Your website can help you to grow your business by bringing in the relevant traffic & targeted audience.
Today, most small business owners have a website but do all of them get desired results. The answer is “No”.
Only a few webmasters are able to get quality traffic to their websites and convert them into paying customers.
So what are the things that the majority of website owners are missing?
Well, there are a few poor practices that a website developer or webmaster should avoid.
In this blog post, we have shared 5 such poor practices.
Let’s dive in.
#1 Poor navigation
If you want your users to browse your website seamlessly, you must make sure that your website’s navigation is intuitive.
A website’s navigation is the architecture of links that take the users to the respective pages when clicked.
A poor navigation system on any website can hurt you in several ways such as:
- High bounce rate.
- Low user-engagement rate.
- Loss of sales & conversions.
What’s the solution here?
By ensuring that your website builder creates logical and easy-to-use navigation on your website, you easily take care of the above-mentioned challenges.
How can we ensure ease of navigation on any website?
- Make the hypertext of your navigation obvious.
- Ensure the consistency of the navigation bar.
- Leverage the footer navigation of all the web pages.
- Make sure that the navigation is clutter-free yet has all the important links.
#2 Popups
Unexpected popups can be a road blocker for your website users.
The popups can sometimes even annoy your users leading them to quit your website as soon as they are confronted with those irritating popups.
Why it’s bad to have annoying popups on your website?
- The popups have a bad history and an average internet user sees them several times a day.
- Most of the users see popups as a forced advertisements on them.
- A popup can take away the attention of users from the main website content.
So, should you stop using popups on your website?
Well, no!
There are a few ways in which your website developer can use a popup effectively on your website.
Below are some of the ways to use popups to your benefit:
- Don’t show the popup to your users immediately when they land on your website.
- Make sure that the popup is responsive for all devices.
- The users should be able to close them and once they do so, the popup shouldn’t appear for them anymore.
Recommended post: 7 Ways to use the popup on eCommerce websites
#3 Broken links
What are the broken links?
The links on a website that are associated with non-existing pages are known as broken links. In other words, non-working links on a website are known as broken links.
Usually, the broken links when clicked show an error message “page not found”.
Having too many broken links can affect your website in 2 major ways:
- The user experience of your website is badly affected which means the users can’t browse your website seamlessly.
- The SEO score of your website also gets affected which means you may get low traffic on your website.
Both the above-mentioned consequences can have an adverse impact on your business.
How can you check if your website has any broken link(s)?
There are several free online tools such as https://www.brokenlinkcheck.com/ that can scan your website and list down the broken links for your website developer to fix them.
#4 Ignorning SEO
One of the major objectives to create a website is to get quality traffic & more conversions on it. And this can be possible only when your website is found on search engines.
Most newbie webmasters & inexperienced website developers do not pay attention to the SEO-friendliness of their websites.
As a consequence, they keep wondering why they don’t get traffic on their websites while their competitors do well.
Of course, there are several SEO activities that must be done in order to rank a website but it all starts with the website itself.
If your website is SEO-friendly and you do other off-page SEO activities as well, you can easily get ranking on search engine ranking positions.
On the other hand, no matter how good your off-page SEO activities but your website is not SEO-friendly, and you may find it too challenging to get there.
What’s the solution here?
You must ensure that your website builder creates an SEO-friendly website for you.
Below are some of the basic yet crucial SEO checklists that your website must be passed on:
- Provision to add meta tags such as title and description for each webpage.
- Ensuring that each webpage must have a unique title and description tag.
- Appropriate placement of h1, h2, and h3 tags. Again, the h1 tag of each webpage must be unique.
- Creation of important files such as sitemap.xml and robots.txt
- Ensuring the responsiveness (mobile-friendliness) of your website.
Now that you know how important it is to build an SEO-friendly website, you must hire only experienced website developers to build your website who knows how to comply with SEO norms.
If you are on a budget and can’t afford to hire experienced local website designers, you can also consider hiring website builders in India.
Most Indian web development agencies also offer SEO services, so their website builders are well-versed in the basic SEO norms.
#5 Slow loading speed
Now, this is something that seems to have a subtle effect on your business but eventually, it may end up affecting your overall sales.
Various online studies have shown that websites that load slower than the normal loading speed tend to get low sales & conversions.
Especially in the case of e-commerce websites, the loading speed matters a lot because it can affect the overall sales of the website.
Unfortunately, most webmasters do not pay attention to the loading speed of their websites and as a consequence, they get a low number of sales.
How can slow loading speed affect your website?
- You get low or no conversions from your website.
- Your website gets a low bounce rate.
- Your website’s SEO score gets affected.
How can you check the loading speed of your website?
There are a few reliable yet free online tools such as https://tools.pingdom.com that can help you to find out the loading speed of your website. Not only that, but this tool will also specify the possible reason(s) for slow loading time on your site.
Ideally, your website shouldn’t take more than 5 seconds to load.
