The ever evolving website has emerged from its scarce beginning, to swiftly approaching 1,000,000,000 websites of niche information across the globe. However, all websites are not created equally and the shelf-life of yours can be directly related to the blueprints that you set for your site's architecture.
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When drafting those blueprints you should remember that Rome wasn’t built in a day, and despite all it’s glory, it still fell! It’s common knowledge that most ventures fail within their first 5 years and in this digital age, a bad website can expedite that timeline. So what makes a website fail? Why are they unsuccessful?
Here are 11 possible reasons:
Not Responsive
This is a simple one. Grab your tablet or mobile phone. Does your website scale to fit your device's size naturally and maybe more important, is it aesthetically pleasing? With the increase of mobile use and Google’s recent Mobilegeddon, this is an issue you have to fix!
It’s Ugly
Your website is an ugly duckling that’s never had the chance to turn into a swan and that could be hurting you! Familiarize yourself with popular websites around the web. What do they have in common? How are their layouts, color schemes, etc.? How does their information flow? Remember, you only have that one chance to make a first impression!
Too Busy
This furthers what we discussed in #2. New web designers often have a penchant to include as much information as possible on their home page. How many times have you gone to a website and been inundated with multiple advertisements, too many clickable links, or far too much imagery?
By giving visitors too many options, you are actually limiting your ability to collect leads. Focus on what you do best or general inquiries and go from there.
Impersonal
It’s vital to display the people behind your brand and connect with your visitors on a human level. This may be difficult depending on your industry, but there are certain ways every business can do this including less stiff language, creating staff profiles, biography pictures, creating links and badges to your social profiles.
Not Optimized for Conversion
After years in the industry, TechWyse understands what makes websites convert. It could be as simple as changing your imagery, colours, call-to-action buttons, or messaging, but small changes can make a big difference.
At TechWyse, we’ve done this for years and we know, if you want your site to succeed, you need to test everything, and always be open to change.
Not Optimized for Search Engines
If you’ve owned a business or built a website, you’ve probably heard the term SEO thrown around a lot. SEO, or search engine optimization, encompasses a plethora of techniques to appease Google’s search algorithms and get you found higher in organic search results.
It’s vital for the success of a website and there are many small adjustments you can make to help your needle in the haystack stand out a little more. That being said, SEO can get quite technical and there is definitely a delicate balance between the art and science of it all. Except, no substitutes for an expert!
Bad URLs
This is a really simple one. URLs are a lot more important than people realize, they need to have relevancy to your business, not be too long, and maintain naming conventions throughout. It sounds overly simple, but long strand URLs can be tough to memorize and come off as cluttered.
Legitimacy
Use your website as a portfolio to share company accomplishments, awards, and social media profiles. These badges project legitimacy to your brands and show visitors that there is a real business with real people behind the curtains.
It’s important to note that if you are going to share your social media pages via, say a Facebook button that links to your page, make sure said pages are active. There is nothing worse than sending a user off site to visit a Facebook page that has 3 fans and hasn’t had an update since March of 2011. Legitimacy lets visitors know the lights are on and there is someone home!
Slow Loading
This is self-explanatory. If your site takes ages to load, it creates a poor user experience, causing a high rate of bounce. Slow site speed could be the result of a variety of factors (See Moz Blog’s 15 Tips to Speed Up Your Website) and it’s important to always be looking to improve upon, thus creating a better user experience.
Content
Content is so crucial to your success online. It is the meat and potatoes of your SEO efforts and without quality content, don’t expect to get results. Your page may be filled with content and you might be content with it (lame joke, sorry), but this doesn’t mean it’s high-quality. When I say quality, I mean useful, evergreen content that is not overstuffed with keywords and reads naturally. This will help people to stay engaged with your pages, improve your search rankings, and overall, increase the user experience. The development of a blog that shares an evergreen content strategy is also highly recommended.
No Incentive to Come Back
Create recurring visitors by developing resources that are helpful to your visitors. This could be a forum to ask a question, a tool you’ve created or host, or even an often updated useful blog that keeps visitors coming back.
For example, at TechWyse our resources section features a number of tools, videos, and infographics relating to our industry, such as our Facebook Image Checker for Promoted Posts or our Lorem Ipsum Checker.
Find out what your audience needs and become the source for it. Of course it doesn’t have to be a highly developed tool, it could even just be a helpful form to answer questions or your helpful blog.
We would love to hear your thoughts on this. Please feel free to connect with me on social media @TysonHuggins or leave a comment below!
on
I am just getting started in this field and I’m teaching myself as I go along. Info like this is very much needed for me.
Thank You.
on
I agree most of the websites get referral traffic. But having a catchy and easy to remember name creates a good impression on the audience.
And Tyson I agree that having a responsive design is crucial. But I have seen blogs hosted on Blogger which are responsive, but they become ugly. They turn into a minimalistic website with ugly interface. The themes are responsive, but they loose their charm on mobiles. Is it because of Blogger as a platform or the themes aren’t configured well for mobiles?
on
URL also matters for Search Engines, because it is another clue you get on search engine on what page will you end up. After all, you only have a short description full of keywords and a title otherwise.
Also, URL matters for Search Engine Ranking. I don’t know where I saw this, but the fact the keyword you search is in the URL is a strong sign for search engines.
About the blogger problem, it’s just that often the mobile theme is computed from the desktop one by the system, or even worst – it is the default theme of Blogger, while they thought of personalizing it in Desktop.
Finally, I really find the worst, worst thing, ever, is lack of legitimacy. Ending up in ghost town social pages feels so amateur…
on
I don’t think these days URLs are that important, or at least not so much that they would drown your business. Why I say that? Easy: people are more likely to get to your site through a search engine or through a link somewhere else. Who writes a full URL on the address bar? No one!
Having said that I agree that some effort should be put in when creating the strcture of your URLs.
You mentioned ugly and busy sites. What do you think about popups and popunders on websites?
on
Hi JB,
Thanks so much for commenting. I agree with you about a lot more people coming from other sources (via search engines, social media etc…) however, having a straightforward, simple URL can keep you top of mind and allow your prospects to easily remember you from other marketing efforts or brand awareness.
I was more in part relating to having proper naming conventions throughout your site so your URLs look uniform and don’t consist of a random string of numbers on every page.
Personally as a user, popups and popunders are an instant turn off. I feel that I am the architect of my own browsing experience. Taking that navigation out of my hands disrupts navigation, and can be beyond frustrating.