9 Typical Website Fails and How to Avoid Them

9 Typical Website Fails and How to Avoid Them

A business’ website is extremely important nowadays. It is at the centre of any digital marketing efforts as it is where a business’ reputation can be uplifted or destroyed.

By planning your website design well, you can avoid these mistakes below, and help to turn your website into the cash grab it can be and generate more leads.

Common issues to avoid are

1. Unstructured Information

When people come to visit your site, they are usually there for a purpose. 

Most common reasons for people to visit a website are to get answers to a question, know more information about products/ services or purchase a product/service. If visitors can navigate the site properly or find the information they want easily then they will leave the website, which isn’t what you want as a business.

Information people want to see on a website homepage are:

  • 86% -Products & services
  • 64% -Contact information
  • 52% -About/company information
  • 27% -Testimonials
  • 23% -Marketing collateral
  • 12% -Social media icons
  • 8% -Blogs
  • 2% -Pricing

Website site structure should follow:

  • Homepage
    • About
    • Services/product categories
      • Service/product categories 1
      • Service/product categories 2
      • Service/product categories 3
      • Service/product categories 4
    • Blog/news
      • Categories 1
        • Articles
      • Categories 2
        • Articles
    • Contact Us

2. Not Mobile Friendly

Having a mobile-friendly site is expected nowadays and if your site isn’t then you are extremely behind. More than half of websites nowadays are being viewed on mobile devices. Therefore, by not having your website mobile friendly you could be missing out on over half of your potential customers, as these people will leave your site as they won’t be able to navigate it.

3. Slow Loading

Site speed is a big factor and can affect your website more than you think. Over 75% of customers said that they wouldn’t return to a website if it took too long to load.

Google recently announced that they are making ‘speed update‘ a large part in their ranking on mobile searches. 3 things to look out for when optimising your site for core web vitals:

  • Use The Updated Page Speed Report: Google recommends using the Lighthouse tool to check and fix load speed issues.
  • Image Optimisation: Using big images is one of the causes for slow site speed. Compressing your images can help to reduce the size of your image file, therefore reducing the slow load speed.
  • Web Hosting: A massive reason for having poor site speed is usually down to your website hosting provider. Files can only load as fast as the speed of the server they are on, so it depends on the quality of the servers the website hosting service you are using are.

4. No Call To Action

Call to Actions (CTA) are extremely important for guiding your users to a specific landing page for them to do the desired task your company wants them to do, like contacting your company. Without this functionality users aren’t being promoters to do anything, for example reduce the number of people that will actually contact your company.

5. Error Pages

The most common error page says “404 error” or “this page does not exist”. These aren’t good as a customer can land on this page giving them a sense of untrustworthiness, and won’t want to stay on your site. Often this error happens when a page on your site has been deleted. A way around this is to use a redirect to take anyone who does get to that page’s URL, it will take them to somewhere else on your site instead of showing the “404 error” message.

6. Cluttered Layout

Although views have low attention spans, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t fit as much detail on one page as possible. This will only make them leave quicker. Your layout should be clean and easy to follow.

7. Inconsistent Design

Having an inconsistent design, makes users lose confidence in your company. As they will see that if you can’t look after your site then how are you going to look after them as a customer. It can also make it hard for users to follow and can sometimes think they have ended up on someone else’s site.

By having a consistent design you are also strengthening your company’s brand identity, that loyal customers will recognise.

8. Does Not Link to Social Pages

Social media is a big thing nowadays and if your company doesn’t have any accounts or actively use these platforms, then you are missing out on channels that are easily available to you to increase your company’s customer relationships.

Once you have your accounts, you need to link them to your website, so more people can find your pages and connect with your company through them. This also allows them to share your company to other people, increasing the amount of customers you get.

9. Missing Contact Details

If you don’t provide your company’s contact information then that leads the users to a bunch of questions on why you don’t provide them and why they shouldn’t trust you.

Conclusion

By avoiding these things you are making massive steps of improvement towards your company’s success.