This is obviously a very broad question, but what makes a good website good? Here’s a general overview of the cornerstones that can be applied to most types of business/informational type website that makes it good.
It’s Maintainable
A good website is maintainable. For developers and content entry folk. A website that’s well organised will future proof it for when you want to add extra functionality or make large changes later on. This is especially important for the underlying code. You will always end up with a legacy codebase in some form, but the extra planning up front to organise your code cleanly will help. This can include commenting your code and keeping a log of changes via git repository or similar.
It’s Optimised for speed
Speed is king on the internet. There are many things that can slow a website down, which includes things like:
- User’s internet speed (broadband vs mobile network)
- If the user is on a VPN or restricted network
- Website server location relative to user
- Server capability ( available ram, shared hosting etc)
- Relying on third party services (tracking, dns servers)
- Users browsing device ( old vs new mobiles)
- Use of Media (lots of images, video etc)
- Complexity of javascript behaviours
- Complex Frameworks
- Database calls, server interactions
Obviously website speed is important nowadays because it’s actually a ranking metric for search engines. If you have a slower than normal website, it’ll have an affect on your search engine position. Good news is a lot of page speed issues can be dealt with, at least mitigated, to reduce perceived loading times.
It’s also Optimised for Search Engines
Probably the number one thing on this list, maybe, what makes a good website good? It can be found by search engines.
This isn’t just my using the correct keywords, html tags and so on. It’s also from creating the right content for users. Blog posts are the best form of attracting users. A blog page can be grown exponentially over time. More content means more for search engines to crawl.
Optimisation for LLMs (AI such as chat gpt etc) is also on the rise, due to the ongoing decline in users finding things through regular search listings. More and more, people are asking conversational questions to find answers, rather than browsing through paged search listings.
It delivers on objectives
A good website revolving around a business – i.e making money – knows what it’s objectives are. It has a way of tracking it’s objectives and measuring results. How will you know what you return on your investment is if you don’t know how well your website has performed? How can you improve it in places where it’s needed? This can be applied to any website really. If you don’t know what a website’s objectives are then you need more planning.
It has barrier free browsing
(get rid of pop ups, broken content etc)
A good website doesn’t get in your way. Whilst it might be tempting to add pop ups, ads and so on, it can only hurt your user experience. Unfortunately this can get quite bad for mobile users. Lot’s of things can take up the limited screen space where the distractions actually cover more of the screen than the actual content! Some barriers to browsing can be:
- Cookie banners (alas unavoidable unless a user has a cookie blocker)
- slow loading assets (very large, unoptimised images)
- pop ups for offers, newsletter sign ups , ads
- 404 pages where you expect content
- perceived lag in interactions, (click events are slow etc)
It has good user experience
(ux – have a deep understanding of users, ease of use, is pleasant to use etc)
For a website to haev good UX, it must haev a deep understanding of it’s users. It’s easy to use and navigate, and is accessible for all users. It’s a pleasant experience to user. If there are issues they are clearly defined. I.e not a generic error such as ‘oops, something went wrong, please try again later.’ Good user experience is also good writing. Plain, easy to understand language.