5 Mistakes Hurting Your Website & How To Fix Them

When your website is one of the first places where customers go to explore your company, it’s crucial to ensure that it’s working for you as best it can.

There’s a wide range of functionality and style preferences that work well for different business types and industries. But, there are also a few particular website mistakes that can end up hurting your business image, traffic or sales, regardless of what you have to offer.

Here are five of the most common website mistakes that hurt online businesses and how to fix them.

1. Unclear navigation

Visitors (aka your potential customers) need to find their way around your website easily. Most people visiting your website will have specific questions they’re trying to answer, especially if it’s their first visit.

Unfortunately, an otherwise beautiful and informative website will be significantly less useful if visitors can’t easily find what they’re looking for. As a result, they’ll likely end up on the website of a competitor.

Try to think through the types of questions that your prospective customers will have as they’re looking through your site, and then make sure those answers are available and easy to find.

Here are a few quick pointers for clear navigation:

• – Include no more than seven (main) items in your main navigation menu – the magical number for information processing.
• – Put your most important items at the beginning of the navigation and the least important items in the middle. ‘Contact Us’ should be the last item on the list.
• – Use a structured and clearly-labelled navigation bar – avoid being vague with your labels, which can cause confusion.

2. Broken links

Not only do broken links appear unprofessional, but they can also hurt your SEO. Broken links prevent search engines from properly crawling your website and understanding its relation to the broader web.

Some website platforms have a built-in broken link checker that will quickly show you where a 404 error is present. Plus, there are several free broken link checkers available online, like this one by Ahrefs.

We recommend running a report each month so you can find and fix any broken links that may have occurred.

Some of the reasons for a broken link include:

• – The URL may have included a typo when it was entered.
• – The page may have been taken down (mainly if it’s an external link).
• – The URL may have been changed since the link was created.

3. Lack of mobile-friendliness

With the majority of web searches occurring on mobile devices, it’s not in your best business interest to design a website that only looks great on a desktop. Plus, mobile visitors are in a hurry, make sure they get the information they need quickly.

Before publishing a new website page or blog post, take the time to confirm the appearance on mobile. Sometimes, imagery may display differently, or a line of text may break differently on mobile than intended because of the screen size. It’s always best to catch these little problems before you hit ‘publish’.

Here are a few tips for ensuring mobile-friendly design:

• – Make sure the text is easy to read – the user shouldn’t have to squint.
• – Ensure that all buttons and links are large enough to be tapped with a finger.
• – It’s pleasing to look at (the user experience is enjoyable)

4. Typos or grammatical errors

The impression of your business quality and authority will instantly be reduced for many visitors if they find a blatant typo or two on your otherwise professional-looking website.

To give your website and business the best first impression, we recommend paying particular attention to your website copywriting. Put the same attention to detail into your website as you do into your business products. After all, your website is a reflection of your business values and practices.

A few tips for avoiding website typos:

• – Write your website updates or blog posts into an online program like Grammarly, which has a built-in spell-check as well as other features that will help you perfect your writing.
• – Proofread and proofread again. Not all typos will be caught by spell-check, as words might be spelt correctly, but misused or out of place.
• – Have someone else review your work. A fresh pair of eyes may catch something that you overlooked.

5. No calls to action

Your website is a prime opportunity to connect your visitors with a range of content and offers that may be relevant and useful to them.

For example, you may have come to this website looking for information on setting up a new blog, and then ended up discovering content on how to optimise the blog for SEO, source photography, and perhaps even set up a membership program.

Be sure to offer plenty of opportunities for visitors to connect with more of what they’re interested in, which could be:

• – Contacting you via a contact form
• – Signing up for updates via your newsletter opt-in
• – Connecting with you on social platforms

Need a helping hand?

Here at Zib Digital, we conduct website audits, make website updates and customisations and design and develop new websites. That means we can, let you know how your website can be improved to meet your business goals or create a brand new site if needed.