Having a website is one thing. Having a good website is something different. And then there's actually having a successful website.

Having a successful Joomla website takes more than just getting putting your products and services in a nice structure and layout. While structure and a clean layout are key components, there are a few other things to consider when wanting to make your site more successful.

1. Set Goals

One of your beginning steps in wanting to create a more successful site is to set some goals. What direction do you see your site going in and in what timeframe? You need to set some concrete, realistic goals that you can work towards such as you want to increase visitors, leads or revenue by X amount in 3 months.

Even goals such as increasing the amount of blogs you write per week, revamping a certain amount of landing pages or introducing X amount of new call-to-actions every 6 months. It could be good to set 3 month goals, 6 month goals and 12 month goals. Discovering the goals that are important to the advancement of your website is the first part of making it more successful.

2. Have Fresh Content

You've probably heard this a million times, but I'm going to say it to you again because it is just that important. Content is king. But having great content isn't just a one and done deal. Having updated, fresh content is just as important. In other words, fresh content is queen.

Be sure to be writing fresh blog posts and creating new landing pages so they can get crawled and indexed, while also creating new content for your visitors and blog subscribers. It's crucial to stay relevant.

3. Know Your Buyer Personas

So, this great website of yours, who is it for? Who are you aiming to attract and convert? Who are you writing this great content for? And the answer isn't the search engines. While, pleasing the search engines is definitely a large part of a successful website, you always need to aim to please your buyer personas first and the search engines second.

The first step is figuring out who your buyer personas are and putting them into an actual document that you can refer back to. Make your website tailored to them and their needs. Want to learn more about buyer personas? Check out this blog.

4. Use Call to Actions

Once you have attracted all of these qualified visitors to your site, you need a way to convert them. It's important to use strong call-to-actions on your site to have the opportunity to, if they don't turn into customers right away, to gather information on these leads, to then be able to tailor marketing materials to them so they eventually become customers.

You want to create a nice balance of having enough call-to-actions on your site to make them easily accessible to your visitors, but not making your site appear spammy. Some things you should be thinking about is what types of call-to-actions your buyer personas would be interested in and what points of pain they have that your call-to-action would fix.

5. Free Joomla Extensions

An easy and fast way you can start making improvements to the success of your website is to look into some free Joomla extensions. There are a lot of great advancements right at your fingertips and many of them are free!

Everything from content editors to admin tools to tools that will improve your time management as well as usability on your site. Check out some top free Joomla extensions here!

Making your Joomla website more successful, like anything, does not happen overnight. It takes good goal setting, a solid look at your current techniques to figure out what's working and what's not working, and commitment to making it better.

Stick to these 5 tips and you'll be on the right track to a more successful Joomla website!

When you set goals, what types of goals do you find to be the most effective?