5 Essential Elements Your Website MUST Have in 2024

If you are building a website from scratch or rebranding and redoing your website, you might be wondering if you really need to include all of the bells and whistles right away. Or you might be unsure of what you absolutely must include.

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So today I’m going to walk you through the essential elements you must include in your website…

1. A clear transformation 

This is the most important thing that you need to include in any of your marketing, whether that’s on your website or somewhere else. 

You need a clear transformation front and centre. You want to make sure that when someone navigates to a landing page on your website (my guess is it will be your homepage), they see the transformation that you will create for them straight away.

Now, what exactly is the transformation? 

Your transformation is not the facts and features of your offer. But rather, your transformation is what your offer will do for your clients and what outcome they will have. 

So for example, if you’re a social media manager, the transformation is not that you offer social media management. What you do is the vehicle to the transformation. The actual transformation might be that they book five new clients per week from Instagram. Or that they increase their monthly income by $5,000. 

Now, the transformation is going to be different depending on what your business is. And will also depend on what your dream clients are saying. So I recommend completing your client research first, to understand exactly what it is that your dream clients want. 

2. An about page

It’s super important that you also have an about page. Now this page won’t be just focused on you. While you will talk about yourself, your about page needs to be written with your dream client in mind. 

In sharing parts of your story, you may like to write about how you got started in your business. Whether you made a big sacrifice or pivoted to serve the people you do today. You might talk about how you love working with the people you currently serve. Or you might tell a story about a client you’ve worked with. You may have had an ‘aha’ moment that led to you starting your business that you’d like to discuss. 

Whichever parts of your story you decide to share, you just need to consider how your dream clients will relate and how you can actually invite them into the story. You want to make sure they can see themselves in the story and see you as the trusted expert that they’d like to work with. 

3. Social proof

You also want to make sure that you include social proof as supporting copy. It won’t be the main event of your website, but it can drastically increase your credibility and how trustworthy a cold audience will find you. And this is because, the majority of people will take social proof as serious as a recommendation from their friends or family. That’s how powerful it can be. 

So what exactly is social proof? Social proof could be a testimonial, a review, a screenshot where someone has spoken about you or your services on social media, or even data and numbers. Whichever type of social proof you decide to share, make sure you include peoples photos and full names so that your readers trust that they are real! 

Social proof should also be used to support any arguments that you’re making on a particular page. For example, if you’re making a point that you’re the very best web designer and they should hire you, you should include social proof where someone says that you’re the very best web designer and that people should hire you. 

4. Simple navigation

You also need to make sure that your website has simple navigation. This is definitely something that people don’t often think about and end up making a lot of mistakes with. If your website isn’t easy to navigate, it’s going to cause a lot of confusion for your readers and will probably cause people to click away from your website. So I don’t want you to make this mistake. 

Simple navigation means having a clear navigation bar and also simple navigation throughout your page. You want to guide people down the page with clear buttons. You want it to be really easy to understand where they should go next. 

You want to make it super simple for the people that come to your website. And that means using plain terms without trying to get too fancy. You don’t want your clients to be unsure about which page will tell them about your services or costs, for example. Your goal with your website navigation is to really spell it out for them, let them know exactly where to go and have a user friendly website. 

5. A services page with a call to action

Lastly, you want to have a really easy way for people to find out more about your services. I really recommend you do this by having a services page with a clear call to action. 

You don’t want to have your readers loving your offer but then not knowing what to do next. Do they email you? Message you on Instagram? Fill out a form? You need to make what you want them to do super clear so that they don’t have to hunt through your website to find out what the next step is. 

Basically, you want it to be a no brainer for what the next step is. You might do this by describing your service and then having a button directly below that both tells them what the next step is and takes them to where they need to complete. Whether that be filling out an application form or booking in a discovery call. 

Hot tip: make your buttons compelling and use them as an opportunity to drive home the transformation your offer will give them. For example, the transformation for my offer is to have my clients become the number choice for their dream clients. So if I want them to click a button to book a discovery call, instead of saying those exact words, I might have my button read “I want to become the number one choice”. 

You can definitely tell them what the next step is beforehand, but you want your button to be exciting! Because if the call to action of your button is attractive, it increases the possibility that they’re actually going to convert and take that next step with you. 

I’d love to hear your thoughts

Thanks for reading this post! I hope you found it valuable. As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Comment down below and let me know what you found most helpful or surprising about the five essential elements your website must have!