How Can You Prevent Website Development Mistakes?
Are you losing your customers due to careless website development mistakes? Most companies that internally develop their websites without prior related experience often make mistakes that affect business growth.
According to Google, 70% of websites take excessive time to load.
Having an exceptional website that offers a great user experience attracts new customers and increases sales profitably. After all, a website should simply tell visitors the “what”, “where”, “why”, and “how” that underlies what the company offers.
Effects of a Bad Website Design
The quality of your website design will be instrumental in taking your business to new heights even in this competitive environment, or it may otherwise influence business volume declines.
Many mistakes made in the website development process can easily be prevented. If you already have a website to work with, it is not that challenging to correct those mistakes.
Review your website strategy, which should include why you have created the website, what client demographics you wish to target, how you will attract targeted traffic, and how will you maintain your website. Doing this will help you discover opportunities to improve the usability and quality of your website.
Here are the Most Common Website Development Mistakes:
- Lack of a Call to Action:
All websites should have a Call to Action (CTA) to encourage visitors to progress into being converted into customers. Your website should illustrate your products and services efficiently to your clients to make the journey seamless to maximize the CTA’s effectiveness.
Do not complicate the things by writing creative content; your website needs to have a simple, short, and snappy call to action so that the visitors understand what they should do. A designer should keep forms short to ensure that more people submit them.
- Analyze Website Performance:
More than 75% of businesses do not use any website analytics tools, so they can understand its performance.
At a minimum, install Google Analytics to track your website easily. This will let you know your customers’ interests and it will help set performance goals for your site. Therefore, you have useful information that can help adapt your website strategy effectively.
- Poor Use of Content:
Fresh content is essential to attract new customers and enhance their interest in your offering. As search engines like Google and Bing strive to deliver the most relevant information to its users, writing detailed and keyword-rich copy is essential to increasing the value your website brings to your business.
A website designer should keep an eye on content by making its font, size, and style more attractive. Fresh content should be accompanied by complementary images and interactive elements.
- Nonexistent Contact Information:
The website of your company should have the correct contact information to help your customers easily get in touch with you. Most of the business owners do not have their complete contact information on their site.
Users should never have to work to find contact information. If they do, they will go to a competitor that has provided their contact information. It is effective to provide as many contact methods as possible for your audience to reach out to you. We advise that you consider integrating a chatbot into your website to provides timely service in the method that serves each user in the best way.
- Excessive Links
While we are a fan of link building to help users locate complementary content and to help improve search engine rankings, too many of them can disrupt the user experience.
- Not Scalable
Most companies don’t consider scalability within the website development process. Plan out your website development project, which will help if your company expects to grow. Start by selecting a scalable database and web server that will better adapt to growth. While uploading photos directly onto a web server can work if you don’t plan to grow, using shared file storage will more easily help scale the website as business grows.
- Ignoring SEO
SEO is often ignored in website design. Something as simple as including an image on each page of your site supports SEO initiatives. However, SEO goes far beyond that as intelligent backlinking, eliminating duplicate content, and having crawlable website architecture are pivotal to rank high in the search engines. Properly planning how you will develop a SEO friendly website might even save you from rewriting it.
Strong Best Practices that Prevent Website Development Mistakes
- Use an effective call to action that provides your audience with a clear understanding of what they should do next if they are interested in your offering
- Deploy website analytics tools to track the performance of the website
- Engage customers through comprehensive content marketing initiatives
- Update blogs regularly to engage your audience and build thought leadership
- Provide all the methods to visitors in which they may contact you easily
- Provide a mobile-friendly experience in which website elements adjust according to screen size
- Optimize your website’s loading speed to provide the best experience for your visitors
- Have helpful schema markup elements to make it easy for search engine bots to scan the content of a page
Avoiding Website Development Mistakes Going Forward
For the best web development that drives business results, have a conversation with an experienced digital marketing agency to help assist your company can improve its online presence through a new website.