Building a unique website design will prove beneficial for any business planning to make its digital marketing strategy work. However, having a one-in-a-kind website is especially important for companies operating in competitive industries, such as the legal cannabis industry.
In today’s article, a web design team from Alpha Efficiency will dive deep into how to create a cannabis website design that will help you make your CBD online store stand out in the crowd.
Table of Contents
- What is a cannabis website design?
- How to create CBD web design that stands out
- Benefits of custom-created websites
- Medical Dispensary Websites
- Cannabis website SEO tips
- Final thoughts
What is a cannabis website design?
Just like a plastic surgery clinic needs a plastic surgery web design, your CBD business needs a website specifically tailored to the needs of the cannabis industry. That’s where the importance of cannabis website design comes to light. It will support your digital marketing efforts across various channels and help you better connect with the target audience. It should be easy to navigate, look professional, and include all the information your customers need to make an informed decision about your products or services.
How to create CBD web design that stands out
To have a chance to stand out in the crowded digital space and compete with celebrities’ cannabis website designs, besides offering quality products, you need to inject personality into your digital marketing strategy. A professional cannabis design agency can help you represent your brand values and connect with your target audience on a much deeper level by providing a unique user experience to your weed store website visitors. The best approach to achieving these goals is engaging in custom web design development. The common problem websites designed with page builders have is that, to some extent, they all look similar. An average website is usually not enough for CBD businesses that want to build a unique online presence and fully incorporate their brand identity system into their cannabis website design.
Benefits of custom-created websites
Several website-building platforms enable business owners without any web development experience to create a cannabis website design. However, such platforms come with certain limitations that might prevent you from achieving the desired level of online success. Here is why hiring a professional cannabis industry web design service provider to create a custom WordPress website design is a better option for your weed business:
Better user experience
Custom-coded websites are better than templated ones because they are designed specifically with your target audience in mind. Professionals from a cannabis design agency will consult with your team to learn more about the customer journey that you have planned. Implementing custom features in your cannabis web design will help you create a better user experience for your potential clients. And better user experience is usually followed by more sales and an SEO boost.
More scalability
Custom web design development will provide a better foundation for your business growth by ensuring that your weed store website is ready to handle the increase in traffic. Custom-coded websites are also much easier to update and modify than templated ones, typically meant to remain static. And as you expand your CBD business or the cannabis industry evolves, custom web design development will allow you to implement additional features to better meet new demands.
Improved functionality
While templated websites take less time to create, they often come with certain limitations regarding functionality. Even after installing countless plugins, the chances are that you will not have all the desired features before your website becomes unbearably slow. On the other hand, custom weed store websites are built by web design development experts who understand your business and how you want your cannabis website design to look and function. That means you can always count on a custom-coded website to be error-free and to meet your specific needs. Professionals will also ensure there are no code redundancies and that your website remains fast despite being feature-rich.
Improved security
Security should be one of your top priorities when building a cannabis web design. You want to minimize the risk of your customers’ data being stolen since it could destroy the trust and credibility you have built with both your audience and search engines.
Uneducated choice of themes and plugins is one of the main reasons some websites become vulnerable to malware and attacks by hackers who manage to find their weaknesses. The problem is that themes are often outdated in terms of security since many were built by developers who no longer invest efforts in maintaining them. On the other hand, a professional cannabis design agency will regularly audit your weed store website to patch up weak spots.
If you are unsure what to look for when hiring a cannabis design agency, you might find our tips for choosing a web design company helpful.
Medical Dispensary Websites
Medical dispensaries’ websites offer patients a one-stop shop for all of their cannabis needs. That includes products and services for medical marijuana, CBD products, activated carbon filters, and similar. Some dispensaries also extend their catalogs by offering other cannabis wellness products, such as deli meats and baked goods. That makes designing such websites a complex task. To ensure enhanced functionality and a great user experience for your visitors, your medical dispensary website design needs the following:
Easy Navigation
Navigation on a website is one of the most important factors when attracting and retaining visitors. A well-designed navigation system on your medical dispensary website will make it easy for visitors to find the information, products, and services they are looking for. It will also make it easy for them to navigate between different sections of your website, which will help you keep their attention for extended periods. Best practices for making cannabis web design easy to navigate include the following:
- Dispensary menu integration – ensure your menu is clear by using categories and subcategories. Keep your target audience in mind and provide quick access to pages they are most likely to visit. Also, short and accurate titles will provide the best user experience.
- Include an internal search option – internal search will allow your users to find your products and posts faster.
- Improve readability – use large enough font sizes so the users on both mobile and desktop devices can easily understand your navigation elements.
Mobile-friendly Dispensary Website Design
A mobile-friendly website can be accessed by a broader range of people, including those on the go. More and more people use mobile devices to search for cannabis products online. If your weed store website doesn’t look great on smaller screens, chances are that conversion rates throughout your landing pages won’t be satisfactory. The best practice is to utilize the power of responsive web design. Such a design will adapt to fit any screen size thanks to fluid grids. CBD business websites designed with mobile users in mind perform better on Google since the most popular search engine takes mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor.
For all these reasons, it is vital to ensure that making your cannabis website design mobile-friendly is marked as a high priority on your design QA checklist.
Accessible Medical Dispensary Website Design
During all stages of a cannabis web design development process, you should keep the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in mind. A web design that is ADA compliant will make it easier for people with disabilities to navigate your brand website in search of cannabis wellness products and educative content. That’s important because the demand for websites that are accessible is constantly increasing, and search engines value a great user experience.
A web design that is ADA compliant also makes your website look more professional and helps you attract customers and keep them engaged. To ensure your cannabis website design is accessible to people with various forms of disabilities, it is a good idea to follow WCAG 2.1 principles. Aim to make your weed store website:
- Perceivable: All visitors need to be able to perceive information on your weed store website. To achieve this, provide text alternatives for non-text content and ensure there are multiple ways for viewing content across your pages.
