Your company’s website is one of the most critical meeting points between you and your customers. It is one of your sales teams, working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and it can reach thousands of potential customers at once.
Maintaining a website optimized for performance and conversion is crucial. It helps you find ways to win new customers, become the leader in your industry and build customer relationships.
CMS platforms
At Publi Web Média we mainly use 5 CMS platforms, depending on our clients’ needs:
- Magento / Adobe Commerce, a powerful and scalable e-commerce platform designed for stores with large catalogs or high sales volumes, for both B2C and B2B
- PrestaShop for large e-commerce sites that require web service integration with the company’s ERP
- Drupal Commerce for e-commerce and membership sites that require web service integration with the company’s ERP
- Drupal for large corporate websites
- WordPress for showcase-type websites like ours
Since the most popular CMS is WordPress (nearly 750,000,000 websites currently run on WordPress, of which 37,500,000 are hosted at WordPress.com), I will focus this article on WordPress. That said, best practices are always worth following, whatever your CMS.
We have managed hundreds of WordPress websites for many years. After a while, a series of common website problems became apparent to us.
Keeping a website up to date and relevant involves much more than simply making sure the content is current.
Here are the common problems and how to prevent or fix them.
1. Websites left for dead
The biggest problem we encounter is companies whose website was built and then never touched again once it went live.
About half of the small businesses we work with have their administrator or receptionist manage their website.
As a rule, this is because the company that built their website is unable to provide ongoing support.
In most cases, the people responsible for managing the website:
- Don’t do it because it scares them
- Don’t know how, because nobody trained them
- Try to do it, but end up breaking something on the site
The technical maintenance and support of your website should be left to a team of professionals.
The exception to this rule is if your team is technically savvy or your company is large enough to hire an in-house web developer.
If that isn’t the case for your business (don’t worry, most small businesses fit this model), you will probably save money by outsourcing maintenance and support, since you and your team will be freed up to focus on revenue-generating activities.
Another big advantage of being freed from technical constraints is that you can afford to create new content for your website.
If you can keep doing this consistently, Google will reward your website with better search engine rankings.
Websites must be constantly improved once they go live, based on user feedback and on what works.
This can lead to more leads and sales generated from your website, turning what would otherwise be a static liability into a business asset.
2. Outdated website design
A problem that goes hand in hand with point #1 is outdated website design.
Web design is often an underrated service. Many small business owners think they can build their own website to save resources.
As a result, business owners often overlook or neglect key aspects of web design that make websites successful.
Your website must represent your brand as professionally as possible for your business to be credible. You don’t want to give yourself a headache when it soon has to be redone.
About 40% of the companies that ask us for help say that making their website more modern and professional is their top priority.
Do your website’s design and overall layout reflect your brand identity? With billions of websites online, you must make sure yours stands out from the crowd.
A professional web designer’s job is to create a website that is perfect from top to bottom. It is also their job to make sure the best technology is used under the hood so that the website performs at its peak.
To learn more about what to consider when designing for the mobile web, click here.
One important thing to note is that you shouldn’t make the mistake of hiring a graphic designer to redesign your website.
Most graphic designers can mock up a website in Photoshop. However, there are major differences between the disciplines of graphic design and web design.
Is your website working for your business?
Your website should be the number one salesperson and marketing tool of your business. If it isn’t, you need one.
I’ve lost count of how many business owners tried to modify their website, or asked their graphic designer to do it, before coming to us.
As a rule, the project is being restructured because they couldn’t determine what the right thing to do was.
In these cases, the most often overlooked web design elements are the following:
- Design that complies with current modern, professional web design standards
- Websites designed to be Google-friendly by following Google’s best practices
- Layout optimized to work properly on mobile devices as well as desktop computers (responsive design)
- Integration with social media channels to encourage social sharing of content
- Design focused on converting leads and sales
Here are some actions we recommend you take to make sure you don’t fall into the same trap:
- Use the expertise of a professional web designer.
- Browse your website. Does it represent your brand in the best possible way? If not, it may be time to rethink your website.
- If you aren’t already, I would recommend using WordPress to manage your website.
- You should back up your website at least once a week. If you update your website every day, backups should be made daily.
3. Websites that aren’t backed up regularly
Is your website backed up regularly? If not, it should be!
In a recent study of more than 40,000 of the most popular WordPress websites in the world, 73% of those websites were vulnerable to hacking.
If your website is targeted, the attacker could gain access to your website and destroy it entirely.
