Website Mistakes
There are 30’000 billion pages indexed by Google. How do people find you in this ocean of websites? How do you stand out and get noticed? Of course, originality, great content and innovative design are essentials ingredients. But how do you get there? Start by avoiding these 5 website mistakes and your website will be great:
1.Creating the website by yourself
You need to consider the users needs. Your website is meant to convert your visitors, not you! Understand what your target audience want to find on your website. Understand the behavior of your visitors, if they actually spend time on it and where they leave it. Adapt the message and the User Experience (UX) based on their behavior. Test what’s working the best, using tools such as Optimizely for A/B testing (part of your visitors will see a specific message, the other part another message: understand what converts best) or UsabilityHub for 5 seconds tests (real people will record what they do when they land on your website). Analyze the results repair your website mistakes.
2.Underestimating mobile traffic
More than 50% of users are browsing websites on mobile. This shouldn’t even be an option anymore, your website has to be responsive! Would you spend time on websites where you have to zoom to understand what they are doing, while other websites are readable from mobile devices? Not being optimized for mobile navigation means that you are taking the risk to lose 50% of your hardly-earned visitors, simply because the user experience is bad on mobile – read more about this in 7 advantages of a mobile website(link). It also means less chance for you to close a deal: you would have to drive twice as many visitors to get the same amount of sales.
3. Neglecting content will lead to website mistakes too!
You’ve probably already heard about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and how important it is to choose relevant keywords to be one of the top ranking site on Google. Indeed, it has a significant impact on your website’s popularity. But more importantly you should write interesting and qualitative content for your visitors. Do not write the keywords you’d like to be found for every 2 lines. Think about readability! You need to find the right balance between writing only for SEO and completely forgetting about SEO!
4. Ignoring loading speed
Everybody is impatient while browsing the web: if a website takes more than 5 seconds to load, you will probably abandon it. If you’re the owner of the website, it means you will lose a potential client. Avoid overloading your pages with heavy images and other fancy stuff you have found on the Internet, your visitors won’t even see them if they take too much time to load anyway. Optimize your pictures, or install a plugin to do it for you. Use Google’s “Mobile Website Speed Testing Tool” to find out your score, and get some advice on what you can improve.
5. Forgetting about the analytics
It doesn’t matter if you’re starting to build your website or if you have it for years, you should constantly analyze your visitors’ behavior and test what is satisfying them and in contrary, what is making them leave. To get traffic on your website, try different channels and measure which one is working best for you. Be careful! It’s not because emailing is working great at a time that you shouldn’t keep testing other channels, like Facebook Ads for instance.
Users’ behavior are constantly changing. The best tools to analyze your online performances are Google Analytics (link) (mostly, to trackgeneral information) and Mixpanel (link) (to track individual activity).
Still a bit lost with your website’s optimization? Our Team would be glad to help you. Coteries Lab is based in Lausanne and major in website development (mainly based on WordPress) and UX/UI design