Try to be honest for a moment and think does your business website generate relevant leads or traffic? Hundreds of small business websites do not make sales or even inquiries. It is almost like having no site at all.
Below I have explained seven critical mistakes in small business websites that are often ignored or overlooked and fixing these will lead to better conversions through your site.
Bad Website Names
Ideally, the website should reflect the nature of your business or be brandable and easy to remember the name for the users. If you need any help check our domain services page.
Common mistakes which happen include:
- Long domain names
- Using symbols or special characters
- Using spammy names and extensions
- Confusing or misdirecting names
Unable to Tell Who Are You
Usually, visitors who come to your site will be impatient, and they often will decide whether to stay or leave within five seconds.
Due to this reason, you should not make the user scan through paragraphs of text merely to identify who you are and what products and services you offer.
Bad or Slow Hosting
There are countless times where we closed a website because of slow loading time, so if a visitor visits your site and found it slow then, he/she will do the same with your website. We offer the best affordable web hosting in Sri Lanka.
Reasons for slow hosting include:
- Hosting companies oversell the web space
- Low standard web hosting hardware and resources(these often happen with cheap hosting services)
- Your hosting does not fully support your website software and resources
- Your web page contains many unoptimized resources
- Your website uses bad theme and or many resource-intensive plug-ins
Poor Site’s User Experience
It is a critical factor which often gets overlooked because it’s to track or identify poor visually and structurally designed websites unless you are an experienced web user or a digital consultant.
Common factors which affect the user experience include:
- Using bad color combinations
- Using confusing site structure
- Not using the user-friendly theme
- Poor site accessibility through various devices
- Using bad styles, unreadable fonts, pixelated images, etc
Call to Action
You can find this mistake on many sites where your front page or landing page does not have a convincing call to action to encourage visitors to act such as contacting you through email or phone, filling out a form.
Tip to increase conversions on your call to action: you can use eye-catching buttons, highlighted text or unique features in your theme such as I have used in this line, this will increase attention toward your CTA.
Testimonials
A testimonial from your customers is like a vote towards your product or services. When real people in the local community are willing to put their stamp of approval on the goods or services you offer, potential customers are much more willing to act.
New and Relevant Content
Your business is your passion; you should always have something new and exciting to say about it! Adding blog content at least once per week to your website is the perfect way to keep the search engine spiders from Google, Yahoo! and Bing coming back. It increases your subject matter authority resulting in higher rankings in the search engines.
Conclusion
Keep in mind that these are small mistakes but remember even one new additional customer will lead to compound profit in the years to come. So if you are a small business owner take appropriate measures to fix the above issues if your website has them.
Please comment or contact me if you have any additional tips you think is essential for small business websites or if you need any further help.
