Setup Wix in 3 Easy Steps

Today there are about 2 billion live websites, but only 20% of them are active. Source: Hosting Tribunal And on average, internet users in the US visit 130+ web pages daily. Visiting websites has become a critical part of a person’s average day. In today’s accelerating digital world, your website is the face of your brand, your key sales generator, and, arguably, your leading marketing tool. Simply put, your website needs to be exceptional. And matching customer expectations are at an all-time high. For 48% of people, website design is the critical factor in determining a business’s credibility. So how can you get your website to meet and, hopefully, exceed customer expectations? At a minimum, you should follow 3 key steps:

1. Pick the right platform to help you set up your web presence, for example, Wix.
2. Understand and utilize all relevant platform functionalities available to you.
3. Know and action the latest best practices on web design and usability.

What is Wix?

With over 220 million users, Wix is one of the leading platforms that can help you create, design, manage and develop your web presence in 6 easy steps:

1. Sign up for the free website builder and choose what kind of website you want to create.
2. Customize a template or get a website made for you.
3. Drag and drop thousands of design features (add text, galleries, videos, animation, scroll effects, vector art, etc.).
4. Customize it for your business: add an online store, booking system, members area, or blog.
5. Publish your website and go live.
6. Use advanced SEO tools and marketing solutions to drive traffic to your site.

What are Wix’s Key Functionalities?

Most importantly, Wix makes it possible to create a high-quality website without knowing how to code. However, if one does know how to code, Velo also allows for additional advanced functionalities. But Wix comes with some other powerful functionalities.

1. Website templates

Wix offers 900+ free, customizable website templates that have been strategically researched and customized for each industry. Whether you are starting a blog or an ecommerce business, there’s a plentitude of templates to choose from. But if you’d instead start with a blank canvas, the website builder is also a powerful option. Source: Wix

2. Customization functionalities

  Wix comes with thousands of advanced design capabilities. For example, it can help you develop a custom domain, logo, and other brand tools. It also provides full-stack web development tools for custom functionalities, including the smart drag-and-drop editor or AI technology that can create the website for you.

3. Complete suite of SEO tools

  Wix can quickly help you optimize your SEO workflows with some powerful features. Its infrastructure aligns with the needs of search engine crawlers or bots to support site performance (such as server-side rendering and the creation of customizable URLs). It also designs and upkeeps your XML sitemap, keeping all site info, pages, and relevant relationships up to date. Lastly, all images are compressed, resized, and converted to WebP for accelerated page loading. Wix also lets you use or modify default meta tags, URL structure and slugs, structured data markup, and other SEO settings. Plus, you can create your own SEO logic and deploy it simultaneously across multiple pages. Source: Wix

4. Powerful analytics

  The Wix Analytics Overview displays your key metrics in concise visual summaries while letting you dig in deeper. The Traffic Overview shows your site’s traffic metrics including site sessions, unique visitors, top traffic sources by sessions, top pages by sessions, new versus returning visitors, and more. Source: Wix The Sales Overview shows your site’s sales and transaction information including total sales, total orders, average order value, top-selling items, sales by billing location, and more. The Behavior Overview displays the visitor engagement data including the bounce rate, average session duration, top navigation flows, most popular pages, abandoned carts, store conversion funnel, and more. And if you’d like to supplement these metrics even further, you should consider additional third-party monitoring and observability tools. For example, our tool – Germain UX – is an end-to-end, Alerts, Insights, and Automation software platform built to improve User Experience (UX) in the broadest sense of the term.

What are the Latest Best Practices In Web Design and Usability?

When designing a website, it’s key to follow the latest best practices and not only get hung up on the aesthetics. The website should also be optimized for usability, ease of use, and user experience (UX). While one could spend hours studying the ins and outs here, there is a set of best practices that is a good general starting point. For example, the HubSpot team highlights the following key website design guidelines to follow:

1. Simplicity
2. Visual hierarchy
3. Navigability
4. Consistency
5. Responsivity
6. Accessibility
7. Conventionality
8. Credibility
9. User-centricity

Actionably, these could simply translate into: –       Choosing a color scheme that suits your brand. –       Adding images to engage and inform readers. –       Simplifying your navigation. –       Making your CTAs stand out. –       Optimizing for mobile. –       Limiting the number of options presented to users. Lastly, with major advancements in AI and the emergence of the early Metaverse, new and cutting-edge web design trends have emerged. Actually, 90% of web designers agree that web design trends are changing faster than ever before. Thus, adopting some of these trends has become critical in standing out from the competition and capturing the audience’s attention. For example, the parallax effect is an animation technique that is growing in popularity. It allows the foreground elements to move faster than the background elements thereby creating a sense of realism and depth. Instead of scrolling horizontally or vertically, the parallax scroll guides the visitor inward or outward from the horizon line. Source: Dribble

Conclusion

The bottom line is that every successful brand or business should have an effective website. And after all, it only takes 50 milliseconds for users to form an opinion of a website. To make the launch of your website a success story, remember to utilize an effective web presence platform such as Wix, maximize the functionalities made available to you, and, finally, adopt key best practices on website design and usability. We look forward to seeing your website out there – amongst the active 20% of course!