You might think you have a pretty neat website. It might look really nice, with its pretty picture sliders and updated HTML 5 coding. But in reality, it’s probably not actually doing anything positive for your company, despite the thousands of dollars you spent paying that internet developer company with the equally flashy looking website to make it.
We sadly come across heaps of poorly performing websites, and that’s because people don’t understand what a high performing website really means to their business.
So here are 6 reasons why your current website (probably) sucks.
1. It Doesn’t Convert
In business, there’s the age-old saying; To make money, you must spend money. Well, if that’s true, then why do you have a website that doesn’t make you any money? Your website should be if not a steady source of income, at least a steady source of leads. This applies to any industry. Your website should be focused on getting people to make enquiries, sign up, sign in and everything else that pushes your customers further into the funnel. You should also be able to directly track exactly how many visitors you’re converting into solid leads, and you should be actively improving that percentage from week to week.
2. It’s Not Mobile Responsive
What’s that? You have a separate web page built specifically for mobile devices? That doesn’t count. With more and more web traffic coming from mobile devices, it is imperative more than ever to make your website properly mobile responsive so that it works across all different screen sizes. This means your website is able to scale to any screen dimension and still look good and function great. An easy way to test whether your website is mobile responsive is to open your page up in a web browser and play around with your browser window size. If it’s mobile responsive, everything should scale properly and elements fold into each other neatly.
3. It Loads Too Slow
Loading times might seem like a trivial problem; after all, your website looks nice, and you have a nice product, so a few seconds of load is worth the wait right?
No, it’s not. Nearly half of web users expect a page to load fully in 2 seconds, and will abandon after 3. 79% of web shoppers who have had a loading problem with a page won’t come back. Web page load speeds also heavily affect your search engine rankings, and people bouncing right off your home page while it’s loading further exasperates the problem. So all those image sliders and super-high resolutions might look nice, but there’s no point if no-one is seeing them.
4. You’re Cluttering Up Your Homepage Without True Purpose
There are heaps of websites that rely too much on their homepage to provide all the information possible. First impressions are super important, so you do have to get it right in the first go. Having said that though, the true purpose of your homepage is to get people off your homepage onto your other web pages as fast as possible, whether it’s clicking through to a registration form, or scrolling down to below the fold. High performing home pages will usually only have one or two lines of text about the benefits your product/service provides, a primary and secondary call-to-action (Sign up here + Find out More), and one nice, static image of your product or service.
5. Your About Me Section is Terrible
This is a bit of a trick section. Good “About Me” sections should still be focused around your visitor. Visitors are selfish people, so even when they are looking up more about you, in reality, they’re looking up extra information on whether you’re the right person to help them. So while a little smattering of personal information can’t go astray, you should really be focused on spelling out your benefits and why visitors should choose from you instead of the schmuck down the road. Use ordered and unordered lists, break sections up so there isn’t massive chunks of text to keep it all engaging, and if you are including head shots of your team, make sure they are specifically taken head shots to bring extra credibility to your website
6. You Haven’t Thought About User Experience
User Experience is all about how someone feels when using your website, and placing information right where users think it should be. Another term for UX is user flow. Bad user flow means high exit rates and high visitor dissatisfaction. However, rather than purely rooted in the world of design, UX is highly data driven. Go thorough your analytics and see which pages have high Bounce and Exit rates, as this usually indicates a problem. Also, there are a plethora of heat mapping and recording tools that allow you to see how exactly visitors are using your site, where they’re getting lost and if they’re clicking on things that aren’t there, or aren’t clicking on things you want them to click on.
Need help with making your business site work for you? We can help! Call Greatson Media today: 877-283-2777
