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A business's online presence can have a massive effect on its growth. Your website is the place where prospects and customers engage and interact with your brand. It provides a significant revenue stream for your business, helps you build trust and stand out from the competition.
But what happens when your website is not performing well? You are more likely to miss sales opportunities, and it could jeopardise your brand trust and credibility. Research shows that 88%* of website visits are unlikely to return to a website after a bad experience.
Does your website have performance issues? Don’t panic! Businesses experience website problems often. The key is to act as soon as you realise that your website is not performing the way you want it to, you need to identify the cause and find the optimal solution.
This article discusses some of the most common and critical website issues and how you can fix them in the most time and cost-efficient way.
#1 Your website is poorly designed or outdated
Your website can determine how your prospects and customers perceive your brand. If it doesn't make it easy for your visitors to understand who you are and what you offer, you are more likely to lose them. It only takes 0.05 seconds for your visitors to determine if they are blown away or appalled by your website.
Design matters as much as your brand message. They both tell your story and reflect the essence of your business. What is the story you want to tell with your visual design? That you are a modern, accessible, reliable brand that cares about the experience its customers will receive online? Or a brand that is outdated, inactive and unprofessional that makes people feel unsure if they should be using your products and services?
Our designer, Peter has some advice on how to fix this problem: You need to truly understand your brand, how people perceive it and what it represents. You then need to design all your assets as a true reflection of your brand. This can help you generate trust, because, if your customers know what your brand represents, then they can trust it.
#2 Your website loading time is too slow
How long do you usually wait for a website to load? In general, the majority of website users will expect your page to load within 2-3 seconds. Slow loading times and websites not loading properly is a pretty serious website issue that could drive away your visitors. In fact, websites that load within 2 seconds have an average bounce rate of 06%, while pages that load in five seconds see their bounce rates rise to 38%*. Bounce rate measures the percentage of website visitors who abandon a page without taking action, like clicking on a link, filling out a form, etc.
The graph below shows why loading speed has a significant impact on your website performance.
There are some quick solutions to improve your website speed without the help of a developer, like optimising images, limiting large videos, and turning off unnecessary plugins. Though, if you want solutions that will have a massive impact on your website loading speed, such as code optimisation, Javascript and CSS clean up, database optimisation and more, you need to work with an experienced developer. This will improve your loading speed without compromising the smooth running of your website.
#3 Your landing pages are not designed to convert
Your landing pages are fundamental to lead generation. They help you guide leads into a conversation and are focused on achieving one specific goal, e.g. download your white paper. But we often see businesses confuse landing pages with their website, a mistake that lowers conversations and drives people away.
Designing a landing page like a website is as good as not having a landing page at all. We have seen landing pages that don’t have a purpose e.g subscribe to a particular event or purchase a specific product and users don’t know what to do. We’ve also seen pages that are irrelevant to the audience they target or are not customised for the campaign ad that brought people to it.
Successful landing pages have five things in common:
- A unique selling proposition
- The benefits of your offering
- Images or video supporting your proposition
- Social proof
- A clear call to action
Make sure you focus on these and make your call to action as prominent as possible and see your leads increasing.
#4 Your site is not mobile responsive
A 2021 research shows that 69%* of smartphone users research products and services online. This is a huge number to ignore. If your website is not responsive to all screen sizes, then you risk losing customers. Do you know how many people visit your website from their mobile devices? Just check the Analytics of your website to find out the percentage of people that visited from mobile devices, see if the bounce rates and conversions are different to your desktop experience. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that if your website looks good on your mobile, it’s the same for everyone, let your stats guide you to the devices your users have and their experience. It is a good baseline to ensure you look at your website on yours and other mobile devices and check if it displays properly, loads quickly, it’s easy to navigate, and the overall experience is positive. If you experience problems with any of the above, so do your prospects and customers. Making your website responsive to not only mobile devices but all screens is fundamental for your success.
#5 Your website is not secure
Would you use your credit card or input your personal information on a website when your browser warns you that it is not secure? Of course not, and neither will your customers. Security threats are taken seriously by users of any business size. Obtaining an SSL certificate will encrypt the data transferred between your visitors, making your website more trustworthy and reliable.
It is also important to regularly update your firewalls and anti-virus software, update your copyright legislation and take regular backups of your website in case you need to recover from a cyber attack.
#6 Your website is not optimised for SEO
What is the point of having a beautifully designed and functional website if prospects cannot find it? Have you measured your organic traffic lately? If you are getting low traffic from search engines, you might need to reconsider your SEO strategy. There is a common misconception that SEO is all about keywords, which are important, but adding them without a clear strategy and benefit for the customer will not make a difference.
First of all, you need to create engaging, original content that adds value to the reader. Of course, you will do your keyword research before writing it, but you should always focus on the value you offer.
You also need to ensure your website pages are optimised for search engines. Using headers that include relevant keywords allow visitors to scan your content and Google to quickly crawl your page and determine how to rank your content.
Other important elements of your SEO are the Meta Tags which help both users and search engines get a snippet of your content in search results. The example that follows displays the way this article is shown in Google Search Results.
How we can help
- Website performance audit: We can help you assess your website's look and feel, code and back-end functionality, loading time and overall speed, SEO performance, and security. We will identify the website problems you face and provide you with recommendations on fixing the issues and improving your website performance.
- Improve your existing website: If you are happy with your existing website, but you need to improve its performance, our team can help you enhance the user experience, refresh your brand identity, improve back-end functionality, fix loading time issues, optimise it for search engines, and provide you with better hosting, security and back-up options solutions.
- Build and design your new website in record time: Leveraging our ten years of experience in understanding our customers and what they want to achieve, we create beautiful and functional websites in record time. We can help you bring your idea to life and create digital experiences that your customers will want to return to.
