What to avoid for a successful website

What makes a website bad?

A lot of people decide to build their own website through drag and drop builders such as Wix and, whilst these tools are great and super beginner friendly, most people aren’t aware what to avoid to have a successful website. This usually leads to common mistakes and key parts of the website missing. If you’re wanting to develop a high quality site that can help you make a successful impact on the web, you should reach out to a web design team. If you decide to fly solo, here are some tips to make sure your site is successful.

What should you avoid on your website?

There are 7 key website mistakes to avoid when building a website. These are common mistakes that are easy to avoid and can make a massive difference to the success of your site.

Not mobile friendly (not responsive)

In 2022, mobile takes in the same amount of traffic as desktop making it imperative that your website is adjusted for both desktop and mobile (responsive). Due to it being so important, most drag and drop builders will now offer you the ability to view your website on both desktop and mobile and make adjustments where necessary. Not having a mobile friendly site could lead to poor website metrics, such as a high bounce rate as mobile users aren’t having a good experience on your page so they jump off and go to a competitors site.

Slow loading times

Sometimes when a business sets up their own site, they go overboard with images, custom fonts, and website apps. Because there are so many items that have to be loaded before a user can access the website, it can take a long time for users to gain access to your website. People want to get access to things fast, the longer it takes to access your site, the more inpatient people will get making people more like to bounce straight off and go somewhere they can get what they want faster. Here’s a guide to help you make your website faster.

Inconsistent branding

One of the smallest mistakes that people miss is consistent brand messaging all through the website. Designing each page uniquely can cause inconsistency across your website, from synonym messaging to different font and image styles. Some sites even contain different layouts throughout. Consistency across a brand is important and on your website that consistency needs to come through. It not only helps build an appealing site, consistency also allows you to develop brand recognition, making your brand go further.

Poor Call To Action (CTA) placements

Whilst you don’t need to shove call to actions down your website visitors throats, correctly placed call to actions can turn potential customers into customers. Call to actions aren’t always as heavy as booking a consultation or buying a product, they can even be small movements such as signing up to a newsletter or going onto a different page. A call to action is just there to move visitors down the funnel, how far down is up to you.

Hard to find contact information

Sometimes, people want to reach out before, during, and after purchasing your service or products. This is something you need to be prepared for. Having your contact information at an easy to reach place is super important to improve customer relations and sales. This could be placing it on it’s own page and listing that page in your menu, or simply listing it in the footer of your site so it can be found at the bottom of every page on your website. Sometimes people don’t want to wait 3-5 business days for a response on email, so bare that in mind and look into offering a phone number or a live chat feature.

Poor Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Sometimes when people create a website they focus on the web design and the user experience (UX). Whilst these are key elements to building a website, if you want your website to be seen by potential customers on search engines, you need to ensure you’re successfully completing Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). SEO is the difference between having a website and having a high traffic website. Lots of drag and drop builders and other CMS’s will have options to help you with SEO. Sites such as SquareSpace and Wix give you SEO options when creating the website, whilst WordPress offers apps such as YoastSEO and All-In-One SEO to help you improve your SEO. If you want to do SEO right, we’ve put together a handy guide on how to get on the first page of Google.

No analytics to measure performance

Furthering on from the previous point, how would you know if your website or SEO is successful? Well this is where analytics comes in to play. Google gives you Google Analytics, whilst Bing offers Bing Webmaster tools. Both are designed to give you an insight into how your site is performing, including insights into traffic generation, demographics, session analysis and more. Here’s a guide from Google on how to link your website to Google analytics.

Final Thoughts

Having a successful website can help your business grow exponentially, so it’s key to avoid these common mistakes to ensure your website is a success and outperforms your competition. Building your website through a drag and drop builder (such as Wix) can be good for businesses on a smaller budget, but this is what tends to leads to common issues. If you want a website that is perfect for your business, doesn’t contain mistakes, performs well in search engines, and has all the tracking you need, you should reach out to an expert web design team.