design to security, is critical.
Below are
core tips for everything from getting online to maintaining an optimized web presence.
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1. Choose the right domain name.
Choosing the right domain can be one of the quickest
steps to getting online, but make sure you take a moment to make the right
selection. Having a URL that is short, simple and easy to say and understand
aloud is critical. To that end, avoid punctuation, unnatural abbreviations or
phrases. Keeping your domain name as close as you can to your business name
helps. Don’t
forget to spend time online looking for businesses and sites with similar
domain names and adjust yours, if needed, to avoid confusion and potential
lawsuits. If you’re building a social presence as well, it’s also worth looking
at whether your domain name is available as an account name in the social media
channels, for consistency across all platforms.
2. Take a mobile-first design approach.
When it comes to web sites, consumers do judge books
by their covers, and visitors will decide at a glance whether they want to stay
on your site based on its appearance. With roughly half of all web traffic
coming from mobile devices, optimize your mobile site experience. To add
incentive, Google’s search algorithm even boosts mobile-friendly sites. Responsive
site design can go a long way toward optimizing your presence — automatically
display your site properly on any type of device a visitor is using, and deliver
readable fonts, touchscreen navigation and compressed image sizes for faster
speeds. You can quickly see whether your site is mobile-friendly by checking
out Google’s quick test.
3. Pick a web host that gives your
site room to grow.
When first getting online, web site owners often
pick host packages based on what they need now, as opposed to thinking ahead to
what they might need to accommodate future growth. If you have a small site
without plans to grow, shared hosting might be right for you. But if you plan
to scale your business, you’ll need a host that can keep up. Cloud hosting or a
dedicated or managed server might be right for you — look for a host that can
support your traffic and resource needs without dips in performance. Additionally,
having a support team might not seem like a big deal until you’re experiencing
a server issue that impacts your business results or online sales. In those
cases, good support is something you’ll want, even though you hopefully won’t
need assistance very often.
4. Avoid high bounce rates with quick load times.
Speed impacts visitor experience, and whether
visitors even make it to your site at all since page load time factors in
Google’s search results rankings — and visitors’ patience. More than half of people will abandon a web site that takes
more than three seconds to load, meaning lost sales and conversions if your
site is too slow. PageSpeed Insights is a great tool to check the loading speed of your site. It also
will make suggestions on ways to enhance your speed, if needed. Additionally,
steps like enabling caching, removing plug-ins and add-ons, optimizing image
size, minimizing code and using a CDN all help improve loading speed.
5. Don’t wait to protect your web site from hackers.
As many as 61% of small
businesses have experienced an attack and 54% have experienced a data breach,
according to a report from Keeper Security. Many SMBs might not
think about web site security until it’s too late, and that’s what makes them
vulnerable. Simple steps like ensuring your web site is protected with an SSL
certificate are table stakes in web security. This one step can help you retain
data integrity by preventing bad actors from modifying the communications
between visitors’ computers and business servers or even injecting unwanted
content into sites. It also encrypts data so it cannot be stolen. To boot, an SSL
certificate helps authenticate your
online presence to consumers and can even help boost your ranking in
Google search results. Other nice features to have are additional layers of
security via tools like SiteLock, along with regular server monitoring.
Suhaib
Zaheer is the SVP and General Manager of HostGator,
one of the world’s largest web hosting companies celebrating its 16th
anniversary this year. He brings over 15 years of experience in the small
business and technology industry and is responsible for delivering the
strategic vision for HostGator and other hosting brands at Endurance
International Group. Zaheer owned and operated a commercial real estate
brokerage specializing in the sales and acquisitions of business opportunities
before entering the tech industry in 2009. He held several leadership positions
at other technology companies like Homestead Technologies, a web site building
company that was later acquired by Endurance, and Intuit, a small business and
financial software company, before he joined the Endurance team.
