What Makes A Good Website? 10 Essential Features For Success

Your website is often the first point of contact people have with your brand. When you ask the question, ‘What makes a good website?’ you’re really asking: how can I ensure that interaction leads to engagement, trust, and ultimately conversions? A well-built site doesn’t just look impressive; it performs, communicates, and supports your business goals. In this guide, we show you the 10 essential features that every great website needs, and how you can apply them to yours with Hosted.com’s Website Builder.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• A good website is essential for visibility, credibility, and sustainable business growth.
• The 10 features that make a good website discussed in this guide are essential for driving traffic, building trust, and increasing conversions.
• Recognizing and addressing common website issues is essential for maintaining performance and trust.
• With Hosted.com®, you can build a professional, optimized, and secure website, no technical background required.

Why You Need a Good Website

Your website is much more than a “nice to have”; it’s usually the first impression potential customers get of your business, your brand, and your values. When done well, it can boost your credibility, expand reach, drive engagement, and generate leads or sales. But if your website doesn’t meet expectations, you may lose out before you’ve even had a chance to show what your business is all about.

Firstly, most (if not all) people judge a business’s credibility based on its website alone. Sloppy design or poor user experience (UX) can immediately cause potential customers to lose trust and leave.

Visitors don’t just look around; they must act. Whether your goal is lead generation, ecommerce sales, or brand building, your website must guide visitors toward your desired outcome. The question of what makes a good website centers heavily on how effectively the site engages and converts. Which means that you must get them to act.

Finally, if you build it but no one visits, what’s the point? Optimizing it to appear higher in search engine rankings helps you get found and grow your business.

For the most part, your website is your main (if not only) point of contact. Doing it correctly can set you apart from the competition; doing it wrong can irritate visitors and lead to being ignored by search engines.

A successful website blends design, functionality, and purpose, all working together to build trust and create an engaging, results-driven user experience.

What Makes a Good Website: The 10 Features Your Website Needs

Currently, the internet comprises over 1.2 billion sites, so having an idea of what makes a good website will help your online business stand out and attract visitors who click your links. Here are the 10 features you need to have.

Clear Purpose

The first element of a good website is that it should instantly communicate who it targets and what it offers. Your homepage and any landing pages should say exactly who you are, what you do, and how visitors can benefit. When visitors immediately understand the purpose, they feel confident and are more likely to stay longer.

From there, you need to know your target audience. Understand the demographics, requirements, and pain points, and customize your messaging accordingly. This should answer who your site is for, the problem you solve, and what action you want them to take. If you don’t answer those questions, website visitors won’t stick around for long. Essentially, put yourself in your audience’s shoes and view your site from their perspective.

You need to set measurable goals, whether it’s sign-ups, sales, downloads, or filling in a contact form, as this will help guide your design, content, and functionality decisions.

Intuitive Navigation

Once on your site, visitors should never feel frustrated or get lost. People want to find what they need quickly, meaning your webpages need to be easy to navigate and have a logical flow.

Have a simple navigation menu with the essentials, including Home, About, Products/Services, Blog, and Contact pages. Keep your layout consistent with menus, footers, logo placement, and other key elements predictable across pages.

Organize content so it feels natural. Use clear headings, proper internal linking, search bars, and filters (if applicable). User-friendly navigation can reduce bounce rates, keep visitors exploring your site longer, and boost conversion rates.

Professional Design

Visitors form an opinion of a site very quickly (often within seconds), and more than 38% of visitors will leave a site if they find it unattractive.

A well-designed website builds trust, reflects your brand, and displays quality. Good website design often means less is more. A clean, uncluttered layout with the right use of white space helps guide attention toward your important content.

Maintain a uniform style across your website by using consistent color schemes, fonts, and images. Ensure font sizes are clear and easily readable, that there is enough contrast, and that visuals enhance the message without causing distractions.

According to Web Designer & Developer Bappi Sarder in a blog post on April 7, 2025: 

“You have about 5 seconds to capture a visitor’s attention. A professional layout, clean design, and purposeful visuals instantly communicate credibility. An outdated or messy website? That sends people running.”

Cohesive Branding

While design focuses on the visuals and first impressions, cohesive branding emphasizes continuity across every page, which helps strengthen recognition and trust. Good branding helps visitors remember your site, your product or service, and encourages them to return after they’ve left.

Your website should reflect your brand identity, including tone, visuals, copy, style, and personality. At the same time, your site must align with your other online channels, such as social media, email, and digital marketing materials. A consistent experience builds recognition and trust.

