A good website does three things. It loads fast. It works on a phone. It makes it obvious how to get in touch.
Everything else is secondary.
Speed
Google measures how fast your site loads. Slow sites rank lower. Visitors leave after three seconds of waiting. A site that takes five seconds to load has already lost half its audience.
At Burch Studio, our own site scores 98 out of 100 on Google's speed test. We build every client site to the same standard. No bloated plugins. No unnecessary scripts. Server-rendered pages that load in under a second.
Mobile
Over 60% of web traffic comes from phones. Google ranks sites based on their mobile experience. If your website doesn't work properly on a phone, Google treats it as a broken website.
Mobile-first means designing for the phone screen first, then adapting for desktop. Not the other way around. Every site we build starts on a 375px screen.
Clear contact
A visitor lands on your site. They're interested. Now what?
If they have to scroll through paragraphs of text to find a phone number, they'll leave. If the contact form asks for eight fields, they'll leave. If there's no obvious button that says "get in touch," they'll leave.
Phone number visible on every page. A simple contact form. A WhatsApp link if that's how your customers communicate. Remove every barrier between interest and action.
What doesn't matter
Stock photography of handshakes. Animated sliders. Background videos that take 10 seconds to load. Parallax scrolling effects. Pages and pages of text nobody reads.
These don't convert visitors into customers. They slow your site down and distract from the point.
The test
Open your website on your phone right now. Ask yourself three questions:
Can you tell what the business does in five seconds? Can you find the phone number without scrolling? Does every page load in under three seconds?
If any answer is no, your website has room to improve.