Website consultants spend a lot of time looking at websites and determining how to make them better. Of course, that also means that they see many websites that are probably doing more harm than good when it comes to bringing in new customers. Worried your website could be among them? Here are the five most common mistakes website consultants see on business websites:
- A Bad Platform
There are quite a few free or low-cost web platforms out there that you can have customized for a very small fee (WordPress is the classic example). That’s not always a bad move, but you should make sure that if you’re paying for professional web development, you’re really getting it. That means your development company should be setting you up with a cleanly coded and secured website, not just a template with some fresh colors.
- Poor Mobile Design
Web experts have been saying this for quite some time, but Google’s announcement that mobile usability will become a ranking signal for search results has clinched it: Mobile optimized websites are the way of the future, and you can’t expect to get decent web traffic without one.
- Cheesy Graphics
Your site needs to have compelling, high-quality images. That means banning amateurish cartoons, generic stock photos or blurry self-portraits. You may think that a photo of the “company dog” snapped on your cell makes your business feel more personal, but in general it simply makes you look outdated.
- Unreadable Copy
It’s time to set the record straight: Web design includes written content. There are quite a few ways to mess up the copy on your site, and most stem from a belief either that visitors won’t read your content at all (which often motivates inane, keyword-stuffed copy aimed at boosting search engine optimization) or will spend hours reading it (which leads to solid walls of text that could be broken down into more digestible bullet points).
- Conversion-Killers
Conversion is a broad category that looks at how many visitors to your site do what you want them to do — become customers, in most cases. Some of the most common conversion killers include dead pages, broken links and links that lead somewhere other than where they say they will. If you have a high bounce rate, meaning that visitors take one look at your site and then hit the back button, that’s a strong argument for bringing website consultants in to discover why your site isn’t converting.
What other easily avoided mistakes do you see businesses making on their websites? Join the discussion in the comments.
