Common Website Mistakes That Could Be Hurting Your Business

At some point in our online adventures, we’ve all visited a poorly-designed website. You know, those ones that take forever to load, have confusing navigation, or don’t fit on a mobile phone screen.

If you’re like most internet users, you probably didn’t wait to find out if the content had the solutions you were looking for. You clicked the back button and went to the next site on the results page.

Now, imagine for a minute that customers have a similar reaction on your website because the same issues are evident.

One minute they’re clicking your link on a search result page, and the next, they’re hitting the back button because the site is sluggish with a cluttered layout. Definitely not an ideal scenario for any business owner.

If your site is struggling to convert visitors despite the content you create, odds are it’s not delivering a seamless user experience. So, you need to fix the underlying issues. Below are common website mistakes that could be negatively affecting your business to give you an idea of what to fix for improved conversions:

Picking the Wrong Domain Name

Let’s start with something that has little to do with design but can still affect your conversions. Your domain name is basically your web address. Usually, it’ll consist of your website’s name and a domain extension (.com, .org, .net, etc.).

When you think about the simple purpose it serves, a domain name seems like an inconsequential detail. I mean, you can slap a .com on just about anything to create your domain, as long as it matches your brand identity, right? Well, not exactly.

Your domain name is what your customers enter in their browsers whenever they want to visit your website. Now, imagine they can’t remember it because it’s incredibly long or contains complex words. That’s some significant traffic already lost.

To avoid this scenario, we recommend keeping your domain name short and catchy. Of course, you can get creative with it to carve out a unique brand identity for yourself.

However, don’t overdo it with anything too complex. You want your customers to easily recall your domain when they need the services you provide. That said, don’t forget to do a domain name search to ensure the domain you’ve picked isn’t already taken.

Not Optimizing Your Site for Mobile

According to the statistics, mobile phones account for 63% of internet traffic, and 96.3% of internet users access the internet with a mobile device some of the time. In other words, most of the people who open your website do so with a smartphone.

To give these visitors the best user experience possible, ensure your website is optimized to run smoothly on mobile devices. For a start, the design should be responsive. This means that when a user visits the website with a smartphone, the content should automatically adjust to fit the screen.

As such, they won’t have to pinch or zoom to find links and navigation buttons. Also, use a hamburger menu to compress navigation options and enlarge the buttons as much as possible so that users can tap easily on a smartphone screen.

You can use Google’s mobile-friendly test to check your website’s usability on mobile devices.

Slow Loading Speed

In case you’ve not noticed it yet, internet users are quite impatient. We want immediate solutions to our problems, and we don’t intend to wait ages for a website to load to find the answers we need.

Of course, there’s another way to explain this impatience, like the fact that humans now have a shorter attention span. So, we’re generally struggling to focus on one thing at a time.

Regardless of how you put it, the point is that a slow-loading website will have your visitors hitting the back button and going elsewhere. If you’ve noticed a high bounce rate on your site, the page speed could be a major factor.

That said, here are a few solutions that can help sort things out:

• Compress your images
• Use a reputable hosting service
• Activate browser caching
• Minimize plugins
• Opt for embedded videos rather than direct uploads

Interestingly, optimizing your website for mobile can also improve loading speed. Usually, websites that aren’t mobile-friendly take a while to load completely on smartphones.

Cluttered Web Design 

A website’s layout should have a balanced mix when it comes to colors, fonts, and images. The design should be attractive enough to keep users on the page.

Unfortunately, too many times, brands overdo it with the layout, combining too many unnecessary details to create a website that’s cluttered and overwhelming to the eyes.

Your website’s design is an opportunity to leave a lasting first impression on your audience. Get it wrong, and you’ll lose too many customers on their first visit.

When it comes to your site’s design, we usually recommend keeping things simple and avoiding anything too flashy. Don’t fill a single page with too many unnecessary elements.

Instead, there should be enough white space so that the overall layout looks neat. This way, it’s easier for visitors to focus on the important details on the site.

Ignoring Accessibility

Your business website will attract different kinds of visitors, including people with disabilities. But if the site isn’t designed to accommodate them, they’ll take their patronage elsewhere.

Imagine someone with visual impairment lands on your website, only to discover that the font sizes are too small, there are no alt texts for images, or the color contrast is poor.

You can even switch it around and imagine an individual with hearing disabilities finding out that there are no captions on your videos. Surely, you can’t blame these folks for leaving the site. Consuming content on your website is almost impossible for them.

To avoid losing customers this way, make your website inclusive with accessibility features like alt texts, video captions, support for keyboards and other assistive technologies, and readable fonts.

Poorly-Optimized Content

So, your website loads fast, is optimized for mobile, and has an eye-catching design. But the content? Lengthy walls of text with excessive technical jargon and a sleep-inducing tone. Or, even worse, the information is outdated.

That’s just another set of reasons for customers to walk away—or hit the back button in this case.

Appealing web design won’t win you customers if your content isn’t engaging, accurate, or understandable. At the end of the day, content is still the tool that converts visitors. So, you need to nail that aspect of the website too. Here are a few suggestions to consider:

• Use shorter paragraphs, headings, and bullet points to break text into skimmable bits
• Ditch the technical jargon for simpler and more relatable language
• Write in a conversational and engaging tone, with elements of storytelling and personality
• Refresh previously written blog posts with new insights and data

Here’s an additional tip: invest in SEO. Search engine optimization is the vehicle that takes your website to the top of Google’s rankings. You can have the products your customers want, but if they can’t find you, they can’t buy from you.

Fortunately, some of the tips in this section and in this article can help in your SEO efforts. However, there are a few other strategies you can include, such as creating content that invest in SEO., optimizing your meta titles and headers with keywords, and taking advantage of internal links.

Final Thoughts

Your website is a major contact point between customers and your business. If it has poor design, lacks mobile optimization, and loads slowly, it’ll fail to convert visitors. Sorting out these issues and other problems mentioned in this blog post can significantly improve your conversation rates and sales numbers.