The success and growth of a business come through various channels and in recent years, a website became one of them. Ever wondered why?
Well, the global business environment is evolving fast. Changing consumer behaviour is what drives it faster. Research by popular platforms like Statista shows there are around 5.18 billion internet users worldwide. It is nearly 65% of the world’s present population.
Looking at this massive number of internet users, don’t you think running a business without a website means foregoing a huge number of potential customers?
The statistics reveal that most people search on the internet and look for relevant information about a product or service before purchasing them. With a website, your business gets visibility on the target. It helps you to target customers globally and provide them with easy access to your products or services. Thus a website acts as a virtual storefront that offers your business many prospects for sales and revenue.
Summing it up in a few words, the importance of a website is vast and manifold in the growth of a business!
To know how exactly a website impacts a business using the modern world’s internet influence, read through this blog.
What Is A Website?
To learn about the importance of a website, you need to first know its definition.
Putting it simply, it is a collection of web pages through which a business, organisation or individual provides information about themselves, their products, or services. The website is accessible on the internet through computers and mobiles.
Customers looking for relevant information related to your business or organisation can reach the website and navigate through it to get the information.
In other words, the website creates the online presence of a business and has a massive impact on its revenue stream and success. In this age, most people are conscious purchasers who seek information about a product or service before buying it. Apparently, a website is the only way to get that! It offers virtual storefront advantages i.e., people can check through the range of products and their prices, even talk to an executive (through the website’s chat support), and make a purchase.
Considering the internet era’s significance, websites are an indispensable aspect of business today, and it’s never fading out. Websites are continuously gaining prominence, undergoing innovation in functionalities, and emerging as diverse types.
So, what do you think about the importance of a website to your business? Do you think your business needs it too?
Let’s discuss that next.
Does Your Business Need An Appealing Website?
As a successful business owner, you may think it is not at all worth investing in a website, especially when it’s a small business. You operate a small agency or storefront with little staff and sell your products directly to the customers. It seems that your business cannot get much from a website utility.
However, that’s just one point of view. If you ask business experts of organizations/brands that have gained web-driven success, you will understand the whole point of having a website.
Many of them have started small with a little shop or office but have today grown into brands and a website helped them achieve that. With a staggering growth in the percentage of online purchases over the years, it was certain that businesses would realise the importance of a website. Here are some global statistics that reveal the website significance or online platform value for businesses in today’s age.
- 47% of total purchases take place online worldwide
- 74% of in-store purchasers search the internet before going to the shop.
- 51% of shoppers find it convenient to research a product/service on Google that they plan to buy online.
- 45% of shoppers research a product/service on Google that they plan to buy in-store.
- More than 50% of shoppers discover or find a new company/brand on Google while researching or purchasing a product.
(Source: Statista and Think with Google)
That’s impressive, right?
The only idea behind presenting these statistical facts is to help you understand the supreme relevance of websites in this modern world. Not having a website means letting go of a huge number of potential customers and subsequent revenue.
Besides, your competitors are having their websites! The customers searching for your products/services cannot discover your company and will surely move to the competitors that have a website. Are you ready to lose your customers to the competitors?
If not, then get ready to build a website with the help of an expert web development company.
11 Reasons Explaining The Importance of A Website
A website is more than just a digital card or an information portal for a business. It’s scaling up the sales of businesses by converting visitors into customers.
Whether your business is successful or not at present a website presence is going to speed up your growth through an extensive range of benefits. The following points reveal the importance of a website for your company in this technology-driven world.
1. Gives exposure and visibility
The first reason behind the necessity of a website is to give the business global exposure, which is never possible with a physical storefront or an office.
A website delivers many internet visibility benefits, the first one being the visibility of your business to a broader audience around the world. With nearly 4.5 billion active users of the internet globally, you can target new markets and regions and constantly seek to increase your potential customer base.
People are now considering the website role in business as a virtual card! It helps them get all the necessary information before making a purchasing decision. So if you are not having a website, but your competitors have one, you’re surely losing them out as your customers.
2. Builds trustworthiness and credibility
One of the remarkable virtual identity benefits that businesses get with a website is an increase in the trust of their customers.
More businesses are realising the website significance of a digital presence and developing their unique websites. As a result, people will find a business with a website more reliable and updated than the ones that do not have it.
