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As a large enterprise, having more resources at your disposal will significantly help your ability to create a powerful website that generates bottom-line results.
At Azuro Digital, we provide enterprise web design services and we have several enterprise web design tips that are vital for success and beating out the competition over the long term:
A common and fateful mistake that large companies often make is to stick to the status quo for too long. Over time, new innovations will become prevalent in your industry and if you don’t adopt them fast enough, you might get wiped out. Remember Blockbuster’s big blunder? They thought they were all high and mighty - laughing at Netflix’s business model until it was too late.
In web design, a similar thing can happen. Large enterprises might scoff at certain web design trends of the modern day - such as motion effects, flashy designs, large text, minimal content, significant spacing/scrolling, etc.
However, it’s important to adopt some (or all) of these trends, because it’s what visitors prefer these days and if you don’t incorporate these things into your website, they might be more inclined to choose one of your competitors if your company feels “outdated” to them.
This is especially important to consider if you’re hiring an agency to build your website. In some agency contracts, it’s specified that the agency actually owns the website. This isn’t ethical and it rarely happens within the enterprise web design space, but it does happen.
Make sure that your contract states that you have full ownership of the site. You should also be given the master administrative login credentials for full control. Your agency should also have admin access, but they shouldn’t be the “super admin”. You should designate 1 person or a small group of people to be the “super admin”, and nobody else should have that status.
From there, whenever you need to add other people to the backend of the site to add/edit pieces of content, be sure to limit their access and only provide them with access to the areas that they absolutely require access to. This will limit the number of mistakes that happen when people are modifying the site.
As an enterprise website, you’re a much bigger target for hackers and much more vulnerable to security risks.
To mitigate these risks and to keep your website secure, step #1 is to religiously implement all routine technical maintenance tasks such as plugin updates. Many security issues are a result of outdated plugins.
From there, you’ll also want to use a secure web host like Cloudways and an advanced security plugin like Wordfence. These will automatically filter out most of your security threats, but then you’ll also want to have a 24/7 security monitoring service so that if something goes wrong, you have someone ready to take action immediately and block anything serious from happening.
Worst case scenario, if something does happen, you should have multiple sources of backups to restore a very recent version of your site. Your web host should be taking daily or even hourly backups of your site, but you don’t want to rely on your web host as the sole source of backups. You should also use a tool like ManageWP as a 2nd source, in case something goes wrong with your web host.
As a large enterprise, your website can’t simply “look good” or “be impressive”. In order to grow, you need to use strategies that will drive more business through your website. This comes in 2 forms: driving traffic to your website (through SEO, paid ads, etc), and maximizing the percentage of website visitors that take action (also known as the conversion rate). The desired “action” might be to submit a contact form, purchase a product, sign up for an event, etc.
At Azuro Digital, our #1 priority is to optimize the bottom-line results of our clients’ websites. To that end, we’ve written an article that outlines the top 10 ways to get more results from your website.
Using the best practices for SEO and the conversion rate is a great start, but in order to truly maximize the results of your website, it’s important to do some ongoing A/B testing.
A/B testing (also known as split testing) is when you create 2 different versions of the same page and test them to see what performs best. To make this work, it’s essential to connect your website with all of the required analytics platforms like Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Google Data Studio, Google Search Console, etc.
To test the conversion rate, we recommend running Google Ads so that the 2 versions are tested at the exact same time to the exact same type of audience to avoid having the data skewed by the time of year, type of audience, etc. When running Google Ads for the test, each version should receive at least 1,000 unique visitors for the data to be sufficient.
When split testing for SEO, you unfortunately don’t have the luxury of testing with any sort of ads. You’ll need to make changes to the page and let that new version run for 1-3 months, track the results in Google Search Console, and then continue to make adjustments from there (testing 1 version at a time).
When you’re split testing for the conversion rate or SEO, it’s best to test very small changes each time so that you’re isolating for 1 variable. At first, it’s okay to test radically different concepts with many variables, but from there it’s best to test 1 change at a time so that you know what’s impacting the difference in results. For example, you might just change the primary headline, the color of a button, the location of the testimonials, etc.
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