07/07/2020
5 Website Mistakes to Avoid – Small Business Tips ( part 1 )
A bad website can be detrimental to your business so you’ll want to avoid as many website mistakes as you can. 75% of consumers admit that they will judge a business’s credibility based on how good their website design is. For the most part, you will only have about 15 seconds to gain a visitor’s attention before they leave, so you’ll want to make sure that you leave the best first impression possible.
We’ve compiled 5 mistakes for you to avoid when putting your website together:
1. Out-of-date business information
If you make the mistake of not keeping your business information up-to-date on your website then you could miss out on a lot of potential visitors and customers. Not having contact information at all can hurt your rankings on search engines, but having contact information that matches your whois information can actually give your search rankings a boost.
When customers look at you contact/business information they expect it to be correct and if they contact an email address that is no longer in use or call a number that no longer belongs to your business, or even go to an address that your business no longer occupies, they are going to get frustrated and most likely not use your services or visit your website again. Avoid the mistake of using out-of-date business information and your visitors will thank you for it.
2. Too much text
A giant wall of text can scare readers away. Most people on the Internet want their answers fast and they don’t want to have to search through long paragraphs to get them. That’s not to say you can’t have in-depth articles, but you need to break up the text with smaller paragraphs, headlines, and images where applicable.
You can use various applications or websites to help keep your copy clean and to the point. One app you might want to try is the HemingwayApp, which will let you know if a sentence is too long or complicated, if something could be said more simply, and other tips to perfect your content for easy reading.
3. Bad images
Having bad images or poor product photography on your website can be a huge mistake and cost you visitors, customers, and overall search ranking. Images can be very beneficial to your website, but they can also cause a lot of problems.
If you don’t optimize your images and resize them they can cause your website to slow down and lower your search ranking. If you use poor quality images you can scare visitors away in an instant. What do bad images look like? Blurry pictures, bad lighting, or the majority of photos that people use for products on eBay or Kijiji.
If this sounds anything like the images on your website, don’t worry, we’ve made an extensive guide on making the perfect product photos for your website. Another thing you’ll want to consider is optimizing your images. Make sure that the photos on your website are not gigantic.
You can resize large images using a photo editor like Photoshop or an online source like picresize.com. Also, name your images something relevant, like “dog-tea-party.png” instead of “image132.png” as search engines actually take into account the name of pictures when ranking your website.
If you are unable to take your own photos for your website there are plenty of places you can find online that have professional stock photos for your use. Take a look at Creative Market, Envato, iStock, or run your own search to find the perfect photos for your website. You’ll want to avoid bad images on your website at all costs if you want to see consistent viewership on your website.
4. Being too “salesy”
Aggressive salespeople can often ruin the shopping experience and push possible customers away. Well, that same effect can happen on your website if you are consistently pushing your products on visitors. That’s not to say, don’t advertise at all on your website, but you should have content that is informative or interesting and isn’t just a sales pitch for your products.
Post content like tutorials, help articles, or other pieces that you know readers in your industry would find interesting/helpful. The more valuable content you have that visitors want to read, the more accepting they will be of your sales pitches.
5. Slow load times
Just under half of the people on the Internet expect a website to load in 2 seconds or less and are ready to leave a website if it takes any longer. Patience is not something you can expect of users on the Internet, so you better do what you can to speed up your website. We already discussed resizing images earlier, some other things you’ll want to do is take advantage of CDNs (Content Delivery Networks), remove unnecessary plugins, and use browser caching.