Every business should have an online presence in this digital age. An online presence helps visitors and potential customers find you and also allows you to advertise your products and services to more people. A website is crucial because many people will look you up and visit yours before engaging with your business.
A website can lose your customers and potential revenue without you realizing it. This can happen for several reasons, and you need to know what they are to stop your website from negatively impacting your business. Let’s look at what they are and what you can do to remedy them.
Your Website is Poorly Designed
When you think about your website as your business’s storefront, you will understand why its design is crucial for improving conversion rates. Visitors expect it to be organized, provide intuitive navigation, and provide them with a great user experience.
If your web design does not attract customers and keep them on your website, they will leave.
Understand that visitors now expect cleanliness and simplicity in your design, but that it also looks professional and organized. It will not matter if you have amazing content if your visitors do not stick around long enough to read it.
Your website should also be easy to navigate so they can find additional information if they need it. Unless they already know the specific products, services, or information they are looking for, people look through several pages on business websites before taking action or making a decision. If they cannot look around by way of navigation, they will leave and try to find what they need on websites that do not make it challenging for them to do so.
Two ways to know if your website’s design is killing your revenue is to hire a user experience and user interface expert and do a usability test. The professional will look over your website and give you recommendations that will help you improve the user experience with the help of your developer. If they suggest a redesign, you should consider what they say.
A usability tester will crawl your website and reveal any user interface and experience issues it finds. It will also provide recommendations for what to change to improve your design and ensure people stick around when they visit.
It is Slow
Internet speeds have become so fast that we expect web pages to open almost instantly. This has made people impatient, and most do not want to wait more than a few seconds for a website to load. This is one of the reasons Google and other companies say a load time of more than three seconds leads to a loss of about 40% of your visitors, with every second after that losing you even more.
It follows that when visitors leave, they do not view any of your amazing content or see your well-crafted calls to action. When they do not, your conversion rates plummet and your website ends up as a liability instead of being the asset it should be.
There are several ways to remedy this situation, but they all start with testing your website’s speed. You can use several tools for this, but you should always use ones that tell you where the bottlenecks are. This way, you and your developer can fix the issues causing your website to load slowly.
If you fix everything and notice that your website is still slow, your hosting provider may be the problem. It is better to switch to one with a proven faster speed and one that uses CDNs to speed up websites. Service providers like Gcore provide distributed infrastructure with numerous CDNS and cloud locations around the world. This means there is at least one server close to all your visitors and potential clients, making your website load fast no matter where they are.
Your Website is Not Mobile-responsive
Google has been pushing for businesses to ensure their websites are responsive for more than five years, and for good reason. Being a search engine, Google has statistics on the number of mobile users vs desktop users. The tech giant realized that the number of mobile users was growing faster than that of desktop users, so they concluded there would be more mobile visitors than desktop visitors in a few years. This is what did happen, with more than 80% of website traffic now coming from mobile users.
Google says all websites should be mobile-responsive and apply mobile-first ranking to their search results. Also, no one wants to zoom and pan around a website because it does not conform to their device’s screen. They would rather leave than have to deal with this.
To solve this issue, start by getting a report from Google; the company has a great responsive testing tool that will tell you of any issue it finds. Then, work with a competent developer to fix all of them and do a final test to ensure your website provides an excellent experience for mobile users.
Your Landing Pages are Ineffective and Unclear
It is common for businesses to spend money on paid search and ads to get more people to visit their websites. Because it is the first page people see when they click on these ads, it should interest the visitor, provide a greater experience, and have a clear call to action.
If you have a chaotic, unclear, or disorganized landing page, you are wasting money because people will not stay on it long enough to see or click on your calls to action.
A great landing page should:
- Use a hierarchical structure
- Have enough breathing space through the creative use of negative space
- Have a clear intent
- Have copy written by a professional
- Include a clear call to action
All will work together to guide the visitor towards the actions you want them to take, whether that is completing a purchase or signing up for your newsletter so you can send them marketing emails later.
Your business website can be a great asset, but it can also be your biggest liability. You should understand the different ways it could be losing you money and rectify them as soon as possible. Fortunately, you can pick from numerous tools and professionals who can help you fix any issues that could cause your business to lose your business money and customers.
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