Standards compliance isn’t just another technical checkbox—it’s a vital business strategy. Companies that follow recognized web standards earn higher trust, improved search rankings, wider audience reach, and digital longevity.
In 2025, your website is the most fundamental tool at your disposal for promoting and growing your business. Ensuring that it follows modern web standards is crucial to visibility and relevance. To many, standards compliance is a complex and often avoided topic; it seems boring. Yet it directly and profoundly affects how consumers and search engines respond to your brand online.
One key standard is device responsiveness, the web design approach that enables your website to adapt to various screen sizes. With mobile now exceeding desktop use across most industries, a website that doesn’t provide a seamless experience on smartphones and tablets will frustrate visitors and push them toward competitors. Search engines like Google actively reward mobile-friendly design with better rankings, making responsiveness essential to both user experience and search engine optimization (SEO).
Security is another key standard. Implementing an SSL certificate (identifiable by “https://” in the browser address bar) ensures that data exchanged between the user and the website is encrypted and secure. For non-secure sites, browsers now throw up scary red warning screens, and nobody wants to visit—much less do business with—a website Google says looks risky. Beyond building trust, secure sites are also favored by search algorithms; SSL compliance means better search results.
Robust, structured coding standards result in flexible, scalable websites that grow as business grows. Lost Highway Media clients are still enjoying ROI from websites we built and launched a decade ago! Websites built on solid code also boast faster load times, smoother performance, and higher reliability. Google’s algorithms cheerfully move these websites to the top of search engine results while burying slow, outdated websites at the bottom of the pile (another reason to avoid bloated CMS platforms like WordPress).
Standards compliance isn’t just another technical checkbox—it’s a vital business strategy. Companies that follow recognized web standards earn higher trust, improved search rankings, wider audience reach, and digital longevity. In a competitive online environment, adhering to modern web standards is one of the smartest investments a business can make.
At Lost Highway Media, we don't find standards compliance boring at all. Coming from a strong software engineering background, we genuinely enjoy building secure, responsive, high-performance websites that work as hard for our clients’ businesses as they do. And we do it at a fraction of the cost of our competitors! Need a new website? Let’s talk.