7 Website Mistakes You Need to Fix ASAP
No doubt your business has a website – whether you’re a shop, blog or service. Many websites (and probably yours) rely on their websites for sales – but if you site doesn’t function as it should, then it turns customers and clients away.
Certain mistakes are fatal, and if you’re experiencing this or worried about making errors on your website, keep reading to learn the most common website mistakes that can leave your business in the dust.
Ignoring Mobile Optimisation
This is a huge one. I see so many websites and blog looking stunning on desktop only to fall short on mobile. In a world where 50% of global traffic comes from mobile, this is a really overlooked piece of advice, and should be one of the first things to consider when creating or updating your website.
Many website building platforms are good at mobile optimisation, but I recommend Squarespace if you know this is going to be a priority for you (and it should be!) Squarespace is a drag and drop website builder that is absolutely fantastic at automatically optimising your website for mobile visitors.
You might be reading this on your mobile phone, and not taken any notice of my blog’s layout or design. That’s exactly what I want.
Readers need to be immersed in your website or blog post – not frustrated about cut off text or wonky images. When readers are immersed, they stay on the website.
This is called audience retention, which is key to building trust and ultimately converting your traffic into customers/clients! Plus, it’s not very professional to have strange looking elements on your mobile website.
So, mobile optimisation is the path to trust.
Broken Links
Links that don’t lead anywhere can be super frustrating to your website visitors. Just when they think they’ve found the information they need, they run into a “404 error” page.
I know I’d leave the site immediately.
Make sure you find and eliminate those broken links to keep your visitors happy and ON your website. It’s important to regularly check your website to make sure there are no broken links. There are many ways of doing this, but my favourite is a free tool called Dead Link Checker.
You can scan your full website in under five minutes and get notified of any broken links. I use this tool regularly and it does wonders to make sure my website is working at it’s best.
No Favicon
I can often tell a Squarespace website by the favicon…because the standard is a little grey box which many people never realise they’re supposed to change. Favicons are a small icon in the top of the browser window, and usually consist of a brand mark or symbol. You can see mine here:
If you’re missing one, it’s going to be replaced with a default (rather ugly) box thing, so make sure you do this. To me and many other people, it’s the mark of an unfinished website!
Favicons also show up in your browsers bookmark, browsing history and other places across the web. It makes your site memorable and much easier to rediscover at a later date. Customising your favicon also helps sustain the branding of your website and makes it appear more professional to your website viewers.
Slow Loading Speeds
A biggy for image heavy websites. I see this all the time with blogs, as often the images that are used to display the blog post and get pinned to Pinterest are a HUGE file size.
This means you can end up scrolling through a seemingly blank page – the next step being an immediate click away. Other types of websites suffer from this too, photographers especially. If your site is image heavy, make sure those images are compressed to a smaller size for quicker loading.
You can do this WITHOUT reducing the image quality – head over to tinypng or tinyjpeg and start compressing your images for faster website speeds.
Slow loading is also reaallly bad for SEO, so you’re not doing yourself any favours with that either. Human attentions spans are getting smaller and smaller with the ever-increasing distractions around us. Make sure you get your message across as quickly as possible with a super speedy site!
Poor Design
Good design often fixes many of the points previously made. If anything, this should be your number one fix before anything else, especially if you’ve had the niggly feeling for a while that things need to change. Good design is friendly to both desktop and mobile, and immersive rather than distracting.
It can be tempting to go for fancy fonts and bright pink lettering, but in reality those things are probably not going to help retain your audience. A couple of things to consider with your blog design are:
A carefully chosen colour palette
Clear fonts for headings, subheadings and paragraph text
Text size being readable on desktop and mobile
Enough white space to avoid a cluttered website
A small selection of pop-ups (too many can be a turn off)
Light background colours
Highlight boxes to emphasise certain pieces of text
Consistent branding throughout your site
Unclear Navigation
The amount of times I’ve been looking for a blog on a website for ages and it’s been named journal. Ugh. This is a pet peeve of mine because great websites are always clear. A blog is a blog, a about page is exactly that. People are going to struggle to find more about you if you’ve named that page “behind the design”.
One rule I like to remind myself of is KISS – Keep it simple, silly!
Website pages have industry standard names for a reason, and it’s because everyone knows what they are. Most visitors to your website will have been browsing for most of their life, and will have a recognition of the most common website pages and their names.
If your blog is called a notebook, they are probably going to wonder what the heck that even means and just move on.
No Call to Actions
70% of business owners don’t use call to actions on their websites. Yet, a clear message like this can convert your conversion rates by over 200%. What…the heck? Imagine having twice as many people click through to your booking page. What could that do for your business?
I love stats like these because they show just how important a call to action can be on your website. Are you part of the 70% without them? If you are (no shame) stick them on your website sooner rather than later. Your future self is thanking you.
You can get super creative with call to actions and personalise them for your brand. I’ve used small amount of custom CSS to add a hover animation to mine. Custom CSS is a great way of adding personality to your website, staying consistent to your brand and making the browsing experience more memorable!
I hope you learnt something from these tips! Leave a comment if you’re heading off to implement a few.