The website determines what people perceive about your business. The information you provide on the website, such as the company’s vision and mission, the origin of the business, team members, products/services offerings, client testimonials, and contact and address details – all these establish the credibility of your business.
3. Operates as a highly potential 24×7 sales channel
A website becomes a prominent medium for sales that works 24×7. Needless to say, this is a supreme importance of a website for a business. It helps you to gain momentum in sales by targeting customers, locally as well as globally.
You can exhibit your products or services and provide all the necessary information on the website with stunning images. It will help visitors have a clear idea of what you offer and how they can benefit. When your information and images are great enough to persuade them to buy, they would click on the call-to-action (CTA). The CTA is an action-oriented button you should put on your website, which drives the visitors to make the purchase and become your customers.
With relevant information and effective CTAs, your website will boost your sales consistently.
4. Helps in business expansion
This is one of the web visibility benefits that are pushing business owners to come up with a vibrant and functional website!
A well-designed website creates awareness about your business and helps you to reach newer markets or customer segments. You can showcase your products or services to customers overseas and generate sales, which was never possible with just a brick-and-mortar store.
The importance of websites has grown due to this reason. By doing proper SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), you can specifically increase your website’s presence in markets where you wish to target. A website enables you to expand your business to desired markets and regions without expanding physically with new stores or offices.
5. Cost-effective online marketing
A website gives you the scope to enhance digital marketing without investing much. It delivers all the online branding benefits, helping your business generate leads and sales.
However, to leverage your website presence for online marketing, you need to create an appealing website that drives engagement. You can promote your website on social media platforms, signatures, banners, and so on. This in turn will lead to more engagement of customers with your website, resulting in more chances for conversions.
You can also use the web-based outreach significance and propel several other marketing efforts with newsletter subscriptions, mailing, customer feedback, videos, and other beneficial content.
6. Gives brand recognition to your business
Developing a brand identity is essential for any business. It differentiates your business from other similar businesses in the market. The website utility also extends to creating brand recognition for your business.
A unique website helps you create a unique brand identity by letting your visitors know who are you, what you do, how you do it, etc. It shows everything, starting from your brand name, logo, business model/process and team to security and privacy policies, case studies, and so on. All these differentiate your business from others in the market, which subsequently establishes your unique brand identity.
7. Provides round-o-clock customer support
This is another significant importance of a website, which makes it today a priority tool for businesses.
Providing non-stop customer support services or after-sales services is undeniably challenging for any business today. A website helps you to become available for customer support 24×7, without needing anyone to be available in real.
AI (Artificial Intelligence) introduced an immersive Chatbot that addresses common issues and queries of the customers. Even if they cannot solve a problem, they would humanly respond to them and ask them to wait for some time to get it solved. This is less frustrating for customers than not getting any response or answer to their issues!
When you integrate such AI-based chat support for customer services, half of your headache goes away. With web-based communication benefits, keep your customers happy and simultaneously, strengthen your customer relationships.
8. Gives a competitive edge
A website or online presence’s importance also lies in outdoing your competitors and gaining a winning position in the market.
A well-designed and meaningful website sets you apart from other businesses. Whether it is the design, information provided, navigation, or customer support of your website that creates a great first impression, the customers are going to remember it. Whenever they need your products or services in future, your website is the first thing that will come to their minds and drive them to make a purchase.
In other words, the website helps a business to realise the online representation value of a website by attracting more customers and generating more sales than competitors.
9. Boosts organic traffic through SEO
A website that creates a lasting impression on customers will also help you keep targeting your audience consistently in the long run.
The digital footprint benefits of your business will increase manifold when you make your website SEO-friendly.
SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is the process by which a website becomes more relevant and easily discoverable on the results pages of search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Whenever someone searches with a popular keyword or key phrase that relates to your business, the search engine will show up your website at the top of the results.
When you make this happen for your website by integrating proper SEO techniques and tools into your website, it will drive more quality organic traffic. More traffic to your website eventually means more chances of leads and conversions.
10. Shows professionalism
Having a website presence also shows the professionalism of your business. In this modern digitally-driven world, a business that operates without a website might look outdated and unprofessional.
A well-structured, organised, and navigable website enhances the visitors’ experience and helps them to access information easily and smoothly. When you pay attention to the typography, images, colour schemes, and layout of the website to align them with your business, it further exhibits your consistency and professionalism as a brand.
