Every business should in this day and age, have a business website, a website can after all break a business or help make it truly successful. This holds true no matter what business you have, be it a solely online business or a traditional bricks and mortar type business. With a website being so important, let’s have a look at some mistakes that if you avoid you’ll create website that increases your reach, potentially gets lots of traffic and converts visitors ultimately into customers.
Using a Free Website Builder
There are a lot of website builders that work great, but they all lack one component that we find crucial for business, professionalism. Having a website such as builder.yourbusinessname.something is not very good image for your business. If you’re not willing to pay twenty dollars for a domain name, why should someone buy your product or services? The same also holds true for your email address. Using your own domain name based email address is crucial to presenting your business professionally.
Undefined Purpose
Your website needs a reason for existing, simply having a website because everyone else doesn’t isn’t really a reason for existing, is it? The reason isn’t always as clear as you think. Almost every business owner will think the reason is selling, but even that depends on your audience and your businesses buying cycle. Your reason might be to educate, to build your email list, and then to convert these to customers. Or, it might be a store where the only reason anyone comes is to buy something.
Non-Responsive
If your website doesn’t work on mobile devices then it really should be updated as soon as possible. Over 50% of people that access the internet and doing so using mobile devices. Because of the huge increase in mobile users, Google will rank your website lower, if it’s not responsive and mobile friendly.
Poor User Experience
Hard to Navigate
Poor page structure and navigation will make it hard for users to navigate your website. Websites with poor navigation can frustrate users quickly and make them leave your website with a bad impression. Determining which pages are top level, holding the most important content, and displaying them in a prominent navigation, will make it easy for users to find the main information on your website and hopefully the information they are looking for.
Busy Website
If the visuals are distracting users from the content, or the content is not presented in an engaging and pleasing manner, users will have a hard time focusing on the website’s main purpose. All images and graphics should support the written content on a website and visually convey the site’s main purpose. Also not only is your content written to fulfill the needs of your audience, but is there for SEO purposes, to attract users from search engines.
Call to Actions
You can have more than one call to action on your website, or web page, depending on the purpose of the call to actions. There can be a fine line between too many or too few call to actions. This coupled with poor design and placement can confuse users, leaving them unsure if an element is clickable, or they might miss it altogether. Call to actions should be placed across a website in a manner that attempts to funnel users to your most important content areas.
Slow Loading Speed
The speed of your website is extremely important. Users do not want to wait more than a few seconds for your web page to load. Taking even one or two seconds too long, in the eyes of the user, will lead them to leave your website immediately. Imagine being in a hurry searching for information your desperately need, when you click on a website’s link and you stare at the screen for 5 or more seconds waiting for it to load. A great percentage of users would not wait that long for a website to load and will quickly move to the next.