Your e-commerce website is your company’s lifeblood. Through it, you earn the sales, brand recognition, and customers you need to thrive as a business. You cannot be satisfied with simply creating a web design that looks and works great today. Implementing the latest trends and targeting your current customers is the right place to start when building your website, but chances are it will need more than that to succeed over the long term. Called future-proofing a website, taking steps to ensure that your site continues to keep up with trends in web design and search engine optimization is important. Here are just a few reasons to build a site that is prepared to wow visitors, not just now but over the long term.
As an e-commerce website, you need to be ready for growth.
As the owner of an e-commerce website, you undoubtedly want your business to become larger, more influential, and more profitable over time. However, that growth will also require changes to your website. For example, your site will need to be able to handle increased traffic, increased purchases, more transactions, more questions, and so forth. And sometimes, growth does not happen gradually. A blog post goes viral and suddenly you are enjoying thousands of new visitors a day, or a sale draws more people than you expected. Unless your website is ready to scale up quickly, you risk a crashed site and costly downtime. As a result, future-proofing your e-commerce website by building in scalability can prepare you for growth. Build your site with growth in mind, and when that growth does eventually happen, you will be able to handle it smoothly, no matter how quickly it occurs.
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The world of web design is ever-evolving.
Of course, the growth of your business is not the only change you can expect in your e-commerce website. The world of web design itself is ever-changing. For example, Flash used to be a common addition to websites, but nowadays, Flash is completely outdated. A perhaps more important example is mobile web design: Creating websites that operate smoothly on mobile devices is essential if you hope to succeed at SEO and reach large segments of your target audience who primarily use their mobile devices to shop. Not all of these changes can be predicted or prepared for. However, future-proofing your e-commerce website can help you to weather some changes in the world of web design. For example, use content management systems and code that is easily changed as your design needs change. Build simplicity into your site, and hire web design professionals who understand and can keep up with changing trends. By doing so, you will prepare your site to more easily adapt to web design changes as they occur.
Search engine optimization doesn’t stay the same, either.
Web design isn’t the only aspect of an e-commerce website that changes regularly. Search engine optimization is also prone to frequent changes, with trends coming and going and the way in which search engines analyze web pages constantly evolving. The SEO strategy that is working for your website today may not be as effective in a year. To that end, future-proofing your website can also prevent your site from falling behind in the search results because of changes in SEO. When you hire SEO experts (like WEBii) who understand SEO and its ever-changing trends, you enjoy a campaign that is future-proofed against potential changes, and that is ever alert to any tweaks that need to be made. The right future-proofed website can thrive even as SEO trends and best practices change over time.
You cannot afford downtime.
One of the primary reasons to future-proof your e-commerce website is because you simply cannot afford any downtime. For example, if your site becomes overwhelmed by too much growth, it may crash and you may be left scrambling to get it up and running again. And every moment your website is inaccessible, you risk losing out on visitors and sales. That could potentially add up to quite a bit of money lost because your site could not handle the growth your business experienced. A future-proofed website, however, as mentioned above, is poised to handle any growth that occurs over time. Even sudden growth will be easier to manage if you have taken the right precautions ahead of time. And that means that you will be less likely to face costly downtime and more likely to enjoy all of the advantages that extra business brings to your e-commerce website.
People judge your business by how your e-commerce website looks (and acts).
Finally, you may want to future-proof your e-commerce website simply because how it looks and acts is a very large part of what makes people stay on (or leave) your site. An outdated web design or pages that load too slowly will communicate to visitors that your business is unprofessional and unconcerned with its visitors’ experience. That is likely to turn them away at the proverbial door. A future-proofed website, however, that is capable of keeping up with web design trends, is more likely to look and act professionally for its visitors. For example, a simple look will have more of a timeless flavor that will allow it to appeal to visitors without needing constant updates. There are many good reasons to future-proof your e-commerce website. Preparing for growth, keeping up with changes in web design and SEO, avoiding costly downtime, and creating a site that looks and acts professionally can ensure that you continue to earn business over the long term.