19 essential website features That Will Help You Rank Higher on Google

5 stages of planning a website functionalities

Presenting step by step planning guide, which helps in deciding the features of the website:-

Stage 1- First of all think about your website visitors: plan website features according to their requirement

What they want, what they are searching for, and how you can make them comfortable in this process, when you can understand the problem of your website visitor, then you will understand What you need, just see what you would need if you were in his place

For example-
Fast Website, Excellent Uptime, Chatting Features, Best Chatting Experience, Many times availability of any kind of tools, Quick response, and Easy navigation so that your website visitor can understand well, this is what you need during a website visit.

Stage 2- Website Features for Layout Planning

Website layout planning is a part of essential features Decide a layout that becomes easy to navigate, most visitors open many websites in separate tabs, if they don’t understand your navigation, they can’t stay on your website – For this, you can choose, mega menus if you have a long list of products or services, If telephonic calls are to necessary then putting this information on the header is one of the best ideas. So the feature that enables this functionality is also good for you.

Additionally, if sliders are important or you want to show your multiple offerings then this slider feature is good for your website layout

Stage 3- Website Forms Planning

There you need some forms on your website, sometimes, big & sometimes tiny to gather different types of information from buyers. Leads are essential parts of running any business, If your lead-generating system is weak then you should rethink your website features

Stage 4- Website planning with social media features

That’s true according to Marketer Neil Patel, 80% internet is dominated by 2 major search engines – 1- YouTube & 2- Google search, still, people are spending their maximum time on social media. If you observe the total watch time then social media holds the traffic a lot.

To leverage social media you need integrations, sharing & other options too, decide in your country what platform is good. I recommend doing everywhere, where you think it can be because social media companies launch various features almost every month, You can’t say when your website visitor will come to which platform, and if you are not there some other competitor will turn this visitor into a buyer.

Stage 5- Website’s marketing & automation features

In the future, you have to do promotions, no matter who does it, you will also need some features of Google, YouTube, and automation.
Google is a primary search engine today, if you want to do its SEO in the future or put valuable blogging content on it for the Internet, then you will need some features for it.
You might want to integrate YouTube on your website as well, this is also a feature.

Here are 6 important planning elements any website should include.

19 Common Website Features, Still Popular in 2023

In context to businesses, before 2000, maybe you didn’t need much advertising due to less online competition. But now the situation is different.

Of course, you are not a web designer so how come you would know the features? This is why you are here on this page. A list, that tells you 19 popular website features you must reconsider.

1- Number of Pages

Pages are the basic elements of your website.

We count it in “Features” because, at the time of taking a project, you will be asked this question, Hey! how many pages do you want on your website? You can be charged based on no. of pages, & just because this is in SOW (scope of work) we care to call it a feature.

Benefit is :

• This can give a prior idea of your work size, so the designer can give a better estimate time & money required

Suggested Pages:

• Home, About Us, and Contact pages, are common pages you might need.
• A blog page is important & in trend, you can ask for this website feature.
• Testimonial 7 gallery pages are optional, but they are good if you have them on your website

If your budget is low

1. You can add all the services to 1 service page or
2. You can ask for a dedicated page for each service, this will help search engines & website visitors both.

2- Contact Form feature

Everyone wants inquiry so, a form is needed as a website feature. This is the place where you get the conversion opportunity.

Benefits

Buyers can contact you, they can fill out this form & the inquiry comes to your mail ID, For those website visitors this is good who are hesitant to call you late at night, they can fill out the form.

3- Fav Icon

When you open a website, it opens in a TAB. Every website has an image icon on the tab. this is called favicon. How fav icons are important, you can see this also if you want to read a dedicated article on the favicon | here.

4- Responsive Website Design

More than 80% of traffic comes from devices other than desktops, so we keep this feature in line with your website. Website design takes different shapes on different devices like mobile, desktop, and medium-screen phones. if you think, a responsive website is the same on all devices then you are incorrect. These websites are intelligent enough to take a shape that suits that device.

5- Content Editing Panel

CMS Feature is called a content management system, it’s a dynamic panel that allows you to add/remove/edit your content on your website. You can get your own panel in PHP & other popular languages. It all fixes the same purpose – to add/remove/edit your content. It’s important for regular content updates & if you are planning for SEO or complete digital marketing, then this panel is a must because you have to make & experiment with a hell lot of changes every day.

