These days, a website is necessary for businesses of all sizes. If you don’t have a website, you lose legitimacy in the eyes of your customers. However, it’s no longer enough to have an out-of-date website with poor design and slow load speeds.
Here are some top ways your website may be holding your business back, and what you can do about them:
It’s not Mobile Friendly
If your website isn’t mobile friendly, this is the first thing you need to change. Today, more people are browsing the internet on mobile phones than on desktop or laptop computers.
Not to mention, Google’s mobile-first ranking system means that websites are listed based on their mobile version. This means that your website may be buried in the rankings by your competitors if their websites have been optimized for mobile.
How to Fix it: Use the Google Mobile Friendly Test to see if your website is mobile-friendly. If it’s not, it may be time to talk to an expert about a Responsive Web Design. This type of design allows your website to appear perfectly on any device since it responds to whichever device is being used.
It’s Too Slow
If your website is glacially slow, you’re likely to be losing potential customers. Scientists now say our attention spans are shorter than goldfish, so your website needs to load quickly before visitors click away.
A slow website impacts your business in two ways. First, potential customers are unlikely to wait patiently for your website to load, and will instead click back to the search results and your competitor’s websites. Second, this increases your bounce rate, which is the percentage of people who click away or ‘bounce’ after viewing only one individual page.
A high bounce rate often indicates that a site doesn’t have the relevant, high-quality content Google wants its highest ranked sites to have.
How to Fix it: Make sure you’re using a reliable, high-quality website hosting company. If your website is built on WordPress, make sure you’re using caching, which prebuilds the pages on your site, greatly reducing load time for visitors. You should also make sure your images are compressed without any reduction in quality, which can cut 1 to 2 seconds off load time for each page. Of course, there are any number of things that could be slowing your website down, so if you’re having speed problems, it may be a good idea to speak to a professional.
The Navigation is Confusing
Your website visitors don’t want to hunt around your site while they look for the page they need. Instead, they’ll simply click away. Now’s the time to take a look at your website and see how it stacks up against other websites in your industry. Is your content in the locations that the average visitor would expect? Does it make sense to the user?
Your category names should actually reflect your content. Put yourself in the shoes of a brand new visitor to your website and ask if they’d easily be able to find the information they want.
How to Fix it: The layout and design of your website are both critical if you want to build trust and look legit to your visitors. Think about arranging your information in a way that makes sense to your users and ensure your links and categories aren’t too similar so they’re not confusing.
The Copy Needs Work
Your website copy should immediately grab your visitors’ attention and convince them to stay on your page. Writing content can be deceptively difficult, and it’s important that you’re effectively communicating why your business is the right choice for your potential customers.
Consistency is also important, and visitors will be confused if your brand voice is changing from one page to the next. Even worse is if you’ve got poorly worded copy, wordy descriptions, bad grammar, or spelling mistakes.
Great copy should not only be written in the right style for your business, but it should also be formatted correctly, with short paragraphs, scannable headings, and the right keywords.
How to Fix it: Unless you have a copywriter in-house, you’re often better to outsource this one to the pros. The benefit of using a professional is that they’re well-versed in writing content for the web. They’ll use proven techniques to communicate your message and connect with your leads and customers.
Not sure where to get started with your website? We can take a look. Get in touch today to learn more.