Visitors to your site are guests to your content, and it's your job to make them feel welcome and encourage them to stick around. Whether you’re a startup or freelancer launching your online presence or a business with a website that’s been around for a while, every brand can benefit from considering the following five tips for a great experience.

1. Establish a clear and consistent hierarchy

Visitors to your site are just that: visitors. It is your job as the owner of the site to guide them through the information available. Much like signs along a trail, your visual system of organizing content will help your viewers identify and reach the information that is most important to them. Make sure text is formatted so that like information is the the same size across your page. Provide headings where convenient to help those skimming your pages to quickly grasp the message you want to communicate. Use color to draw attention to interesting information or to indicate change. If using graphics or images, consider their size and how they contribute to the written content and vice versa. You’ve worked hard to create good content, so make sure it's easily accessible or you’ll quickly lose viewers’ attention and they’ll leave.

2. Choose your fonts with care

The number of typefaces available today is staggering and it can be tricky to make a good decision for your site. When choosing how to display text on your page be sure to consider the mood you’re creating with your choices. Looking for a sleek, modern feel? Go sans serif. More formal or elegant? Serifs all the way. Above all, make sure your content is easily readable. Cool fonts that are hard to read are pointless. Mind your line height and character width! Make it easy to consume your content and you’ll hold your viewers' attention longer. And for heaven’s sake, don’t use Comic Sans.

3. Design for function, beautify, repeat

If you’re a blog, you have something to say. If you’re a store, you have something to sell. As you build your website, consider what you want your website to do and then make design choices from there. Ask yourself: What are my viewers supposed to get from visiting my site? What do I want them to do? How do I make that easy? Make sure it works and then move to making it visually appealing. When considering hot trends in design, always check against the core purpose of your site before diving in head first. Just because it's hot doesn’t necessarily mean it's right for you or your business.

4. Show love to your mobile site

The results are in, and people are browsing the web more from their phones than ever before. In fact, more than 50% of web traffic comes from mobile devices now, so if you’re not spending as much time optimizing your site for mobile as you are building a beautiful desktop site, you may want to consider how you spend your time.

5. Speed, speed, speed

A watched pot never boils and a slow-to-load site seldom keeps viewer interest. The reality is that we humans have incredibly low patience when it comes to the internet. When building or revising your site, it's a good idea to monitor how your changes affect your overall load speed. Found some great plugins you want to implement? Try checking your site’s load time with the plugins active and then again with them switched off to make sure inefficient code isn’t losing you valuable viewers. Be sure that photos and videos are optimized for web. You have great content, so make sure you’re not the turtle in a race biased toward the hare.