6- Animated Sliders

Animation increases engagement with your website. You must be careful because they are situated at the top of the home page, & load at first. If they are heavy then they can slow down your website. However, their presence on your website attracts visitors to spend some time on your site.

7- Social Media integration on your website

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, and LinkedIn are very important to connect with buyers. If buyers connect socially, they interact with your business naturally, so very easily you can connect them & convert them later. So this feature is a very important website feature

8- Social Share

This feature is different from social media integration, social media sharing means you add a feature to a website. Let’s say the Facebook icon on the page. When someone clicks it, it automatically shares your buyer’s Facebook profile. You did not share it, your buyer shared it. Maybe he liked your content & shared it on his wall. This is a modern website feature that can boost your social media in an organic form.

9- Technical Maintenance

Sometimes people think technical updates mean you can ask a web designer to add content & create new pages for you.

However, to be clear! the technical maintenance is backend work. Every month there are scripts, caches, plugins, servers, CMS versions & other elements that need maintenance.

Sometimes it is a direct website backend work & mostly it’s server & hosting-related. Without this, your website can’t work properly for a long time.

Content updates are completely another separate part of the service. Servers, emails, scripts, and codes are part of your website’s technical maintenance.

So, we know this is not a feature but you should know when you are hiring a web designer.

10- Blogging Feature

Blogging can make your website popular. The website’s blogging feature gives you the ability to add posts & announcements.

Benefits:

You can post, and each post has a page, more pages mean more opportunities for web promotions, blogging is popular throughout the world, if you haven’t heard of this website’s features then you are years behind.

11- SSL ( Secure socket layer)

This is definitely a product. This is for the security of your website visitors.

When a visitor puts in some card details, this goes to the server.

12- The benefit of the SSL feature:

This is the security between your website & the server’s data transmission. Hackers can’t hack personal details this way.

13- CDN

In order to secure your website & speed it up, this is another technique. When one server serves a website data, it has a capacity so it can get slow sometimes.

Benefits:

In the case of CDN, your data gets downloaded from a number of servers. If one server is busy, another server sends this data. So websites become faster.

14- Email IDs

Do you know what an is Email ID? For example, you are using emails like XYZ@gmail.com You don’t need to be dependent on Gmail

15- Benefit-

Professional email IDs are better than free email IDs because they are more than free email IDs.

info@yourdomain.com or yourname@yourwebsitename.com are better than yourname@gmail.com.

16- Social Media Blog Auto post feature on the website is an important feature in the list

Your website can save you time, it can post on your social media pages like Facebook, etc., on your behalf.

Benefits –

• You save a lot of posting time on your website, also you get better branding with less effort.
• You just added new content to your website, & it gets posted on Facebook even without login, great it is.

17- SEO Ready Designing

This means the website is SEO-ready, it’s ready to be promoted. However, this is not on-page optimized as on-page optimization is a major part of SEO. A non-SEO-ready design can create issues when you start marketing someday.

Benefits –

SEO-ready design can do a lot and it can improve your business. Else you would have to make a new website. Why do you pay double & work double to make a website? It’s just a one-time effort. Making that SEO-ready is mandatory

18- Push Notifications

Sometimes a sudden notification comes when you turn your PC on. When it connects to the internet, a strange popup starts coming, telling you about your competitor (See image)

This is push notification, many third-party notification services are in the market. You can buy this feature from them & you can add it to your website.

Benefits –

This can increase repeat visitors because anyone who visits your website once can get this notification on their desktop. Everyone wants this push notification feature on the website

The benefit is that your website visitors will get notified, & in touch. They will not forget you because every day they can see notifications on their computer.

19- Marketing reports

Your web designer can add this feature to your website so that you can be notified about your website visitors & can plan the internet marketing according to this.

The reports are as follows –

Monthly Traffic Analysis Reports

A website traffic analysis report is crucial because it tells you

• Visitor’s City
• Website Visitor’s Age
• His gender
• When they visited
• If their visit is a repeat visit
• Which product they are interested in &
• What is the exit page, etc?

So, here is a list of website features that can be great when you want a modern website. Most of them are free & need less effort to do. But some of them are hard to do, for them, your website designer can charge you.

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We answer every one! if you have a question, we can answer it.

Informative Website feature list table

eCommerce Website feature list table