Having a professional-looking website provide you with many web engagement benefits too! Customers will be interested to interact more or making purchases perceiving your credibility. On the other hand, many businesses will be willing to enter into partnerships or expand their business presence through you.
11. Ensures long-lasting value with greater ROI
Let’s get to the last but very crucial importance of a website for business. It’s greater ROI!
ROI or Return on Investment is much greater for a website development given the wide range of digital presence advantages you get. First are the web visibility benefits, which count exposure to global markets, more conversions, greater sales, and growth.
Second, you get online reputation significance which builds the brand image and credibility of your business and enhances trust in customers. Lastly, it gives customers online accessibility advantages such as 24×7 sales and customer support services.
Given these far-reaching benefits and the little investment needed to build a website, its ROI is extremely rewarding.
Can Facebook Page Be A Good Alternative For Website?
Many businesses believe that a Facebook page can be a pretty good and inexpensive alternative for a website offering all the advantages of a virtual storefront. No doubt, social media has a greater impact on businesses but that’s only on the marketing front.
Facebook works as a potential advertisement channel, helping brands to make people aware of their business and products/services. It also helps the brand to encourage better customer engagement and build a loyal customer base.
Despite the benefits a Facebook page brings, it is never an alternative to the business website. Here’s why.
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No ownership
Facebook never gives you ownership of your page. It may happen that one fine day Facebook restricts or suspends your page for not following any of its rules or policy.
Also, strictly adhering to the rules and policy does not ensure your ownership of the page. It is still Facebook’s property and can stop working for a lot of other reasons. If the social media platform gets a technical glitch or faces a hacking issue, your page might disappear leading to the loss of all your followers and posts.
We’re sure that you never want to take that risk! Thus a website is the primary need for a business to create an online presence.
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Website ensures credibility
A website works like a trustworthy gateway to the business and people only spend on a business that they know well and trust.
While it is comparatively easier, quicker, and cost-effective to create a Facebook page, it won’t build the trust needed to sustain in the cyber world. On the contrary, a website will make your business look credible and more professional.
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Massive competition on Facebook
Almost every individual entrepreneur and business has a Facebook page. It is a great marketing channel, especially for the small business. No matter what is your industry, you will have a lot of competitors on Facebook, which does not let you realise more of the online platform’s value.
Also, there’s no way to customize or make your page look brilliant to draw the attention of your target audience. Therefore, it’s better to have your own bespoke website for online presence rather than fighting for attention on Facebook.
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Less scope for SEO on Facebook
A website takes your business to a top position in Google with tactful SEO strategies. Your website appears on the search engine result pages (SERPs) for most queries or keywords related to your products/services if it has good SEO.
Is that possible with Facebook? Think about it.
5 Pro Tips For Developing Efficient Website That Drives Business Success
Businesses need a website to create an online identity and boost their sales and revenues. It gives enormous online connectivity benefits to brands and helps them secure a large customer base.
If all our above-discussed points about the importance of a website in business make you think of getting a website next, here are a few tips to keep in mind.
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Keep navigation simple
We advise you to keep the navigation of your website as simple as possible with fewer tabs and pages. When the navigation is easy, visitors will scan through your information, products, etc., faster and find what they need.
They will quickly make the purchase and move out. That’s it! The end goals of both parties are met so quickly.
If you want to achieve conversions faster like this, keep your website navigation simple with clearly labelled tabs, fewer pages and sections, and easily identifiable call-to-action (CTA) buttons.
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Create an organised page layout
If your site has information but does not present it properly, you are going to lose visitors and potential conversion.
Putting information through text, graphics, images, charts, videos, etc., is important but they shouldn’t confuse the minds of the visitors. Create an interesting yet convenient layout of your website according to the content. It should balance the text with images or videos.
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Ensure mobile responsiveness
Mobile responsiveness is a top priority for any business website today to benefit fully from the internet outreach significance. People spend a huge part of their day on mobiles every day and nearly one-third of them shop through mobile devices.
Needless to say, if your website is not mobile-friendly i.e., difficult to navigate on mobile devices, you can lose a great number of customers.
While web traffic benefits your business and gives you many potential customers, you cannot let go of the conversion chances from mobile traffic. Thus, make sure to build a mobile-responsive website that brings a lot of traffic every day.
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Put engaging content
If the visitors to your website find the content on the home page interesting, they will spend more time learning about your brand, services, or products.
