Are people leaving your website as soon as they arrive? You might have problems with your website that you aren’t aware of. After all, 89% of consumers will head to a competitor site if they don’t have a great user experience.
Running a website isn’t as simple as uploading it to a server and letting it run on its own. Below are seven common website problems that you can expect as a webmaster.
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Slow Loading Times
The internet has gotten visual in recent years. Instead of blocks of text making up web pages, we have videos and images everywhere. While these things make pages more engaging, they also increase page load times.
Unfortunately, not everyone has access to high-speed internet at all times. With much of your traffic coming from mobile devices, you risk alienating many of your visitors. You need to optimize the speed on your site if you want these people to stick around.
The best place to start is to optimize the images on your site. Compression software is available that will reduce the size of your images while retaining the image quality. Doing this alone can drastically reduce your page sizes.
You can also implement lazy-loading on your website to delay loading images until your users scroll down on the page. This method allows the web browser to focus on downloading critical resources first and not downloading other files until it needs to.
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Bad Mobile Design
In the past, web designers created websites for large screens. There wasn’t much thought to other screen sizes since they can design for the smallest resolution possible and still make it look great on large devices. That isn’t the case today with so many internet browsers being used on small phone screens.
You need to create a responsive web design to solve this issue. Instead of creating one website layout for everyone, your web design will change based on the size of your user’s monitor.
Most designers do this by using a method called mobile-first design. You first create your design to display correctly on small screens. Since it’s easier to add to web designs than subtract from them, you can add more features to your website for larger screens once it looks good on mobile.
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Broken Links
In a perfect world, every page you create on your website would stay relevant forever. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen.
The most common way to remove outdated website information is to remove that page. The problem is that you will likely link to that page from several other pages on your website.
People who visit that page will get a 404 error. They won’t be able to find what they’re looking for and will likely look elsewhere for the answer.
You can solve this error by adding a redirect to your missing pages. Instead of getting a 404 error, your visitors will be sent to a relevant page that can provide them the information they’re looking for.
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Lack of Security
Information is the currency of the internet. Websites everywhere collect email addresses, credit card numbers, and other personal data of their visitors. It’s a serious problem if that information isn’t sent securely.
The lack of HTTPS on your website will leave your site vulnerable to attack. Any information your visitors send to your server can be intercepted and stolen. You need to add a security certificate to encrypt your website traffic.
The good news is that it isn’t expensive to do. The LetsEncrypt service provides free SSL certificates for anyone who wants one. All you need to do is run a few commands on your server or click a few buttons in your web hosting control panel.
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Bad SEO
There are a lot of websites on the internet today. You can’t expect Google to give you attention if you don’t show that your website is relevant. SEO will help you do this.
You can start by using best practices for on-site SEO. Make sure your meta-information is keyword rich and will convince searchers that your website is worth visiting. If you can increase your click-through rate on the search result page, it can signal that your website is high-quality.
Of course, on-site SEO won’t be enough if you’re in a competitive industry. You might need to build backlinks to increase the authority for your website. You can reach out to other webmasters yourself or find help for SEO from companies that are experts in the SEO industry.
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Website Corruption
No matter how bullet-proof your web hosting claims to be, accidents can still happen. You never know when your host will go down, and your website goes up in smoke.
If you don’t have a backup solution in place, you’re out of luck. You’ll need to rebuild from the ground up. This makes it critical that you set up a backup schedule to keep your data safe.
You can do this manually or use software to handle things for you. Try to keep a set of backups on your local machine or another web server. Your backups are useless if you lose them with the rest of your website.
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Lack of Tracking
It isn’t enough to get people to your website. You need to understand their behavior if you want to optimize your website for success. Tracking scripts will give you the information you need.
Start with Google Analytics. This software will tell you where you’re getting your website traffic. Once you have this information, you can set up goal pages to see which traffic sources provide the best results.
You can also use heat maps to see how users interact with your pages. Doing this will let you split test your website. You’ll be able to make small changes to see what gives you the best conversion rates.
Learn About Common Website Problems Before You Experience Them Yourself
The last thing you need is to be stuck with website problems and not know where to find the answer. Make sure you learn about common website issues, so you know what to do when they happen to you. A little work now can save you time and money down the line.
If you want to learn more about how to use your website to drive more business, keep reading our blog. Our posts will give you the tips and tricks you need to know for success.
