It does not matter what sort of business you have, what industry you operate in, or how big or small your business is, you cannot ignore the extreme amount of opportunities that are provided to you by the Internet.
If you do not take advantage of these, then your business is always going to fall behind the competition and you are going to miss out on customers and the opportunity to grow your brand as much as possible.
The trouble is that there are so many different ways that you can go wrong with a website and there are so many conflicting opinions as well. We also have to recognize the fact that the internet is evolving and growing all of the time and this is something that you really need to keep on top of. You may have had a website that was incredible five years ago but it may be considered outdated now.
With that being said, in this blog post, we are going to take a look at some of the different ways that people go wrong with their website so that you can make sure that you correct any of the mistakes that you are making and enjoy greater success online as a consequence.
Outdated websites
Let’s expand on one of the points that we made in the introduction and this is the fact that a lot of people today have outdated websites. You need to recognize that the internet is developing all of the time. There are new trends coming onto the marketplace, and also customers are becoming savvier when it comes to technology, so they are expecting more as a consequence.
You may have paid a lot of money to have a beautiful website designed several years ago and you may have invested plenty in SEO at the time as well. However, you cannot expect to invest in your website just one time and then not touch it again. Your website is something that needs to be worked on all of the time if you want to achieve the great results that it can provide you with. It is a moving thing.
Therefore, if you have not touched your website for quite some time now, then it’s highly likely that your website is not in a condition that will attract lots of people and bring in lots of results.
The best thing that you can do in this regard is to get an objective opinion from people you trust and ask them whether or not they find your website appealing.
Cramming too much into a website
Another mistake that we see a lot of people make is trying to cram so many different things onto a website and so many elements. This can be overwhelming. You should never forget about the value of a bit of white space on your website. You need to give people the opportunity to breathe when they are reviewing the content on your website. The last thing you want to do is overload them because they will not know what to do next or where to look.
Whenever someone lands on your website, they should have an intuitive sense of where they should be going next and they should not need to think twice about this. If you find that people are looking all over your website and constantly hitting the back button, this is an indication that there is something wrong with your navigation. It is highly likely that you’ve tried to include too many different elements on your website.
Slow websites
There is another problem with the above, and this is the fact that including too many things on your website can make your website too slow to load. People use the internet because they want convenience. They do not want to wait around. Therefore, if someone lands on your website and it is taking 10 seconds to load, you can rest assured that they will simply leave your website and they will look elsewhere instead. This is the last thing you want because you are ultimately going to end up losing potential customers to the competition.
Today, people are simply not prepared to wait and this is something that you need to realize. The good news is that there are so many different ways that you can make a website faster to load.
You do not always need to remove elements but you should think about compressing them so that the file size becomes smaller.
Aside from this, you can use different tools online to test what parts or elements on your website are slowing it down, so that you can make the necessary improvements and enjoy the quickest speed on your website.
You may also want to consider choosing a different web host as well because this can often have a direct impact on the performance of your website.
Using free website builders
Next, a lot of mistakes are made when using website building services online. There are a lot of free website building tools and this can be very tempting because you can save a lot of money. However, you need to ask yourself whether there is really any value in this. A lot of the free website builders that are available today will display the site building company’s branding on your site, and this is not something that you should be doing when you’re trying to build your own business at the same time.
There are some website building solutions that are paid for monthly and this means you can get rid of the branding. You should only use these if you are building a simple website and you have some basic technical knowledge.
If you are building a comprehensive website with a lot of different features that need to stand out from the crowd, then it makes a lot of sense to work with website professionals who have many years of experience in the industry and have worked on a lot of websites like yours. Look for experts who have expertise in the type of site you are building, for example, you can get help on your Prestashop website from professionals who understand and have built many of these websites.
Content mistakes
Next, we have to talk about the content on your website. This is also important and it is an area that a lot of people are getting wrong at the moment.
The worst thing that you can do is duplicate content that you have found elsewhere. It is important to have original content on your website so that people feel like they trust you and they have peace of mind when they land on your website or interact with your business.
You also need to make sure that content is presented in an attractive way and it should be free of any grammatical errors.
Black hat techniques and SEO problems
Aside from this, it is imperative to make sure that you optimize your website. You can have the most beautiful website on the internet but if no one sees it, you need to ask yourself what is the point?
Visibility is imperative. The only way that you are going to achieve this is by optimizing your website effectively. This includes using a range of different techniques such as link building and also adding keywords into your contact naturally.
One of the biggest mistakes that we see a lot of businesses make today is that they use black hat techniques in order to try and move up the search engine result pages. This is something that we never recommend because black hat techniques go against the terms and conditions that Google has set in place.
Some examples of these approaches include the likes of keyword stuffing and incorporating words in white text on your website so that viewers cannot see the words but the search engine can. While this may seem like a quick fix, you are going against the rules and regulations that have been put in place by the search engines and the only thing that is going to happen here is that your website will be punished in the long run. The best thing that you can hope for is for your website to drop down the search engine result pages. However, we have seen a lot of businesses that have been removed from Google altogether because they have purposely breached the terms and conditions that Google has put in place. This can be incredibly difficult to recover from, so make sure that you always build your online presence in an organic manner.
We hope that the information that we have provided you with in this blog post has shown you some of the biggest mistakes that people make when it comes to building their online presence. If you have made any mistakes mentioned in this blog post, there is no need to panic but you do need to make an effort to put these errors right so that you can enjoy greater success online.