In other words, having engaging content holds the attention of first-time visitors and reduces your website’s bounce rates. You’re likely to have more conversions when the content impresses the visitors and induces them to purchase.
The key to providing engaging content is to think and write from the perspective of your customers. Tell them how they can benefit through crisp and precise content.
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Optimise the loading speed
The faster the pages of your website load, the better it is. Anyone can quickly scroll and navigate the pages to get what they want. Once they get it, they make their purchase decision, which gives you a conversion. This does not happen always when you have a slower website!
When the website pages load too slowly, it frustrates the visitors, who will then close your website and move to a competitor’s site. Don’t let that happen by ensuring faster loading speed.
Updating the website, optimising the sizes of videos and images, and using a website host are some ways to ensure fast loading speed.
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Integrate SEO aspects
Lastly, incorporate all the key practices of SEO into your newly-built website to make it easily discoverable on Google.
Consider SEO as a core website functionality that helps it get more organic traffic and higher conversions. It ranks the site in the top position so that people can find it with relevant keywords.
Some of the SEO aspects you should ensure in your website are keyword-optimised URLs, title tags and metadata, alt attributes for images, and mobile-friendly design.
Build A Stunning Website For Your Business With Us!
There are ample reasons to consider the importance of a website for your business. From creating worldwide visibility to expanding your customer base, and enhancing online marketing efforts to boosting customer interactions, a website works as a true game changer for a business!
It primarily serves as a virtual storefront but helps in shaping the perception of your customers by putting all the valuable information professionally and impressively.
In a nutshell, a well-designed helps your business to stand out in the industry! It ensures long-term returns through better visibility, increased customer experience, more organic traffic, increased sales, and so on.
If all these advantages of having a website make you think of building one for your business, get in touch with Webskitters Technology Solutions Pvt. Ltd. We are a top-rated website design and development agency in the UK, providing businesses with appealing and user-friendly websites. Feel free to contact us today and share your requirements!
Frequently Asked Questions
1. Is it important for small businesses to have a website?
Yes, having a website is crucial today for any small business. It serves as a virtual storefront and increases online visibility and accessibility in today’s digital landscape. With a website, you can showcase your products or services, develop the credibility of your small business brand, and reach a broader audience. You can also enhance customer engagement with a website, which will fosters trust and grow your customer base. In every way, a website is essential for a small business that works as a tool for driving its growth.
2. Do businesses perform better with a website?
A business tends to perform significantly better with a website. A website expands its reach and accessibility to wider markets. It enhances the credibility of a business and allows potential customers to learn about the products and services before purchasing. A website also serves as a prominent digital hub for pushing marketing efforts, like SEO and social media campaigns. This further boosts online visibility and attracts potential clients.
3. What is the general purpose of creating a website?
The primary purpose of creating a website is to establish the online presence of a business. It works as a platform for businesses or organizations to share their information, offer products or services, and engage with potential customers. In other words, a website functions as a virtual storefront, a common communication hub, and a marketing means to increase the visibility, brand reputation, and credibility of the business.
4. How do I know if my business needs a website?
If you’re not sure whether your business requires a website, just consider the industry and purchase behaviour of your target audience. If your customers are online or if your competitors have websites, a website becomes a necessity!
Moreover, assess your business goals. If you want to expand your audience reach, showcase products or services, or provide information, a website is valuable. If you want to build credibility and customer engagement, a website is a great idea for that. On the whole, a website becomes a need if you aim to tap into the digital market and stay relevant in today’s online-centric business landscape.
5. Is a website important for marketing a business?
It is an absolute YES! A website is essential for propelling the marketing of a business. It enhances your visibility on Google and other search engines, allowing your business to reach a much broader audience. Secondly, it helps you apply various digital marketing strategies, such as blogs, content marketing, social media integration, email campaigns, and more. All these are modern marketing efforts that help a business stay ahead of its competitors.
6. Is a website necessary for sales?
Yes, a website is necessary for driving sales for businesses in today’s digital landscape. It operates as a virtual storefront, available to potential customers 24×7, providing them with essential information about products or services. A well-designed website will offer your customers a seamless shopping experience, enabling them to purchase, make payments, and even receive customer support online. It gradually opened up opportunities for e-commerce to general businesses, helping them to boost sales and revenue.
