Do you wonder what is happening to your site? Has traffic decreased? Are your sales going down, and are your website stats at an all-time low? Are you not sure what’s going on? Here are 10 reasons that you may be having these issues.
1. Your content is difficult to read:
Make sure that your website font is the correct size, clear, and easy to read. People should not have a hard time understanding the product descriptions or learning more about your company. If they are, there is a good chance that they will click away before trying to decipher the font or more about you. Colour plays a part in this as well. Make sure that your website font colour is not too light, or too harsh.
2. Too many ads:
A few well-placed ads are fine. However, no one likes to be bombarded with products and services. You never want your readers to feel that you are trying to make money off of them or to stress about trying to exit pop-up ads. Even if you are using ads to gain revenue, make sure that you are not using your site to advertise in an obvious way.
3. Poor navigation structure:
Make sure that your site is easy to navigate. If you have readers coming to your site looking or searching for something and they have trouble clicking around your site they will become frustrated quickly and leave.
4. Unclear product benefits:
Make sure that you are clear about what you are selling. Someone visiting your site for the first time should easily understand what you are selling and be able to understand the product. All of your products should be clearly explained and the benefits to them as well.
5. Lacking an “About Us” page
This is a big one. People like to know who they are buying from. Make sure that you have an informative “About Us” page and that it is easily found. You want to be personable and have customers engage with you. Your goal is for people to read about you, and then feel like they actually know you, and is also your best chance that you’ll have of convincing people to choose you and your products.
6. Outdated website design:
You are trying to communicate and sell to people online, make sure that your site is up to date. There is nothing worse than visiting a site and feeling like nothing has been updated in the past 10 years. By having an up to date site it shows that your company is active and used often.
7. Automatic playing videos:
This is another huge no. Most people prefer their privacy and they don’t want to click on your site and have a video (and audio) start playing. Keep in mind that your customers might be at work or in a public setting and may not want others knowing that they are online at that moment. Audio starting to play announces to others what they are doing. Also, no one wants to have to quickly browse through the page looking for the video to pause it.
8. Your site is not responsive:
The truth is that one-third of every adult in the UK owns a smartphone. This means that at least half of your clients are going to be visiting your site via mobile device. That is why it is SO important that your site is optimized for mobile use. If it’s not you are essentially losing business as your customers will click away and find a site that is responsive. Google also recommends this as site optimization also raises your Google rankings. And who doesn't want that?
9. Lacking in personality:
You want your site to look like YOU. Make sure that your site reflects who you are and what you do. You want it to be unique to you. You know how you want to appear to clients and with that in mind make sure that your website reflects that to others.
10. Loads slowly:
Let’s be honest. The days of dial-up are over. Nobody sits around waiting for a website to load anymore. Make sure that your site and all of its pages load swiftly. This is one of the number one reason people click away from websites-if it loads too slowly. Make sure that yours is up to speed. A general rule is that your site shouldn’t take longer than 3 seconds to load. Much longer than that and people are going to be leaving.
If you are finding that your website is failing the best way to start over is to step back and look at it as a first-time visitor. View it the way that your customers do and look at it from a fresh angle. Be sure to use this guide with these ten tips, as well as be objective. The secret to having a successful website it trying as many things as you need to until you find something that works (meaning sales increase) and then try some more. It may not be one thing but multiple ones that need to be changed, and that’s not a bad thing! For businesses and websites change can be good!
Your goal is to have an active and lucrative website, and although it may take some fixing, it’s a goal you can reach!