5 Website Mistakes That Are Killing Your Traffic (And How to Fix Them)
These days, virtually every business needs an online presence to compete in their respective marketplace. One key tool for establishing an identity online is a website. You can use it to tell your story, publish blog posts, sell your goods and services, and build trust with customers, among other benefits.
Of course you'll need to implement a strategy for bringing targeted traffic to your site, but that's only half the battle. The other half is keeping your visitors on the site long enough to covert.
If after checking your analytics, you notice visitors are quickly turning away from your site like the plague, you're probably making one of the following mistakes.
Are You Sabotaging Your Traffic Flow with These Mistakes?
1. Grammar & Spelling Issues
Grammatical errors may seem like a small sacrifice to make as long as you're consistently churning out content. However, in a study conducted by Global Lingo, 74 percent of those surveyed said they pay attention to the quality of a company's website content. To some extent, grammar and spelling mistakes can also translate to lost revenues—in the same survey, 59 percent said they would be reluctant to do business with a company whose site and marketing materials have apparent errors.
Such niggling mistakes have a significant impact on your brand’s credibility. Poor spelling and grammar indicate a lack of professionalism—you failed to take the extra step in ensuring your work quality. Moreover, badly written content tends to be shared and linked less often because it sounds untrustworthy.
Fortunately, grammatical and typo errors are avoidable. Read the draft repeatedly to spot mistakes. Fatigue can sometimes happen, so ask someone else to go through it. Consider hiring an editor or having the write-up outsourced to a reliable company.
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2. Not Mobile-Friendly
If you have fewer site visitors than before, it could be that your website isn't mobile-friendly. As more people consume content on the go, it’s no surprise that most of them browse on their tablets and smartphones. When your website content looks jumbled and misaligned on smaller screens and loads slower on mobile devices, you are likely losing out to competitors.
Google recognizes the importance of optimizing your website for mobile viewing. In 2018, the search engine encouraged web page owners to be more mobile-friendly with mobile-first indexing when turning out search results. If you haven't do so yet, take time to assess the mobile version of your website.
If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, you can still fix it with a few tweaks. Google offers a short guide on building sites for mobile devices. One important tip is to opt for a responsive web design wherein site content adjusts whenever the screen size changes without changing the URL. Your web developer will know what to do, but if you don’t work with one, read up on CSS and Javascript and learn about Google’s AMP pages.
Make your site easier to navigate on phones and tablets with a mostly vertical layout, fewer drop-down menus, and bigger checkboxes, form fields, and links. Also, reduce elements that clutter the display and take up precious space, such as distracting sidebars and annoying pop-ups.
3. Your Site is Too Slow
Page load speeds have increasingly become an essential part of the user experience. Most people expect websites to load in a couple of seconds. According to Google, the average load time for mobile pages is seven seconds. But that's still slow, and the bounce rate, or the probability of viewers leaving, significantly increases the longer it takes to view a single page. Not only does this impact traffic, but it also cuts off conversion and potential sales. Retailers Amazon and Walmart noticed that millisecond-delays in loading translated to lost revenues.
Loading times also affect the number of pages viewed—a key metric in e-commerce sites. Faster load speeds allow customers to view more pages and find something that may pique their interest, leading to future purchases.
If your page load speed isn’t quite up to par, you can still trim it to an acceptable pace. Set a target load time for every page and try to stick to it by compressing and optimizing all elements present. Also, consider switching to a content delivery network or CDN, a set of web servers that provide web content nearest to the end user’s location. This method ensures faster content delivery, thanks to numerous servers instead of one. Lastly, regularly monitor your page loading speed.
4. Poor Website Design
Another factor that affects your site’s traffic is its design. A website that doesn’t look well thought out makes your business look less credible. The first few seconds of browsing your site are crucial. If you fail to impress potential customers with a shoddily made site in that short window, they will look at other possible alternatives—your competitors.
So what makes a poorly designed website? A lot. Having too many elements on the page is not only cluttering, but it also slows down your loading speeds by a stretch. Different colors and varying fonts are visually unappealing and make it difficult for your visitors to stay and explore your website. Fortunately, you can find quality design themes in a pinch on the Internet.
But that doesn’t mean there should be plenty of negative space—the lack of clickable links, essential information, and a navigational menu also turns off visitors because of the disappointing user experience. A site without mobile optimization looks bad on smaller screens and loads slower, causing guests to abandon your page.
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5. Lack of Optimization
Search engine optimization or SEO is something familiar to most people but often misunderstood. It is a marketing strategy for improving your site’s visibility on search results using the right keywords and phrases. When someone searches for a particular topic, you want your website to be on top of the relevant results list, driving site traffic in the process.
Some web page owners do not know where to start with SEO. Fortunately, there are companies like Crazy Egg that help with the nitty-gritty of optimizing your website. But if you take on such an endeavor, remember three essential elements—keywords, content, and off-page signals.
Placing keywords in the title and header tags, meta descriptions, and the body content is one way of telling search engines of your page’s relevance to the searched topic. Long-tail and location-based keywords increase your chances of turning up on the results page.
Having quality content ensures that your visitors will stay and engage. It is also a way for other sites to reference or link back to yours, boosting your credibility and authority in your niche.
Note that all five website mistakes are interconnected—when fixing one, be sure to pay attention to others as well.