5 Common Website Mistakes That Could Be Hurting Your Business

Author: Chris Egner - Lead Developer

A website is an important part of your business – for generating leads, for visibility & brand awareness, for engaging with customers, or for direct sales. Clients often come to us to help address issues with their website that are holding back their success as a business. Here are five of the most common problems we see.

Outdated design or content

Your website is a crucial tool for effectively communicating your brand. If the aesthetic of your website is outdated, it can give the impression that your business is behind the times. This negative brand perception could be losing you valuable customers, especially if competitors have more modern and engaging websites.

Beyond the aesthetics, the content of your site must also be kept up-to-date. Outdated or incorrect information can cause confusion for site visitors and give the impression that your business is neglectful. Google and other search engines prioritize sites with regularly updated content, so keeping things current is important for preserving organic traffic.

Depending on the nature of your site, it may only need some minor sprucing up to have a more modern experience. If it hasn’t seen much maintenance for a few years now, it may make more sense to go through with a full redesign and rebuild.

Slow speeds

Trying to navigate a slow website is a frustrating experience, yet unfortunately familiar. If your website isn’t fully loaded within a few seconds, users are going to start to bounce. While this can obviously cost you potential business, it can also cause decreased satisfaction for those existing customers who are trying to engage with you through your website.

Search engines take performance into consideration when ranking pages, so keeping your page load times down will also help with search engine optimization (SEO).

Optimizing a website for speed often isn’t a straightforward task, as there are many factors that contribute to a site’s load time, such as:

Hosting: Is the current hosting environment adequate for the site’s traffic, or does it need an upgrade?
Caching: Is the site being cached properly? Could the site benefit from a content delivery network (CDN) to reduce hits to the server?
Code Tuning: Are there inefficiencies in the code of the site itself that are causing bottlenecks? Can we remove any unnecessary plugins or libraries?
Optimizing static assets: Can we compress images, CSS, Javascript, and other assets to reduce transfer bandwidth?

Not mobile-friendly

It’s estimated that over half of all web traffic comes from mobile users, and for certain types of websites it’s even more than that. As a website owner it’s important to treat mobile traffic as equal in importance to desktop. This means ensuring that the website is entirely usable on mobile devices, and isn’t offering just a subset of the desktop experience.

If your site has no mobile component at all and mobile users simply see a tiny version of the desktop site, this is a huge usability issue that should be addressed as soon as possible. Even if your website has a mobile view, it’s important to make sure it’s fully responsive and optimized for any device size, not just the few most common sizes.

Mobile devices are typically underpowered compared to desktops & laptops, and a mobile internet connection often doesn’t have the same bandwidth as a home or office. As such, the same performance enhancements we make across the whole site are doubly important for mobile users, and some additional effort may be necessary to specifically address mobile site speeds.

Poor accessibility / ADA compliance

No matter how small your site is, a segment of your audience is going to have some sort of visual, hearing, or motor impairment. In the same way that our physical spaces must be accessible to all, so should our digital spaces.

This means things such as:

Proper font sizes and color contrast for text legibility
Ensuring the site can be navigated via screen reader for those visually impaired
Transcripts or closed captions for any video/audio content
Keyboard navigation for motor impairment; not reliant solely on mouse movement

Beyond the loss of customers, poor accessibility could also put you at legal risk. It’s not uncommon for an organization to find itself the target of a lawsuit for having a website that’s not adequately accessible. Developing your site to be fully compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) can help make sure you are protected in these cases.

Not regularly applying software updates

You may not realize it, but a good portion of your website’s overall traffic comes from bots. Most of these are innocuous search engine crawlers and other automated scans, but some of them are malicious bots probing your website for vulnerabilities to exploit. There’s not much you can do to stop this traffic from coming to your website, but you can take steps to make it harder for them to find anything they can take advantage of.

The most important step is to keep up-to-date with all the software that your website runs on. This includes:

The content management system (CMS) such as WordPress or Drupal
Third-party CMS plugins/modules
Other third-party libraries (javascript, etc.)
Web server and database software (e.g. Apache, Mysql & PHP)
Web server operating system & associated packages (Linux)

This will make sure you’re protected from any known vulnerabilities in your website’s software, one of the most common attack vectors. While keeping all these items up-to-date won’t guarantee you’ll never have a security breach, it’s a crucial first step before going into deeper security hardening.

Beyond the security implications, it’s important to keep your CMS, plugins, and server software up-to-date to ensure you’re taking advantage of the latest bug fixes, new features, and performance enhancements they offer.

If you see your website in this article and need help with any of these items, please contact us today.

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