Some designers define perfection as the removal of every unnecessary thing. Some writers would say that the perfect book only uses the word needed to tell the story, and no more. This same definition of perfection could easily apply to websites.

Think about how many websites are cluttered with so much junk, you can’t sort the content from the craft. Some websites don’t seem to know what it is they want to be. So they try to be a little bit of everything. They become a muddy mix of the following:

• E-commerce
• Gallery
• Blog
• Advice
• Entertainment
• News

The list goes on. And while all of these elements can be the main focus of a website, they do not work well when jumbled together into a single, ungainly mess. A site cannot be said to be perfect if it has no focus. It must have a clear mission, and be free of the things that distract it from that mission. Here are three other requirements of a perfect site:

Speed

The perfect site starts with the perfect hosting service or at least the one that is perfect for your needs. The number of services, options, and price points make it difficult to know exactly what you are seeing when evaluating one service at a time. Lining them up side by side is a more useful approach when determining which service meets your priorities.

One of those priorities has to be speed. And one of the primary determiners of speed is hosting. Though it seems like a secondary concern, if your site isn’t fast enough for the end user, it will not be used. It will be seen as defective. You will lose the battle before you even get to show them your content.

If the user discovered you through a search engine, they will simply click the next site if yours does not load fast enough. Speed is also a product of only using the elements you need and eliminating the rest. Just remember the following rule: when it comes to the internet, speed thrills.

Compliant

If your website is out of compliance with Google’s rules, the end user will never find it via a search engine. While Google is not the only search engine in the world, it is the only one that matters. Other search engines often take their cues from what Google does. So if you hope to be discovered via search engine, you have to be in compliance with Google.

Optimizing your site for Google is a multifaceted task. There are a number of things you need to do including the following:

Be sure your site is mobile responsive.

Make sure ads don’t take over screens and generally misbehave.

Check to be sure your site does not run afoul of back-linking rules.

The penalty for getting it wrong can range from getting a lower ranking in search, to being delisted altogether. In some ways, the penalty is the same. 91% of Google searches do not make it past the first page. There is a 95% drop off moving from page one to page two. Lose your ranking, and you might as well be delisted. You cannot have a perfect site if people can’t find it.

Useful

The scourge of blogging are those sites that do nothing but rehash the news that someone else originally reported. The problem with such sites is that they have nothing to add to the story by way of additional information or useful insight. It is just a regurgitation of details that one could get anywhere. The site is not useful.

A perfect site has to be a useful site. It has to provide information or context that cannot be found anywhere else. If it is a service-oriented site, something about the service should be unique. There are a million sites that are similar to yours. You have to give the user a reason to choose your site over the rest. Find your useful uniqueness, and you find your perfection.

Perfection cannot be boiled down to a few words, But simplicity, speed, compliance, and usefulness are where perfect sites begin.