What Is Hurting Your Site? Common Website Problems To Check
Many businesses put hard work into their websites. They do the best they can to create something people will respond to. However, in your quest to make your site as effective and/or beautiful as it can be, it’s easy to overlook some important factors and add in elements that are doing more harm than good. Here are several common website problems to check to identify what’s hurting your site:
Too Many Pop-Ups
This may seem obvious, but it’s worth being said because we still see it so frequently. Having too many pop-ups is a huge deterrent. It can slow down browsers, frustrate consumers, and simply end up becoming downright annoying. We’ve all been in the computer chair eagerly looking for information when we’ve been bombarded by pop-ups. They can bog you down so much you simply look elsewhere.
Another issue with pop-ups? Even If you are using them correctly, savvy pop-up blockers may not show them at all, decreasing your chances of conversion or sign-ups or whatever your goal may be.
Look, we get it. Pop-ups can be crucial when it comes to capturing emails and prompting sign-ups. All we’re asking is to limit the number you use and when you do use them, do so thoughtfully. Keep them minimally intrusive. Integrate as much as you can into your actual pages.
Poor-Quality Images, No Images, and Poor Placement
We’ve preached the wild statistics of visuals before, and we’ll do it again because it matters. According to Adobe, “posts with images produce a 650% higher engagement rate than regular text posts.” With that kind of a number, there’s not much of an excuse for your site to have no images.
Not only is simply having images important, they have to be good images. What makes a good image? It should be high quality and it should be relevant. Don’t use bad stock images. Try to get images that best represent you, whether that’s purchasing or getting ones taken of your real space or product or people. Chances are your competitors won’t have those some images on their sites, and your consumers won’t groan at seeing the same ambiguous woman smiling in a conference room.
You’ve got images and they’re high quality, but it’s all about location, location, location. Where your pictures go has an impact, a really big one. Don’t let one bad image placement cost you when it’s so easy to get right.
Content
There are so many ways using content wrong can hurt your site. From low-quality posts to a lack of variety, here are the big ones:
Not Enough Content
There are a couple different places and ways you might not have enough content. For starters, let’s look at your blog. If you want to be an authority in your space and show people you know what you’re talking about, you have to give them content to back it up. If you’re an expert on tires and don’t have a gigantic amount of information people are looking for about tires, they’re going to look somewhere else. Go past the basics. Don’t be vague. Give the people what they want.
Another place you may not have enough content is in your product descriptions. People like information. They want to know what the features are of the product, what the benefits are, and why they should buy it. Tell them. Don’t let a customer slip away because they want to buy your product but don’t have enough information to make that purchasing decision.
Not Enough Types of Content
Now, not only can you be lacking in the amount of content you have, you can be lacking in the types of content you have. People like variety. Don’t give them 1,000-word blog post after 1,000-word blog post with the same format over and over. Shake things up. Remember that crazy visual statistic? This is a great time to take that further. Add infographics. Add video. Add resource lists.
Poorly Written Content
Not much can make a consumer hightail it from your site like content riddled with errors. We know typos happen, but there are typos and then there are egregious errors that are hard to look past. Not only can poorly written content be difficult to read, it can imply a couple things about you. For one, it can imply that you simply don’t care enough to properly edit the content on your website.
For two, it can imply that you don’t have the ability to properly edit the content and/or think it’s correct the way it is. If you don’t care enough to fix your website or seem like you don’t think you need to, maybe you don’t care enough or aren’t capable enough to create a quality product or provide a quality service. Either way, you’re losing credibility, authority, and most likely, consumers. Take the time to hire an editor. You’ll save face in professional circles, and you won’t drive potential leads from your site.
Duplicate Content
We aren’t talking about plagiarism (we sincerely hope that is a given), we’re talking about taking the same exact content and plastering it on different pages of your website or sister websites. As a consumer or a reader, it’s frustrating to search for information you assume a website has only to find the same boilerplate paragraph wherever you look.
Even if your sister websites sell similar things and are under one umbrella, content should be unique. If you have sister sites, that’s because you have two different brands, probably with different logos, mascots, and missions. Don’t make readers feel like they’ve hit a dead end no matter where they look. It can make them feel like they won’t ever get any new information from any of your sites, so they’ll start to look elsewhere.
When you know which website problems to check, you’ll have a much better understanding of where your performance stands, how to improve your content, and what strategies to use to engage your audience.
CopyPress writer
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