Smooth navigation, high traffic, attractive content, and a significant conversion rate are some of the basic pillars that lead to a successful business website. However, most of the times, these are the pillars that devour your focus and take you away from minor mistakes, leaving your website at a disadvantage.
While conducting a website technical audit might be beneficial, fixing up blunders found in the result of the audit is entirely another story. Fortunately, for the majority of business website owners, correcting these website errors don’t turn out to be a tedious task, unless you have no idea where to begin from.
Since your website is going to be the center of attraction, you cannot afford to leave it with common errors, which can eventually go on to become major issues.
So, here is a list of top 10 most common website errors that generally go unnoticed but should be fixed as soon as possible.
10 Most Common Website Errors
Too Many Messages on The Website:
At some point in time, you must have landed on such a site that would have rendered you clueless. Probably, you might have decided only to purchase one product, however, as soon as you were there, you were bombarded with an array of promotions, buttons, and obstacles. Experienced it, right?
If you have too many messages on your website and not something specific to focus on, it is surely going to be frustrating and distracting to your visitors. Therefore, the only solution to this problem would be keeping your website as simple as you can. Try and lead your visitors to what they intend to see.
Any message that you are displaying on your website should implement the advantage that a user or visitor will attain by performing the detailed action. Don’t stop de-cluttering the mess unless you are sure that your website is worth visiting.
Not Conducting SEO Audit:
It takes a whole lot of years before you can finally boast about your business being a household name. However, before that, you would obviously have to undergo vigorous hard-work to make your business reach out to your customers.
Since you may want your target audience to find your business on Google, it’s possible that they might have no idea about your products or services. This is the point where search engine optimization turns out to be a boon for small businesses.
While the importance of SEO cannot be neglected, there are innumerable websites that have been badly structured for SEO, making it even more problematic for Google crawlers to comprehend the content and accordingly rank it. Hence, conducting an SEO audit is of utmost importance to discover the errors and fix them on time. There are several tools that can help you audit your website based on the SEO guidelines, including this SEO auditor.
Long Conversion Forms:
There is no denying the fact that conversion forms are one of the important factors for converting your website traffic into potential leads. However, only if you have done the form thing right will you be able to convert more traffic into leads.
Do you really think that asking personal information to this extent would be appropriate? Moreover, why would anyone need the address if they are already asking for the email ID? As a visitor, nobody is going to stick to your website for a longer period of time, filling up the information they don’t feel like sharing with the rest of the world.
Asking just for the email ID would be a better option than keeping the form too lengthy. Unless you aren’t running a contest where you’d want to deliver a gift to the winner’s house, it wouldn’t be good enough to ask their address. So, limit the fields on your website form to the important information you need, if you want to increase the conversion rate.
Not Keeping A Tab on Domain:
It’s quite obvious. Running a business is no child’s play. You have to be present almost everywhere all the time. While that would be humanly impossible, unless you are another version of Sophia robot, you would need a few tools to help you with different tasks and chores, right?
If you are entirely relying on search engines, you should keep in mind that they only bestow their blessings on such websites that are not expired for a longer period of time. If you’ve got your domain name registered for the next couple of years, you can mark yourself as a committed person in the list of search engines and you can even save yourself from dreadful spams.
Even if you don’t want to renew the domain name for years altogether beforehand, you can do that every year. However, make sure you don’t miss out on the last date. For that, you can use tools, such as Netumo that keep you notified whenever your domain is set to expire. Not just that, but this tool can be of great help in several other ways as well.
Making the Website All About Yourself:
Moving all the way from the offline market to online, people have misconstrued the actual meaning of marketing. It’s true that most of the business owners and even marketers are living with the conception that business branding or marketing is all about boasting about what the company can do.
There is no dearth of websites on the internet comprising such elements that talk only about products or services and not how users can benefit from them. This, somehow, tend to be a major turn off for your visitors or buyers.
So, if your website also has a lot of elements only talking about the “I” factor and not the “We” factor, then you must change the tone right away.
Not Knowing When the Website Is Down:
One of the most common errors that people ignore is not knowing when their website is down. Since visitors aren’t patient enough, they wouldn’t be there, waiting for the website to download appropriately. This may increase the bounce rate and impact negatively on your website.
Therefore, you must find a way to get an update whenever your website is down. In this way, you can even inform your users about it by keeping a notification.
For this, you can use a tool, such as DownNotifier. This website tool monitors SSL certificate for configuration or expiration. It also checks the website every 2 seconds to see whether it is up-to-the-mark or not. And furthermore, you can get several other benefits from this tool.
Not Paying Attention to Analytics:
Being a part of online business, you must keep in mind that the search console and analytics account are treasures that contain several important information. Data that you will be attaining through these accounts should assist you to comprehend everything required to maximize the traffic on your website along with the conversion rates.
Be it the broken links, slower performance, higher bounce rate, lesser conversion rates, or anything else, analytics can help you dig deeper and find the root cause. Instead of simply relying on guesswork, you should be reviewing your search console account to find the problem.
Not Clear Contact Options:
If you fail to provide a substantial form of contact to your visitors, know that it’s a mistake you would repent in the future. Generally, the newer versions of websites don’t feature a specific contain detail. On the contrary, they just upload a contact form to let visitors type in their queries.
What these websites don’t realize is that not many people would be comfortable in sharing their details. A majority of customers only anticipate direct contact. Moreover, not providing contact details sow a seed of skepticism regarding the quality of customer care services, especially if you are new in the race.
So, if you aren’t making it easier for your visitors to contact you, they aren’t going to take the initiative to get in touch with you. Also, if you aren’t comfortable in putting up a phone number, you can at least give authentic and genuine email ID.
Using Excessive Stock Photographs:
It is quite understandable that being a beginner, you might be a bit tight on budget. Hence, those who aren’t willing to spend a lot on the visual aspect of their website tend to rely on stock photographs to a great extent. This isn’t the era of the 2000s and your visitors might have seen every stock picture almost a hundred times.
Using excessive stock photographs convey the absence of imagination and may represent your company to be something that is presenting a wrong image. Instead of downloading and using images, you can spend a certain amount on a professional photographer.
In this way, you can simply show the real world inside your brand. You can get the interior and exterior of your building shot. Furthermore, you can even include personnel, products and other aspects of your company to maintain the credibility.
Problem with Content:
When there is a lot of content to be written, typos or a few grammatical errors might seem forgivable. However, they are the prime culprits in sending an unprofessional image to your audience.
When you be in the professional world, act like you are one. Therefore, whoever has the responsibility to complete copywriting errands in your company, make sure that they are going through the content at least twice before getting it published. Also, if you can get an editor, it would be great.
Conclusion:
Over the period of time, minor issues turn out to become major problems. Don’t let that happen with your organization. Be wary of these common website errors and keep improving it side-by-side. So, these are some small errors that you must fix now to plan a thriving and successful future for your website.
