When you are making a website there are things you should always have setup. Whether it’s a website or blog, whether is a professional site or just a personal blog. Last night I was going through in my mind the 3 things I think every website should have. There are many features you can add to every site, but these 3 are on every site I have and in my opinion they should be on your site too.

Tracking Software
You always want to know where your traffic is coming from. If you have a huge traffic day it is nice to know where all of that traffic is coming from. Also with tracking software you can see what your most popular pages are and when the most people visit the site, which might make you rethink when to post articles. Probably the most popular tracking software is Google Analytics, it is also free. I have also used Mint, which works well.

A Contact Form
You always need a way for your readers to get in touch with you. If there is a problem with you site or someone wants to give you a suggestion makes sure there is a way for them to do so. A contact form is probably the best idea for that since it will not reveal your e-mail address to anyone. If you don’t want to do a contact form you can do a contact me section where you list a contact e-mail address.

Ad-Serving Software
This is something I really never thought about until about a year ago. If you have ads on your site this is a must, for a few reasons. First you want to see how many people are clicking the ads. This helps with placement and to see if it is actually worth having ads on your site. Another good reason to have ad-serving software is what if you have an in-article ad on each page of your site. If you manually put it in there and you wanted to change it you would have to edit every page. With ad-serving software you can easily change the ad on every page. Finally if you have a private advertiser they might want to know how many impressions / clicks they are getting. On all of my site’s I’m using OpenAds, which is free.