How to Build a Professional Website: Best Practices & Benefits

What is a professional website?

A professional website is high-quality, easy to navigate, mobile-friendly, and aesthetically pleasing. It also supplements the customer journey and provides visitors with the information they’re looking for right away.

With these characteristics, individuals are more likely to engage with your site, become loyal to your brand, and make repeat visits or purchases.

What types of careers would benefit from having a professional website?

Many types of careers can benefit from having a professional website, including entrepreneurs, freelancers, and contractors.

For example, freelancers can use a professional website as an online resume that highlights their previous work and skills. This digital portfolio is more interactive and can be enhanced with images, videos, and testimonials.

An entrepreneur, on the other hand, may want to create a website for their online store. This allows them to showcase their products or services to stakeholders and potential customers.

Parts of a professional website

There are a few components that your website should have to boost the likelihood of success. This includes mobile optimization, easy navigation, and search engine optimization (SEO).

Mobile optimization

Optimizing your website for mobile devices is critical in today's digital age. More and more people are engaging with smartphones, tablets, and other devices daily, and search engines are updating their indexing and ranking practices to be mobile-first.

In fact, Google is known to be a mobile-first search engine, meaning it uses the mobile version of your site to index and rank it on the SERP (search engine results pages). While Google says you don’t have to have a mobile version of your website to be on the SERP, they highly recommend doing so to improve your position.

In 2021, more than half of organic search engine visits were conducted on mobile devices, so making your website mobile-friendly is worth the effort.

Easy navigation

Ensuring your website is easy to navigate can make the browsing experience more enjoyable for visitors, which may cause them to stay on your website longer and engage more. This can also lower bounce since users aren’t immediately leaving your website. Since visitors will spend more time on your website, they may even be inclined to purchase.

To improve your site’s navigation, you can:

• Organize your pages into categories
• Have a navigation bar
• Ensure consistency

Search engine optimization

SEO is the process of improving your site to rank highly on search engines and drive organic traffic. Not only does it involve keyword research and content optimization (on-page SEO), but it also includes updating the back-end elements of your site and acquiring backlinks (off-page SEO).

There are many advantages to using SEO, such as:

• Boosting organic traffic
• Lowering marketing costs
• Improving trust
• Ranking locally
• Supporting PPC and other marketing strategies
• Increasing brand awareness

How to build a professional website

Building a professional website can provide several benefits. Use the steps below to get started.

Define your goals

Defining your goals can help you create an effective website strategy. For example, if the goal is for users to download a white paper, you may want to integrate attention-grabbing call-to-action (CTA) buttons and use SEO to drive traffic to the page.

As you list your goals, consider the user journey and the typical experience for users who land on your site. This will help you determine the type of information and pages you need to include.

It's also a good idea to set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely (SMART) goals. Doing so allows you to outline realistic objectives and ensures you don't stray too far from your goals.

Choose a website-building platform

Fortunately, you don’t need to know how to code to build a professional website. Whether you're a freelancer, entrepreneur, startup, or anything in-between, you can use a web creation platform like Wix to increase your digital presence with limited or no site design experience.

Here are a few considerations to keep in mind as you search for a web design platform to make your website:

• Price
• Templates/themes
• Ease of use
• Features
• Third-party integrations
• Customer support

If you'd rather have an expert design your website, you might instead choose to hire a web designer.

Keep it simple

It’s always best to keep your website's content simple rather than bombard users with lots of distractions.

Remember, less is often more with web design—especially when conveying a particular message. A clutter-free website helps create a better user experience for visitors and allows them to focus on the most critical information.

Additionally, sites that keep things simple are often easier for users to engage with. A landing page full of call-outs, flashy animations, and colorful designs may overwhelm site visitors, resulting in higher bounce rates and low conversions.

Usability and functionality

Not only does your website have to look professional, but it also has to function well. If it doesn’t work properly, it may frustrate visitors, and they may end up going to a competitor’s site instead. In fact, ZIPPIA reports that 88% of online consumers won’t return to a site after having a negative user experience, while 52% of people say they’ll lose faith in a business with a poor mobile experience.

While the numbers may seem alarming at first, there are many improvements you can make to make your site’s usability and functionality better, including:

• Ensure your site is mobile-friendly.
• Make the site responsive regardless of the device used.
• Increase the speed of your website.
• Make the design easy to read.
• Focus on having simple navigation.

You can also test your site regularly to verify that it functions as intended. Ask friends, family, employees, site visitors, and customers for feedback.

Create relevant content

Creating relevant content for your niche is essential because it allows you to reach your target audience and drive the right people to your website. As such, you can connect with site visitors who are likely interested in your products or services and move them through the sales process more efficiently.

Content creation also positions you as an authority and knowledgeable figure in your industry. This boosts credibility and trust, so individuals may return to your site for answers.

Here are a few examples of the type of content you can create:

• Blog posts
• Infographics
• Landing pages
• White papers
• Case studies
• Ebooks
• FAQs
• How-to videos

Optimize for search engines

Optimizing your website for search engines can help you rank higher on the SERP, meaning people are more likely to click on your site. Only .63% of Google users clicked on links on the second page of search results, so raising your position on the SERP is imperative.

There are a number of ways you can optimize your site for search engines, including:

• Leveraging keyword research
• Creating relevant, authoritative, and valuable content
• Providing good UX
• Focusing on on-page and off-page SEO
• Making your site accessible on mobile
• Improving loading times.

Benefits of building a professional website

There are many benefits to creating a professional website. Here are some of the most lucrative advantages:

• Boost your digital presence. An online presence is vital since people often spend lots of time on their digital devices.
• Learn more about consumers. With the right tools, your website can gather customer information, allowing you to create targeted sales and marketing campaigns.
• Generate traffic and increase conversions. You can reach the right people with a high-quality website and drive traffic to your brand.

You don't have to be a web designer to have a beautiful website

Creating a professional website can help your business in many different ways. Before you start building the site, it’s important to closely examine your goals. What’s the purpose of your website? What are you trying to achieve? By following the steps outlined above, you can build an effective website that enables you to accomplish your goals.

You can use Mailchimp’s website builder to easily create, design, and publish a website that meets the needs of your business.

A web creation platform like Wix can help you establish your online business presence with intuitive tools that allow you to launch a professional website in minutes, regardless of your industry. And since it's easy to connect a Wix website to Mailchimp, you'll have everything you need to elevate your marketing with personalized, automated email campaigns that turn site visitors into customers.