- Operable: To ensure the user interface and navigation on your website are easy to operate, you should implement keyboard navigation, avoid showing content that might cause physical reactions, give visitors enough time to use your content, design several ways for filling forms, etc. That will improve the user experience your visitors get when browsing your cannabis products.
- Understandable: A web design team needs to make sure that the content on your website is easy to understand for both users and assistive technologies they might use – for example, screen readers. The best practice is to keep your sentences short, avoid using advanced vocabulary, and break long walls of text with images, videos, and similar. In addition, you should organize your content in a predictable order to ensure navigation is easy for everyone.
- Robust: Your weed store website needs to be accessible through different web browsers, such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and more. Robust cannabis website design also contains a description of every element’s function.
If you hire a cannabis design agency to build a brand website on an open-source platform such as WordPress, through custom design development, they will be able to implement additional features to help you further extend the accessibility of your website and make your CBD business stand out in front of the competition.
Age verification popup
Cannabis products are not legal for consumption for every age. Implementing the age verification popup feature in your cannabis web design is the best solution for preventing minors from accessing your weed store website. It is essential to take this task seriously – otherwise, you might have to face legal consequences. Professionals will utilize their design skills to implement the age verification popup feature in your dispensary website design without ruining the user experience.
Customer support
It is important to implement adequate customer support in dispensary website design. Cannabis products are a relatively new phenomenon about which the public is still not adequately educated. Before converting, potential customers might have different concerns about the safety of your CBD products. To increase the number of sales, you need to provide them with 24/7 support. Your cannabis website design should include:
- Live chat
- Chatbot
- FAQ section
- Address
- Phone number
Cannabis website SEO tips
SEO is vital to cannabis businesses’ digital marketing strategy since Google Ads strictly prohibits advertising medicines through PPC campaigns. To attract more customers to your weed store website, you need a cannabis web design built with the best search engine optimization practices. A website that performs well in search engines, combined with active social media channels, can be a powerful tool for driving business growth. With many factors that impact the success of a website in Google and other popular search engines, our SEO agency in Chicago advises you to:
Create a Clean Site Structure
Clean site structure is essential for cannabis website SEO because it helps visitors easily navigate your pages, but it is also a great way to help Google and other search engines understand the hierarchy of your content. By making it clear to crawlers what pages are the most important, you will avoid having two pages with similar content compete with one another.
However, keep in mind that your product line is likely to change over time, and you will want new products to reach more potential customers. For example, let’s say you wanted to promote a new cannabis packaging solution. If you don’t adjust your site structure to these changes, Google might show old products to search engine users. When organizing your weed store website structure, start with these levels:
- Homepage: from your homepage, link to the most important pages on your website. But don’t overdo it. The goal is to provide quick navigation to users.
- Categories: In every e-Commerce website design, you need to sort products into different categories. For weed store websites, common categories include: “Edibles,” “Vapes,” “Extracts,” “Accessories,” and more.
- Subcategories: If you are offering a large number of products on your cannabis business website, our web design agency in Chicago recommends dividing the categories into subcategories. That will provide even quicker navigation to your visitors, resulting in a much better user experience.
- Individual posts and pages: Once you define your categories and subcategories, it will be much easier to organize individual pages on your weed store website.
Keep in mind that the power behind a strong site structure is internal linking. The best practice is to provide internal links at the places where users will find them helpful. For example, in your blog posts, provide a link to another piece of your content that explains a specific subject in more detail. If you don’t plan to implement a blog in your cannabis website design, you can build internal links by including them in “related products,” “customers also loved,” and similar sections.
High-Quality Content
When it comes to ranking a weed store website high in search engines – writing purposeful, original, and helpful content is your safest bet. Your writers and editors must be familiar with the latest changes in search engine algorithms and be able to produce content that website visitors will find helpful.
Content on CBD business websites usually falls under the “Your Money or Your Life” category, which means you must ensure that every piece of information on it is accurate. Since any inaccurate information included in YMYL content could potentially lead to people’s health consequences, Google comprehensively analyses them. To rank better in search engines:
- Demonstrate expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-A-T) through your pages
- Double-check every piece of information related to cannabis products and how they can affect people
- Keep your target audience in mind, and aim to optimize your content to match its search intent.
- Conduct detailed keyword research, as it can help you find more topic ideas related to the cannabis industry.
Creating a long-term content strategy is the best practice for weed store websites looking to establish online authority and credibility over time. As you provide high-quality cannabis industry resources to others, you will notice improvements in the SEO performance of your website.
Optimize Page Speed
When it comes to search engine optimization, one of the crucial metrics you need to pay close attention to is website speed. Slow loading times of your pages can be frustrating for even the most patient visitors. If you don’t manage to achieve fast website speeds, you will lose many potential customers. In fact, around 70% of people return to the search engine results page if the website doesn’t load within three seconds. A high bounce rate will negatively affect the SEO performance of your weed store website. To achieve faster page speeds, consider the following:
- Optimize images
- Reduce the number of redirects on your weed store website
- Uninstall unnecessary plugins
- Hire professional web design developers to write clean code from scratch
- Find a better hosting solution
Final thoughts
A custom cannabis website design is vital for any CBD business aiming to maximize the effectiveness of its operations in the digital sphere. Well-designed weed store websites are not limited to visual elements – they also provide extended functionality and a great user experience for your clients.
If you are looking for professionals with a proven success track record in the web design business to build a digital landscape for promoting your cannabis products – feel free to schedule a call with Alpha Efficiency.
Our web design team and SEO experts will respond on the shortest notice and try to do a dream design job for your CBD business.