High Quality Content

Web development attracts visitors’ attention; relevant content keeps them there. This includes copywriting, images, videos, and other elements. Beyond that, it must align with visitor intent, address their needs, and motivate them to act.

Write website content for people, not just for search engines (we cover this later). Your website’s content should answer questions and provide value. However, text with relevant keywords alone isn’t enough. Always incorporate visuals, infographics, or interactive features where appropriate.

Stale content is like stale food; no one wants to consume it. Fresh content, on the other hand, informs, connects, and converts. Regularly update blog posts, resources, and media.

Include customer testimonials, case studies, social proof, and information about your business, as these support trust and conversions.

To quote Jorn van Dijk, Co-founder of Framer: “Taste and quality go hand in hand. With AI, it’s super easy to make something sloppy very fast. That’s why it’s called AI slop. A way to stand out is to focus on quality and making something unique to yourself, to the individual, and to the brand.” September 17, 2025

Mobile-Responsiveness

Mobile user traffic has surpassed computer traffic, with over 60% of searches in the U.S. coming from mobile devices.

 A major indicator of what makes a good website is its performance on smartphones and tablets. A responsive design adapts to screen size, ensures readability, and keeps layouts consistent across devices.

Your site should adapt to different devices and screen sizes, not just be a scaled-down desktop version on each. Simplify menu items so they’re easier to open, ensure buttons are easy to tap, and fonts are large enough to read. Mobile devices often have slower connections, so you’ll need to compress images, minify scripts, and use caching for faster page loading speeds.

Remember: Google also uses mobile-first indexing, meaning the mobile version of your site is considered the main one.

Clear Calls To Action

Even the best website won’t convert if visitors aren’t guided toward what to do next. A Call To Action (CTA) clearly indicates the actions visitors should take, and helps improve conversion rates.

Effective CTA buttons should stand out, so ensure you have the right color contrast, size, and shape. Place clear CTAs where relevant and at logical decision points on the page, and use strong wording, such as “Buy Now,” “Get Started,” “Contact Us,” or “Download”.

Regarding clarity, avoid using multiple competing CTAs; each page should guide visitors to one action, not confuse them. While you can use supportive micro-CTAs as secondary actions (learn more, watch video, chat), they should not distract from the main one.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Visibility matters. If no one can find your website, it doesn’t matter how great it looks. SEO is about combining user intent, on-page and technical optimization, and user experience to rank higher on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

Use keyword research and use keywords naturally in titles, headings, body copy, meta descriptions, and image alt-text. Once again, pages should be structured logically, with your main ones linked from your navigation menu, with relevant internal links. Receiving backlinks from other credible sites also helps with authority.

On the technical side, always use a secure HTTPS connection with an SSL certificate, fast loading speeds, and mobile responsiveness, as Google utilizes these user experience signals as major factors in its ranking algorithm.

Like people, search engines prefer content that is updated regularly. One study shows that sites publishing 16 or more blog posts per month receive 3.5 times more traffic. Use tools like Google Analytics and Search Console to analyze and improve, so your website stays visible in search queries.

Speed & Performance

Website performance is the backbone of the user experience, and a core part of what makes a website good. A slow and unreliable site can frustrate visitors, increase the bounce rate, and damage your credibility. People’s attention spans are short, so if your page load time is more than three seconds, you risk losing visitors and visibility in search rankings. The same applies to broken links, unresponsive elements, or large media files.

According to Brendan Byrne in a DataOT blog, “When it comes to digital experiences, speed is everything“. A slow-loading site frustrates visitors, reduces engagement, and hurts your SEO rankings.”

To keep things loading quickly, compress images, minify CSS and JavaScript code, implement lazy loading, enable browser caching, and limit the number of redirects as much as possible. Your web hosting provider (we cover this below) plays a role; it needs to have the server infrastructure that provides your site with maximum speed, uptime, and responsiveness.

Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to monitor performance and identify performance issues before they become major problems. In short, fast loading times keep visitors and search engines happy and drive conversions.

Website Security

Security builds trust, and a safe website protects your business and your customers. It is non-negotiable when it comes to what makes a good website, especially when handling personal information, financial transactions, and other sensitive data, like with ecommerce websites.

First, choose a Web Hosting provider with features such as malware detection and removal, firewalls, automated backups, and DDoS protection.

Next, ensure your site uses an encrypted HTTPS connection with an SSL certificate, which gives the padlock icon in the browser bar. This not only helps prevent data being intercepted, but it is also a major search engine ranking factor.

