Designing your next eCommerce platform, business site, or even your blog around modern website features puts you ahead of the game instantly. Like many industries, the world of web design changes according to what customers want, need, and expect. And these changes happen almost constantly to keep up with industry shifts and even search engine algorithms. You can hire expert web developers. But to save money, here are a few tips to get started.

Clear and Easy Customer Service

First and foremost, you should channel a lot of your energy into customer service. This is vital for beating out the competition since recent data suggests that 77% of visitors place good customer service high in establishing brand loyalty. Additionally, most major companies are known for bad customer service, giving you an edge if you focus on this. A phone answering service, fast replies, a ticketing system, and even just providing an email address all help you.

WCAG Accessibility Features

No one should be excluded from accessing your website. And this is especially true of those with disabilities and medical issues. These can range from benign problems such as color blindness to navigation for people with missing limbs. Fortunately, there are systems you can implement across your site to improve accessibility. These are detailed in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. And include things like using colors, speech control, and tab order.

Modern Website Features Include AI

AI has been around for a while. But recent access because of open source code has opened it up to everyone. And it has burst onto the scene at an alarming rate. Like any technology, there are great uses for AI and bad uses. But from an eCommerce point of view, you can use AI across your site. The most used AI in web business is personalization at 70%, searching at 54%, and forecasting at 52% with tools such as Zyro, Wix ADI, and Amazon Personalize.

Easy Form Submission

Forms are a great addition to any website where you need to interact with customers. They offer a standard and formal way to collect data from just about any query. But often, that can be overly complicated and long-winded. And this will put customers off using them altogether. You should focus on providing different forms for each scenario. For example, a query about your shipping charges shouldn’t require a user’s phone number since it is data you don’t need.

Automated Replies System

After just a few customers per day, your time can be taken up by answering queries and looking after members. But automation will help you out immensely when it comes to saving time. Of course, all new members should receive a welcome email. And customer queries should be met with a reply. But you can’t do all these yourself. It’s almost impossible. So, you can use automation software, widgets, and plugins across your CMS site to handle these for you.

On-Page SEO Best Practices

Whether you are new to web business or a veteran with experience, you will eventually come across SEO or Search Engine Optimization. Some people are afraid of SEO because they feel it is complex, and it is. But not all of it. On-page SEO refers mostly to your content and website:

  • Do keyword research and include a focus keyword in your page and post content.
  • Use page URLs that contain only keywords that are contained in the page or post title.
  • Include the focus keyword in at least one header and the first and last paragraph.
  • Write a descriptive meta description that contains the focus keyword.
  • Don’t forget to add alt text that describes any images you use on your blog posts.
  • Include main page internal links in your website’s footer to encourage clicks.
  • Make your copy easy to read with bullets, small paragraphs, and negative space.
  • Configure your pages and posts for schema markup to use rich content.
  • Update outdated content to reflect changes or change content with niche edits.
  • Submit a new sitemap to your search engine after making changes or new content.
  • Include as many tags as possible that are relevant to any posts or web pages.

On-page SEO is vital because it provides a consistent layout for your site that appeals to both users and search engines. It’s also the easiest type of SEO to use and the one you will be most familiar with when developing a site. Also, you have direct control over on-page SEO via CMS.

Page Speed Optimization

SEO is just one of the ways in which a search engine like Google ranks your page for a results query. There are many other methods an algorithm uses. And one of them is the loading speed of your site. A slow site will not rank well. Some of the biggest culprits for slowing your site include a poor host, uncompressed images and excessive code from poor programming, a bad theme, or too many plugins. Google Pagespeed Insights will analyze your site for speed errors.

Multiple Payment Options

No longer is it acceptable to only offer one way to pay on your modern site. Credit and debit card payments are fine, and most people use these. But more and more customers might want to pay using modern methods. These include payment gateways such as PayPal and Venmo. Or they can also include digital wallets such as Google Pay. And finally, you might also benefit from offering your customer the ability to pay using cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ether.

You Need Mobile Modern Website Features

The updated Google algorithm now prioritizes websites that are built to be responsive to mobile devices to meet the growing use of smartphones to access the web. This is because today, 92% of the 4.32 billion web users access the internet using mobile devices. As such, you need to either develop a new site with a responsive theme or update your site’s features to include them. These include tap-scrolling, image pinching for zooming in and out, and stick nav bars.

An Easy Checkout System

Offering your customers multiple ways to pay is part of the checkout process. But it is a small part. The overall process must be as easy as possible for every customer. This helps them feel appreciated and reduces frustration when paying. And it helps increase sales from reduced cart abandonment. To make it easier, you can use shopping cart sidebar widgets, be clear about extra charges and provide guest checkout that doesn’t require signing up to buy a product.

Simplified Navigation Tools

Finally, the customer and user experience forms a major part of your site’s features by making your site easy to navigate. If you follow standard web design guidelines, then this should be simple. But you can also adapt your site to include expected modern features such as a mega menu. A mega menu ditches the traditional nav bar in favor of a large menu that includes all categories on your site. The idea is that your users can find what they need with minimal clicks.

Summary

You can revamp your site’s design to include modern website features or build them from the ground up. Easy customer service should be the focus of your design, and you can go from there. You can also use on-page SEO for more organic traffic and make your site easier to navigate. Additionally, AI and automation will help you keep up with growing demand and save you some time. And offering multiple payment methods helps you appeal to broader customers.