What are the absolutely essential elements for a website?

[HostXNow]

Your website can have the best content/design in the world but if the website does not load within 2 -3 seconds I would go to a similar site. I am sure around 60-85% would agree with me that fast loading pages is very important! If the site does not load fast then it does not matter what content is on the website or how good the design is as many will not wait around to even see it.

So, for a website, reliability / website speed is very important IMO. And we all know Google loves SPEED so if you optimize your website to load fast then no doubt Google will rank it better over similar sites which run much slower.

 

[fisicx]

Your website can have the best content/design in the world but if the website does not load within 2 -3 seconds I would go to a similar site.

Nope. It's perceived load speed that is important. It could take 10 seconds for a page to fully load but if you can get the key content on the page in a few seconds then people will wait for the images in the footer or a script to load.

Google doesn't love speed. Google considers speed when it ranks a page but it's not a major ranking signal.

 

[HostXNow]

I agree with you fisicx but regarding page taking more than 2-3 seconds to load I mean nothing loads whatsoever not even a snippet of important information. Your site has a lot of useful info btw and so will be reading it as need to redesign HostXNow website. I got the site to load really fast which has helped a lot but need pages to be more SEO friendly and have better content etc.

 

[waskas]

user expeerence

 

[beasty]

Customer arrives

Knows what it is you have

Knows how to buy it

Is not distracted

I have just had www.krankgolfuk.com (today) re worked, it previously had too many pages (Guy that I no longer work with got carried away and it had video and all sorts of crap that might distract the visitor from buying..

VidEO. .great off to youtube!

Websites should be all about efficiently getting your customer to do what you want

This means

LESS pages
LESS words

Be concise and Keep it simple

IMO

 

[lokash]

when we start talking about website something interesting comes in our mind such as
1) SEO
2) Domain
3) Social promotion ex. fb
and last but not least designing and developing your website.

The people get their websites build but not able to afford the seo services....

 

[singhabhishek251]

I do not think anything is more important than easy navigation and a normal page speed for visitors to retain and convert as a customers.