5 reasons why your website isn’t performing and how to fix it
Is your website failing to deliver results for your business? Perhaps you’ve recently had a new website built and it just isn’t working the way that you had hoped. From lack of traffic to drop in sales, we’ll take a look at some of the most common reasons why your website is failing to perform and what you can do to rectify them.
1. Not mobile-friendly
In case you hadn’t noticed everyone has a smartphone and they do much more on them than just checking their social media profiles. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, then your potential customers won’t stick around and will simply head to one of your competitors. Think that your customers only use a computer? A massive 44% of all website traffic comes from mobile with a further 7% from tablet devices.
If you want to ensure that your potential customers have the best experience possible, then you need to make sure your website is mobile-friendly.
How to fix it
This isn’t a quick fix and often the best way to make your website mobile-friendly is to get a new website developed. Luckily, this is much more straightforward then you’d imagine, and you’ll benefit from an updated design that looks great on all devices.
2. Bad user experience
Is your website easy to use and to navigate? Or, does it confuse users? User experience is a big part of modern web design with websites designed around the needs of users. If your website isn’t designed with the needs of your users in mind, then you will be creating friction where there should be none.
From your landing pages to your navigation and the content on your pages, your website should help guide visitors into taking the actions that you want while making it easy to achieve their goals.
How to fix it
There are plenty of options when it comes to improving user experience but one of the easiest is to use a platform such as Google Analytics to track how website visitors are using your website. This can help to identify potential problems and help you re-design your site making it simpler for users to navigate.
3. No SEO
One of the biggest reasons for lack of results is that your website hasn’t been optimized for the search engines. 93% of all online experiences begin on a search engine so you really do need to make sure that your website is optimized for search. Some of the signs that your website SEO is not up to scratch include lack of organic traffic, unable to find your website on Google, and general lack of website visitors.
How to fix
Google Search Console is one of the first places to check to see if there are any issues that may be affecting your website and stopping the search engines from crawling your webpages. It will also help you to see which pages have been picked up and indexed by Google and what search queries people are using to reach your website. This in turn can help you put together a plan of action for your site and work on its SEO.
There’s much more to SEO than just making sure your website can be indexed and a good SEO agency will be able to put together a plan of action for your business to help you get more website relevant website traffic to your website.
4. Slow loading website
Is your website slow to load? Website speed is incredibly important if you want to provide your users with a great experience. Slow loading websites frustrate users and cause them to leave, this is especially true on mobile devices with visitors abandoning a website that takes more than 3 – 4 seconds to load.
How to fix it
Using tools such as Google’s Page Speed Insights, GT Metric and Pingdom Tools will help to identify problems that relate to how fast your website loads. General tips include enabling compression and caching, minimizing the size of images and deferring the parsing of JavaScript. For most website speed increase you’ll need the help of a website developer in order to make the changes you need to speed up your website.
5. No call to action
You could have the best designed website in the world but if it doesn’t make it obvious how visitors can get in touch or purchase your products then they will go elsewhere. Calls to action need to stand out and entice visitors to take the next step in their user journey. Take a good look at your website – is it clear what action you want visitors to take on each page or are you missing opportunities to turn clicks into customers.
How to fix it
Go through your website and each page on it, identify what you would like your website visitor to do on every page. This can be different depending on the intent of each page for example for someone reading a blog article the action you might want them to take is to subscribe to your blog, where someone on a product page should be encouraged to purchase. Your calls to action should align with the goals of your business.