The online world is integrated with almost every aspect of our lives today. We look up restaurants when we want to eat, online shops when we need a change of clothes, and travel blogs when we are deciding on our next vacation.
For many of your potential customers, your website will be the first interaction with your business. If the web pages take too long to load, the forms are not working, and navigation is difficult to follow—the customers might simply give up and search for another solution.
The functionality of your website is essential to run any successful business. It is your online representation, and it should do you just. Read on for actionable tips on how to identify the functionality needs of your website and improve customer experience.
Set The Goal Of Your Website
What is the main purpose of your website? Is it an eCommerce store for online sales? A useful blog that collects subscribers? An online booking page for making reservations?
As you can imagine, the website design and functionality vary from niche to niche. Depending on the website type, you might need functionalities such as a location map, event calendar, booking form, e-payment, etc.
The cost of developing a website also varies based on the functionalities you need. If you set your website goals carefully, you can avoid some unnecessary expenses in the development phase.
Determine the Needs of Your Audience
Create a User Persona to understand the needs and expectations of your audience. Learn about what your customers like about your website, which pages they open, and what is their behaviour like—and incorporate these findings into the website functionalities.
For some essentials of the website foundation, such as privacy policy and data management, there are simple solutions such as GDPR software tool integrations. For others, such as advanced payment procedures, a more strategic and expensive solution is required.
→ Looking for customer feedback Software? Check out Techimply’s customer feedback Software solutions.
Analyze Website Security
Apart from the above-mentioned data management security, other aspects of cybersecurity should be monitored and taken care of on your site. For example, an active SSL certificate reassures the users that you implement two-way encryption that helps them protect their personal information.
Moreover, if you are dealing with functionalities such as card payments, extra measurements need to be taken in order to keep the user’s financial data safe. For checkouts that take place online, a VPN solution can increase the level of safety and privacy for the customer by changing the location of the browser.
Clean Up the Database
For some websites, the database behind the smooth front end can be quite messy and full of potential challenges that may slow down the whole site. Especially if you have owned the website for a long period of time, an important step in identifying the functionality needs of it is to run a diagnosis across the entire database easy navigation through clear menus
.
For example, if you have decided to scale your business and need to maintain different copies of the database on servers in different locations, investing in a reliable database solution can significantly improve website performance. Software such as PostgreSQL database replication involves creating and maintaining copies of a database on multiple servers.
Allocate Your Budget and Resources
When deciding on improving different features of your website, or creating new functionalities from scratch, your budget and resources can be the determining factor.
Upon thorough analysis of the customer needs and your website’s current status, you need to make a list of priorities of which functionalities are the burning issue to fix right away, and which ones can hold on for a while longer.
Moreover, your budget will dictate how complex and expensive the solutions for each functionality can be, while the resources such as your tech team will have a final say on the deadline for which the changes can be live.
Track Website Performance and Optimize
As technology improves and trends change, so will your website and the functionalities it needs. For a long-term investment into customer satisfaction online, make sure to keep a record of the key metrics of the website's performance.
Invest in a tool that can send alerts and understand the metrics to help you monitor the events on the site. That way, you can timely discover the changes in customer behaviour and make the changes to the website promptly.
Create a Functionality Checklist
In addition to regular monitoring of the website performance and customer behaviour, it is a good practice to do a website functionality needs assessment on a periodical basis (once a year or even more frequently, depending on your business scale).
To make these regular assessments smooth and efficient time and resource-wise, we’ve prepared a checklist of the common website functionalities you should check.
- Blog page
- Photo Gallery
- Video Gallery
- CTA buttons
- Search function
- Forms
- Location map
- Checkout
- Social sharing widget
- Event Calendar
- Category widget
This list can be edited—shortened or expanded, depending on the business niche and scale, and adjusted to the particular goal of your website.
Over to You
There are 1.13 billion websites in the world, and even though only a fraction of these are active and regularly updated, more are being created every day. As consumer needs dictate that everything must be accessible online, the competition in almost every industry remains tough on the digital scale.
With such a demanding market to please, and experienced rivals to overcome, a strong website with compelling content, alluring visuals, and smoothly-operating functionalities is a must. Keep your website up-to-date, including the content and the plugins, and the database clean and bug-free.
