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In a world filled with too many brands today, it’s hard for consumers to segregate the reputable ones from those that exist only to rip them off. People would find comfort in checking your website and feeling at ease to know that your business is real and legit.
Because your website is your online storefront, it makes sense to devise it the best way you can. Consider hiring web designers who are experts in their field to ensure a website that fits your business accordingly. Unfortunately, some business owners fail in this area. They do everything independently and overcrowd the homepage with unnecessary widgets, only to distract visitors and have them leave after a few clicks. Additionally, some fail to include crucial variables and miss out on generating leads or converting sales.
Hence, it’s imperative to know the following mistakes to avoid when creating a website:
1) Complex Content
When someone clicks on your website, you only have less than 15 seconds to make or break their experience. This is how crucial leaving a first impression is. While it’s true that you need to give importance to your design and visuals, your visitors will stay longer not only because of these features. They will stay because of the content you offer. An impressive website is essential for many businesses but won’t guarantee visibility immediately. Getting a website ranked in search results requires the search engines to understand what your website offers. Hence, when crafting your content, you should consider the best search engine optimization practices to make it rank up in search engines.
Create a content marketing strategy to grow your business. Make something easy to decipher for your readers. After all, they’re browsing your resources because they’re on a hunt for information that they may fail to find somewhere else. Create content not only for search engines but also for people who visit your website.
The lack of quality content, mistakes, or irrelevant content compromises your brand image and makes your customers unhappy. This will make them leave your site, so you lose the chance of converting their visit into a possible sale or providing value for them. Likewise, be careful not to use complex words to impress them. Keep your sentences concise and easy to understand. Stay away from jargon and provide examples for those that are too complex.
2) Slow Crawl Speeds
You may lose many potential customers if your website doesn’t load quickly. The truth is everyone’s living a hectic life, so they can’t afford to spend their precious minutes waiting for your page to load. A slow website can ruin customers’ online shopping experience because they expect a certain speed. Thus, no matter how great your content is, they won’t come back if you can’t provide what your customers want. Slow crawl speeds also won’t get you the high rank you deserve in search engines because Google wants to give the best websites to their users, including a site that loads in less than a second.
3) Overpowering Images
Another mistake some companies make is overpowering their site with many graphics and images that affect text readability. Because the pictures are too overpowering, the reader might get distracted and forget to press the call-to-action button. Ensure you find a balance between using images and texts. Make your sentences and words readable by choosing the right color to stand out. Ensure text visibility by using contrasting colors.
4) Difficult To Navigate
Website visitors stay on a site that’s easy to navigate. They will automatically leave if it’s otherwise. If they find it hard to use and navigate, they will leave the site without a second glance, leading to a loss of potential sales.
With smooth navigation, visitors can move easily between pages on a website. Therefore, it is highly likely that users will find your content if your website has no navigational issues. If they can’t find what they want on your site, they surely won’t buy from you.
Besides, adding hyperlinks to different texts is crucial to improving your website navigation. These are the shortcuts your visitors need as they don’t want to struggle going back and forth to other pages to read what they want. Make it easy for them to spot these hyperlinks, too. You can set them in italic, bold, or with different colors.
Another tip is to make your sidebars stand out from the rest of the content on the page. Follow the structure and remove clutter. Format the hyperlinks correctly. Mobile navigation should be responsive on the website. A tip would be to imagine yourself in the shoes of a website visitor.
Perhaps a majority of your target readers are out and about with their mobile phones as their means of gathering information. While users are reading something on your website, don’t use uncontrollable navigation, such as animation that rolls, bounces, or moves. This will only disrupt readers and annoy them, eventually making them leave your website.
5) No Contact Information Found
Although this mistake is easy to correct and avoid, some website owners still forget it. Lack of contact information is a much more manageable issue, albeit quite common. You’ve put up a website in the first place to have your customers contact you, so if you fail to include your contact details, this forfeits your overall goal.
From your main page to subsequent pages of interest, you must always provide a way for visitors to contact you. Additionally, ensure all contact information can be found easily on your Contact Us page.
Include your business name, address, email, mobile or landline number, and sitemap if applicable. You can also leverage your visitors’ desire to find your sitemap, so it’s best to include it, too.
6) Too Much Pop-Ups Everywhere
Some people hate visiting sites with too many pop-ups as distractions. Besides being notoriously irritating for visitors, these are also frowned upon by Google. While you may want to use it to monetize your website, it’s crucial not to overdo it.
The key here is to find the appropriate time for your pop-up display. Check your analytics to know when your visitors are most likely to visit. Ensure your users don’t have any interruptions while browsing and the pop-ups’ offers make sense within the context of the page. Lastly, pop-ups must abide by search engines’ mobile-friendly rules.
Conclusion
There is no need to worry about the issues discussed here because they can be fixed and resolved. However, you must be aware of these common mistakes to avoid them and create an error-free website for your visitors. It would help to think about your site from a consumer’s perspective to see what’s wrong and how to improve it. Furthermore, you can increase sales with the right design changes.