What impact would it have on your business if you had a working website one day and came back the next day with nothing?
Would the time and cost required to rebuild your website have a devastating effect on your business?
Don’t leave this huge risk to chance. You need to make sure your entire website is backed up so that, if it is attacked, hacked, destroyed or lost, it can be restored quickly at any time.
The frequency of your backups should match how often your website content is updated.
You will want to back up your website more regularly if you are constantly adding new content or selling products.
I suggest backing up your website at least once a week. This is done solely to protect your online investment.
Above all, backup archives must be exported somewhere other than the website, and even somewhere other than the server that hosts your website. In an ideal world, backups are made and exported automatically every night to a Dropbox or Google Drive account.
Is your website working for your business?
Your website should be the number one salesperson and marketing tool of your business. If it isn’t, you need one.
There are many backup options for WordPress that do an excellent job. I have already written about the top backup plugins for your WordPress site.
It is important to understand that if you back up your website on the same server where it is hosted, you may not be able to restore it at all if the server goes down.
Moreover, if your website is hacked, the server is likely compromised, which means you may have no backup at all.
Make sure the backup is stored in a reliable external location so that, if the server goes down, you can still restore your site without notice.
Once you have set up your chosen plugin, run a backup and see how you would be able to restore your site if you needed to.
Each solution has its own restore procedure, so make sure you work it out before you need it. It could save you a lot of headaches. Better yet, have someone take care of it for you.
We use a combination of solutions to perform our backups at Publi Web Média. We use Akeeba Backup on all our WordPress websites to make sure backups are created automatically every night for us.
We also use WP Engine to schedule daily backups. If necessary, we use other plugins depending on the client’s website. WordPress Backup to Dropbox and BackupBuddy are some of the solutions we have used.
Here are some action items to make sure your website is properly backed up:
- Make sure your website is backed up consistently. If it isn’t, set it up!
- Determine your restore options in case your website goes down.
- Consider backing up to multiple locations to avoid accidentally losing the backup.
- Make sure the backup location is separate from your website so you can restore it if the server fails.
- Calls to action must be contextually relevant to what you offer and to what your customers expect from you.
4. Lack of on-page optimization and calls to action
Seven times out of ten, your potential customer will search for your product or service on Google before finding your business online.
Each person will type a different keyword into Google to find what they are looking for.
If you want your website to appear more often in Google when your customers search for solutions, its content must be relevant.
On the other hand, you don’t want to overload every page with dozens of keywords just to appear in search results.
Each page should be written so that it sounds natural when read aloud. It should also have its own topic with its own set of keywords.
By putting different keywords on each page, you will find that some pages of your site rank better than others.
When people search for your content, you can’t expect every user to follow exactly the same path to find your content on your website.
They may not visit your home page at all.
Visitors may land directly on your contact page or on a single blog post. That is why it’s important to have strong calls to action on each of your pages.
To make sure your website has the best chance of capturing conversions, each of your landing pages should provide engaging content that leads to a relevant call to action.
A call to action is your customer’s next step toward working with you.
Potential customers won’t be inclined to take the next step with your business if the next step isn’t clear to them.
Think of it as a funnel where you capture leads at the top and gently push them through the funnel to make the sale at the end.
Here are some of the most common calls to action:
Call your business phone number
Enter your contact details and send a message through your website’s contact form
Enter your email and subscribe to your news
Like / share the page with your social media followers.
Usually, a call to action includes an incentive for the customer to take action, such as being able to download something or receive exclusive content.
Often, sites don’t display a clear contact method at all.
Far too many service businesses that manage their own website have no business phone number on their home page.
So I wonder whether these businesses want their potential customers to buy their product or service. In fact, according to HubSpot, 51% of respondents think “complete contact information” is the most important element missing from many companies’ websites, while 44% of website visitors will leave a company’s website without contact details or a phone number.
A great way to build your email subscription list is to include the option to subscribe to your blog. This can be either somewhere on your website or it can be built in as a pop-up.
When a pop-up appears, it is called interruption marketing, because you are interrupting your users with a pop-up window.
Website visitors often find that having a pop-up on a page discourages them from browsing and can sometimes cause them to leave your site.
A better way to use a pop-up on your website is to have it appear when someone clicks a link or tries to leave your website.
That way, you only interrupt their viewing experience once they have finished interacting with the page’s content.
This form of lead generation is called exit intent. That is, the lead capture pop-up only appears when the user shows the intent to leave your website.