Hackers exploit gaps in outdated software, so it’s essential to keep your software, themes, plugins, and custom code updated to the latest versions.

Finally, while not a security measure, it’s also a good idea to display your privacy policy, cookie notifications, secure payment gateway logos, customer testimonials, and other visible trust signals.

Common Problems & How to Fix Them

Even the best-quality websites, which tick many of the boxes we discuss here, can encounter problems. Knowing what these common issues are and how to fix them helps maintain a good website long after launch.

High Bounce Rate

A high bounce rate means visitors leave your site quickly. This can happen due to slow load times that frustrate users right from the start, unclear messaging, confusing navigation, menus that make it difficult to find relevant information, and content that doesn’t match what they are looking for.

To improve this, focus on speeding up its load time, making your navigation clearer, and having a clear value proposition at the top, so visitors instantly understand what you offer. It’s also a good idea to customize your content to perfectly align with what brought visitors to your page in the first place.

Low Conversions

Site visitors not taking the desired action, such as making a purchase or filling out a form, is a result of unclear or missing trust signals, issues with mobile usability that make navigation frustrating on smaller screens, and content that doesn’t match what visitors are looking for.

To help improve conversions, experiment with different wording, colors, and CTA positions to find what works best. Don’t forget to optimize for mobile, ensuring everything runs smoothly on phones and tablets of differing sizes. Building trust is also important; consider adding testimonials and trust badges to boost credibility.

Poor Search Engine Rankings

Sites with low search engine rankings often make basic SEO mistakes that make it difficult for search engine crawlers to understand and rank them. Common issues include low-quality content, missing or poorly optimized meta titles and descriptions, a lack of proper internal and backlinking, slow site speed, and a lack of a mobile-friendly design.

To fix this, begin with a complete SEO audit. Then, focus on enhancing titles and meta descriptions to attract visitors. Make your content more detailed and relevant, and thoughtfully create internal links to guide your audience through your site. Don’t forget to keep your site fast and mobile-friendly, so it meets search engine standards and provides a great user experience.

Use tools like Google Search Console to monitor keyword rankings, identify any crawl issues or errors, and resolve technical problems fast.

Security & Trust Issues

Security and trust issues directly harm your reputation and put your users’ data at risk. These challenges often result from not having an SSL certificate (so your site is HTTP instead of the secure HTTPS), using outdated software or plugins that hackers may exploit, or missing or broken secure elements. Ensure you regularly run security scans and monitor for unusual login attempts or traffic spikes.

Stale Content

Stale content makes a website appear neglected and less authoritative, which leads to less traffic and engagement. This is caused by blogs or web pages not being regularly updated, outdated offers being presented, and a general lack of new content.

To fix this, you should have a clear content strategy for planning that includes regularly refreshing old pages with new information and insights, consistently adding new blogs, updating all visuals and removing old content that is no longer relevant. Use analytics to identify pages with declining traffic or high bounce rates, and prioritize them accordingly.

Website Building with Hosted.com®

When it comes to building and maintaining a site with all the features listed above that answer the question of what makes a good website, Hosted.com®’s Website Builder has you covered.

Our Website Builder lets you create a professional-looking site, even if you’re a complete beginner, without having to write a single line of code or spend money on web design.

Just choose a template that suits your niche and use the drag-and-drop editor to customize your layout and branding, add content, and a range of widgets to provide the necessary features and functionality. All 200+ templates are mobile-responsive, meaning you don’t need to worry about whether your site will adapt to different devices.

You receive built-in SEO features along with Google Analytics integration, so you can see what your visitors are doing and where your traffic is coming from to improve your visibility in search results.

As an add-on to our cPanel Web Hosting plans, you also receive lightning-fast performance and stability. The server infrastructure behind the scenes is designed for speed, with a 99.9% uptime guarantee.

We include a free SSL certificate, malware scanning and removal, DDoS protection, and more, helping to build trust while keeping your online business and customers safe from cyberthreats.

In short, you get an all-in-one solution that integrates Web Hosting, a free domain name registration*, and email, all managed from a single, user-friendly control panel.

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• About the Author
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Rhett Freeman

Rhett isn’t just a writer at Hosted.com – he’s our resident WordPress content guru. With over 7 years of experience as a content writer, with a background in copywriting, journalism, research, and SEO, and a passion for websites.

Rhett authors informative blogs, articles, and Knowledgebase guides that simplify the complexities of WordPress, website builders, domains, and cPanel hosting. Rhett’s clear explanations and practical tips provide valuable resources for anyone wanting to own and build a website. Just don’t ask him about coding before he’s had coffee.

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