Every business websites’ ultimate goal is to generate leads and sales to grow their business.

A website has numerous features that are important but not all of them play an active role in your business growth.

Following are the 7 most essential website features that play a concrete role in your business growth:

Powerful website content
Optimized website performance
Lead generator
Call to actions
Blog
Testimonials/Case studies
FAQs

Having a visually appealing website design and other such features is a plus point, but they will not help you generate leads.

Website features

Website features enhance the functionality of a website. If we look at the list of website features it’s quite extensive and may vary depending on the type of website.

However, following are the 7 features that every website must have since they play a proactive role in the growth of your website as well as business.

1. Website content

Website content plays the most important role in the conversion rate of your website. If your content connects with your audience, the chances of conversion multiplies automatically.

Having irrelevant content on your website can drastically increase your bounce rate. Your user must be able to find the answers to the following questions on your website:

What problems are you solving
Your mission statement
Your solutions
Value proposition
Stakes of not working with you

Apart from these, the content on the following pages of your website is also highly important for conversion.

Homepage
About page
Landing pages
Contact page

Content also plays an important role in search engine optimization, the better and more organized your content is, higher are the chances of ranking well on SERPs

2. Lead generator

It takes a lot of time, energy, and effort to land a visitor on your website. All of that goes in vain, if you don’t have a proper lead generation system installed on your website to capture your visitor’s email.

A lead generation system is the process of attracting and converting your potential clients by offering something valuable at no cost to them at all and capturing their email in return.

This will help you grow the email list that will help you convert them into full-time clients in the future.

Lead generators are of many types, a few common ones are:

Downloadable PDF
eBook
Free webinar
Free course
Quiz
And so on

Having an email list is crucial in any business and will always pay off in the future. It is one of the assets you have online.

Also having a pop-up is highly recommended as well as it said to increase the conversion ratio by 60%.

Here’s an example of a lead generator:

Lead generator - Must have website feature

You should clarify and create one valuable and powerful resource that should have enough power to capture your visitor’s email ID.

Once you have their email address, you can constantly stay in touch with them with your content, offer, and services because these are the people who are genuinely interested in your product and the chances of converting them into full time customers is the highest.

3. Call to actions

You can have the best features, products, and content on your site but if you don’t have a clear process of calling your customers to take an action, your conversation rate will go down.

A direct call to action is very important. You can have different call to actions for different landing pages for your products or services.

Following are a few examples of direct CTAs:

Buy now
Book a free consultation
Schedule a call
Contact us
Get started
And so on

However, many people make this mistake of making the sales process longer than needed by adding vague call to actions like:

Learn more
Read more
Join our newsletter
Etc

If you’re serious about generating business from your website, avoid using vague CTAs and focus on installing direct and relevant CTAs throughout your website.

4. Blog

Marketing plays a vital role in your business success, and most businesses struggle with marketing online. A blog is an excellent tool to market your business and establish authority in the industry.

Content has proven to be the most effective SEO strategy thus far. Having a blog that is regularly published, updated, and promoted may prove to be all the marketing your business needs.

Here’s how you can create regular content for your blog:

Stick to a blogging calendar
Focus on keyword research
Use effective frameworks
Write engaging introductions
Keep it unique, simple, and easy to understand
Write consistently

Blog posts are generally created for promotional purposes, however, it is recommended to avoid direct selling of your products or services and use this opportunity to build trust, credibility, and authority among your visitors.

Here are a few more benefits about why having a blog is a must on your website:

You get content for newsletters
Increases brand awareness
Content for social media
Your email list grows
Improves site’s SEO ranking
Showcase your expertise
Improved user experience

It is important to understand that search engines don’t rank entire websites, but individual pages, therefore blog posts and articles are the strongest sources to rank for maximum pages and keywords.

5. Testimonials/Case studies

Testimonials are highly critical in helping you establish brand trust and credibility. They can be in the form of:

Reviews
Case studies
Ratings
Recommendations
And so on

Their impact depends on how you showcase them throughout your website. It is important to include testimonials on different pages, especially service/landing pages according to the relevancy.

Apart from that, having a separate page for testimonials and case studies is also highly recommended.

You should look for collecting reviews on the following platforms and then including them on your website:

Google reviews
Facebook reviews
Trustpilot
Yelp
Direct testimonials

These reviews can play a similar role to referrals for your business. So utilise them wisely by including them in your homepage, content, landing pages, footer section, and creating a separate page for them.

Here are an example of how they can be utilised:

Video testimonials can also play a strong role on your website.

6. FAQs

Frequently asked questions can add massive value to your website’s user experience. Anyone who wants to work with you will have questions they want to ask.

If they can be easily found on the website without having to send you an email about the inquiry, your conversion changes automatically improve.

Your customer services or support email inbox is the best way to find what people are looking for and you should create your FAQs around those.

You can also consider creating a blog post post around it and publishing on your website so you can share a link to that each time someone asks you that question

It is highly recommended to include an FAQs section on every landing page you have to answer specific questions about your product/services.

Here are the benefits of doing this:

It saves time for you and your customer services team
Your customers get better, consistent and more detailed answers to their questions
Speeds up your sales process
Help with your website’s SEO

It is also recommended to create a separate FAQs page for your website in case you are only focused on selling 1 product/service. But if you have more than 1 service to sell, you should install this section in every page.

Here’s an example of an FAQ section:

Generally, an eCommerce website has a separate FAQs page.

7. Website performance

Business owners often focus on marketing, content, and designing, and they ignore one critically important thing – Website performance.

Website performance impacts everything from search engine ranking to sales.

There are many performance tools that have automated reports so you can analyse and make sure your website performance is up to the mark.

Following are some of the main areas you should focus on:

Mobile Responsive

Having a mobile-friendly website is not just an option nowadays, It’s a must-have. We are in a mobile-first world now and most of the traffic to your website is coming from devices.

If your website doesn’t load or respond on devices, you may permanently lose your potential customers to your competitors. A mobile-friendly website ensures that your pages perform well on all devices. This should be taken care in the website development process.

Browser Compatibility

Simialry, it should be made sure that your website is browser friendly – meaning, it is responsive and optimized for all browsers and search engines and not just Chrome.

You will be surprised to learn how many people are still using Internet Explorer. Make sure your website behavior is the same for every browser.

Easy navigation

Users prefer websites with easy navigation. Your website should have a clear structure and easy to use menus. All the content on your website should be accessible in minimum clicks.

Here are some tips to keep your navigation as easy and effective as possible:

Avoid using dropdown menus
Include all the links in your footer section
Use standard header menu, don’t overstuff it

The purpose of navigation should be kept in mind, empowering users to explore your site and find their desired products or information, instead of focusing on the design and making it look aesthetic.

Conclusion

There are hundreds of websites features and discussing the detail can become quite extensive.

Therefore, we have only discussed the importance and details of those features that actually play a role in your website and business’s growth.

I hope this list will help you in making sure you have all these essential features on your website and also help you include them in case you have missed.

Let me know in the comments below if you think there’s another important feature that we may have missed.

Also, feel free to request a free website growth audit to find out if you have all these essential features on your website and suggestions to improve them.