Thanks to social sharing options, it’s easy for your visitors to market your website for you.
With a relevant and useful offer, you will be able to grow your newsletter subscriptions with minimal loss to your website’s user experience.
5. Few or no social sharing options
If your website has a blog (there’s no reason it shouldn’t), you want to make it simple for your readers to share your content.
It must be shareable so that your website is passed on to other potential customers in their own networks.
That way, your audience can build awareness and visibility on social media without it costing you a penny!
Share buttons will help you get your content in front of your customers.
You will often see share icons floating on the side of the page (look for an example on the left of this page) as you scroll through the site.
Another great place to put these icons is in your website’s sidebar or footer area. Once your reader has finished reading the blog post, they may navigate to another location on your website or leave it.
For this reason, you want to make sure your blog content is well linked to the other pages and blogs on your website.
You can also tease your viewers with relevant content from your blog by having a related posts section at the bottom.
If you have a decent social following or if your content receives a lot of shares, a good idea would be to include social counters.
Social counters, like social networks, can help build social proof with your visitors, encouraging them to stay on your website.
Social proof can help reinforce the idea, for your potential customers, that your business is the best fit for them. More than 70% of internet users trust online opinions, and social media allows opinions to be heard.
Using social media is a powerful way to grow your audience and make your business known. Social media is a way to increase your business’s exposure to people who might not have seen your business otherwise.
It is important that people can easily interact with your business or brand, not only on your website but also on social media.
Being able to share your content easily makes it easier for your customers to interact and ultimately helps you grow your business.
Remember that your target market won’t be absolutely everywhere (especially on the internet).
To save time and money, make sure you focus your social media efforts not only on what works for you, but also on where your customers actually are.
Is your website working for your business?
Your website should be the number one salesperson and marketing tool of your business. If it isn’t, you need one.
Here are some actions to improve your website’s use of social media:
- Add social proof to your website
- Add social links and share buttons to your content.
- Set up social media accounts for your business.
- Only use social media accounts if you can afford to and if your customers are online.
There are many tasks and areas you need to spend time on to make your website perform well. The bigger your website, the more time you will generally need to maintain it.
6. Web tasks that are tedious to manage yourself
When businesses decide to manage their own website, they often don’t realize how much time it takes.
86% of the business owners who contacted us over the past 12 months said they found it difficult to manage all aspects of their website.
They agreed that it would have been more beneficial to bring in a team to help with their site from the start.
Modern content management systems such as WordPress have reduced the time needed to manage websites.
However, I’m sure you can do much better with your time than debugging plugin errors!
Simply put, small business owners are much better off doing revenue-generating activities.
It is easy and relatively inexpensive to delegate the task of ongoing website management to a team of professionals.
If you aren’t sure whether delegating the management of your website will be cost-effective, proceed as follows:
Install a time-tracking app such as RescueTime, which will quietly track time spent in the background while you work.
At the end of the month, check your RescueTime dashboard and see how much time you spent working on your website.
Think about how much each hour of your time is worth to your business. Multiply that rate by the time spent working on your website to get an idea of the opportunity cost.
If that cost is higher than what it would cost to outsource it, you should definitely consider delegating this task to a team of professionals.
Having a well-maintained website is essential if you want your business to thrive.
The more time and effort you put into improving your website, the more valuable it will become.
Here are some action items to help you better manage the time you spend on your website:
- Do a task audit on yourself to see where your time goes.
- If you spend your time updating or maintaining your website, you should consider delegating or outsourcing these tasks.
- Google Analytics is the de facto standard for website analytics. It’s free, powerful and easy to integrate into your website.
7. No website statistics or conversion tracking
If you don’t know your website’s statistics, it’s like driving a car blindfolded. You need to know your website’s numbers so you can determine which parts need to be optimized, added or revised.
You must be able to track these numbers consistently, because this information will change and evolve as more work is done on the site.
Some of the most important data you should capture are:
- Where do your website visitors come from? This information will help you better pinpoint the marketing channels that bring people to your website. That way, you can focus your marketing efforts on the channels that send visitors to your site.
- What keywords do your visitors type into Google to find you? Using Google Search Console, you will be able to know exactly which key phrases bring visitors to your website. Knowing this, you can prioritize your SEO efforts, improving your web page’s ranking for keyword searches that drive traffic.
- What do visitors actually do on your website? When you know which elements and pages your visitors interact with, you can strategically create more pages. On the other hand, if key pages of your website have huge bounce and drop-off rates, you need to prioritize improving them.
