A business website is the heart of your digital marketing efforts. It really is the make or break for your business reputation. It’s important that you plan well to ensure that your website is at its best, considering that your website promotes you 24/7.
We’ve seen hundreds of websites with these mistakes, and we have corrected them many times throughout our redesign.
Ready to understand what could turn-off potential customers? Here’s the three most common issues to be avoided:
1. Not Optimised for Mobile
Let’s go over the most important one first, mobile optimisation. If your website is not ready for mobile, you are bound to lose a large amount of valuable traffic and customers to competitors.
A recent study from Statista shows that over half of all global website traffic comes from mobile devices. See why this is important?
No matter how good your website looks on desktop, it can still look bad on mobile if it isn’t optimised. This should be the first step in your design process. Imagine this, you’re paying for google ads and people are visiting your website on their mobile device. If the website doesn’t look presentable or professional, those visitors are instantly going to go elsewhere. You’d be losing out on valuable leads.
2. Slow Loading
This is another key component and is integral to the overall user experience. Google have recently announced that load speed is now a ranking factor in mobile search results. Because of this, your site has to load in 3 seconds or faster, or you’ll be losing out on well-deserved search rankings for SEO.
‘79% of web shoppers who have trouble with website performance say they won’t return to the site to buy again.’ (Source)
Here’s some quick tips on how to optimise the speed of your site:
- Image Optimisation: Heavy images are a common cause of slower load times. We recommend optimising all your images before placing them on your website. If you have a WordPress website, we recommend installing the plugin ‘Smush’. It will automatically compress all your images when you upload them to your website.
- Web Hosting: Your web host is usually one of the main reasons for slower load times. The files on your site will only load as fast as the speed of the server where your website is hosted. We recommend choosing a hosting provider that uses solid-state drives.
Page speed is a ranking factor, and a critical aspect of overall site performance.
3. No Call To Action
You could have the most amazing website, giving all the users the information they need to know, and a simplified layout ready for mobile. But, if you don’t have call to action, you’re going to struggle. A site without call to action is like having a road without traffic signs. CTA buttons should be strategically planted throughout your website to guide the users to the pages they are looking for, such as ordering a product, or signing up to your newsletter.
Here’s an example of a CTA button on a website:
Final Points
There’s many more mistakes that could be made, however from our experience of redesigning websites for small to large organisations, these are the most common mistakes we’ve seen. Don’t make these same mistakes, you’ll be losing out on potential sales 24/7.
If you’d like some more information on how we avoid these mistakes, or what other mistakes can be prevented, feel free to contact us. Although we offer Web Design Gold Coast & Australia wide, we are happy to help, even if you are the other side of the world.
