Your website is more than just a shopfront for your business, it’s the online home of your brand. A place where you can freely express your personality and expertise without having to fit into the format of the popular Social Media channels.
Websites are fantastic because they cut through the noise of what’s out there - once someone is on your website you’re not competing with other peoples’ social feeds and it’s a big opportunity to make sales.
Often people won’t be able to find your website or they do find it but they bounce off without contacting you or buying something. This is probably because your website is committing some of these common crimes.
Not being properly mobile responsive
The majority of website themes are mobile responsive - as in it breaks the website down to viewing one column at a time, on mobiles. That’s fine but the reality is 59% of all website traffic is via mobile phones so if you’re looking to stand out from your competition, just allowing a theme to break your website design into columns isn’t enough.
Depending on the website theme you’re using you can choose to hide/display specific columns and containers on mobile, define the column viewing order and much more. Customising your header so it’s more mobile friendly and breaking down hero images which have a text overlay, is also a must.
Get your mobile layout looking as good as your desktop layout and you’ll put yourself miles ahead of the competition.
Using the wrong size images
Images which are too big for the container they’re in or are heavy on the pixels will be penalised by Google, affect your SEO ranking and add vital loading time to your website.
Images which are too small will pixelate and blur, losing the detail and making your website look amateurish.
Neither of these are great. Do the work to your images before uploading them to your website - make sure they’re the right size for the maximum input of your site (on WordPress this tends to be 2560px), run it through a compression tool or save it as a web-specific file and finally, select the size you want to use it as, when adding it to the page. In the case of lo-res images, if you can’t find something of a high enough resolution then change the image, don’t put a low resolution image in and hope for the best.
Not speeding things up
You know that feeling when you’re driving and you’re stuck behind a car doing exactly the speed limit meaning you have to drive slower? How frustration can bubble over as you just want to get to where you’re going….
It’s the same with websites - a slow to load website causes frustration and a drop in sales. If the clickable elements on a website are too slow to load, you can bet your would-be-clients are going to click off and go to a faster website.
There are a whole host of ways to speed things up, starting with your server settings, image sizes and then move through the website design. At the very least, make sure your server is running the highest php level and install a cacheing plugin.
Flimsy Calls to Action
There are so many websites out there which look good, have engaging text and clearly have been really well thought out by the website owner but it’s missing one thing….. the Calls to Action. When someone lands on your website they want to know what the next step is. Whether that’s booking a call with you, buying the product now or filling in a contact form let them know what you want them to do.
People hate to get things wrong so if you don’t have a button or clickable text, then people won’t get in touch with you in case that’s not what they’re meant to do. Don’t worry about being overly bold with your Call to Action, the most vibrant Calls to Action get the best responses.
Sporadic Blogging
Blogs are amazing. They allow you to showcase your expertise, build authority in your industry and speak to your audience in a slightly more relaxed way to the rest of your website text. They also do wonderful things for your website rankings and play a big part in Search Engine Optimisation. Therefore setting a blogging schedule of creating new content, ideally every week or fortnight but at the outside, every month, is essential.
Often when people are busy, blogging is the first thing they stop doing. It helps to build blogging into your weekly tasks and block out time for it. If you’re not sure what to blog about take the most asked questions in your industry and answer each one separately in a blog.
There’s an amazing book: Content Fortress which walks you through this step by step.
Not utilising your email list
Strictly speaking this isn’t about websites BUT it should be an essential part of your digital marketing strategy. A successful marketing strategy includes:
📌 Website
📌 Social Media
📌 Email Marketing
Email marketing is particularly brilliant because the people who sign up to receive your emails genuinely want to hear from you. This is then known as a ‘warm lead’ as they already have shown interest in what you do/sell and it’s up to you to now keep in contact with them, answering any questions they have and showing you’re the right person to buy from.
Lots of people like to send a weekly email and there are loads of things you can email about:
📌 A new blog post
📌 Podcast episode
📌 Industry Inside info
The possibilities are endless. If you don’t have an email list currently, sign up for a free plan using an email client such as MailerLite and get started today.