- What are the demographics of your online audience? Knowing more specific details about your website visitors, such as gender, age or location, can help you refine your marketing messages. Showing the right offer at the right time to the right person will help your website maintain the best possible conversion rate.
It’s not unusual for businesses to have no idea whether or not they have website analytics.
Setting up tracking and acting on the results will ensure that your website is your hardest-working employee every day. It really pays to have the right team behind you to make sure you have the data you need to know.
Having good data is a good start; however, data is useless if you don’t act on it.
Using the data, look at what needs to be changed, updated, removed or deleted from your website to improve performance.
Are your customers following the flow of your website the way you want them to?
Are they following through on your call to action? Which parts of your page generate the most clicks?
By using your website data to make decisions about improvements, you put yourself ahead of your competitors.
Here are the actions to take to improve your website’s statistics and tracking:
Add Google Analytics to your website if you haven’t already.
Get your data in shape. Have your data analyzed so it tells you where you can improve.
SEO is, and will remain, one of the most important and viable traffic acquisition channels in 2019.
8. Little or no thought given to getting the website ranked
How does your website rank on Google?
Thinking that if you build it, they will come is a surefire way to make sure your website stays hidden from the public.
For your website to work as a real asset, it must be easy for internet users to find.
This is especially true if your target audience searches Google for the solutions you provide.
More than 80% of all purchases (not just retail) start online. Your customers can easily compare and find alternatives to your service. That is why your website must be kept up to date to meet your customers’ constantly changing needs.
One of the main questions businesses often ask is how to improve their ranking in search results.
Search engine optimization (SEO) comes down to a number of aspects, on and off your website, and involves considerable work.
We have written quite a few blog posts about SEO, which you can read here.
One of the first things to know is the website theme that powers your site.
Your website’s theme is like the foundation of your structure and should have been built with SEO in mind.
It’s important to have the right foundations before building a big building. The same goes for your website.
If the framework is bad, what chance do you have of building a great tower?
If you’re just starting out, I would advise you to look at frameworks such as Genesis, designed with SEO in mind. At Publi Web Média, we built our own WordPress framework from scratch to include many SEO best practices by default.
This framework has helped propel many of our clients’ websites, and our own, to the top of Google in competitive niches such as web design.
With the right framework in place, the next thing to do is your website’s content.
You want to make sure you create the highest-quality, most engaging and easy-to-read content for your website.
One thing is clear: your website’s content is not limited to what you write on your blog.
In fact, the most important content to get right is the content of your top conversion pages, for example your product and/or service pages.
As for your blog, each post must contain both a unique title and unique content.
One thing to keep in mind is whether you repeat content on your website. You must make sure your content provides value and is NOT copied and pasted from other websites. I covered this in a previous article.
If Google sees two pieces of very similar content, it will take note and will generally choose to display one of them rather than both. The page displayed may be your competitor’s rather than yours in its search results.
A web page’s loading time is another factor that has an incredible impact on your ranking.
You should always aim to have every page of your site load in 2 seconds or less.
If your customers have to wait more than a few seconds to access your content, you will probably lose them.
SEO is something that is constantly changing and requires a dedicated person to stay completely up to date. If you follow the SEO suggestions above, you will be on the right track for long-term success.
Here are some action points on how to improve your website’s SEO:
Make sure your website is built to the best SEO standards. Get a second opinion.
Create content for your website consistently. Make the content unique.
Run a website loading speed test on your website.
Having a disjointed user experience on desktops and mobile devices will frustrate your users, forcing them over to your competitors’ websites.
9. Poor user experience on mobile devices
It has become very common for consumers to access websites while on the go and away from their computers.
More than ever, more people access websites on mobile devices than on desktops.
Therefore, your website’s layout and design must display and function properly on these devices. Otherwise, in most cases, you are losing more than half of your potential audience.
Only 17% of websites are considered mobile-friendly by Google, and many businesses don’t know their website isn’t mobile-friendly.
It’s also important to point out that nearly 60% of all online searches come from mobile devices, not desktops.
That is why your search engine ranking must be number one.
When building a website, you must take all screen size variations into account. Often, people who manage their own website will have built it to display properly only on desktop computers. When it comes to viewing it on tablets or mobile phones, it becomes impossible to use.
In some cases, you will see websites that load on a mobile subdomain, for example http://m.example.com.au.
Google has said this is not the preferred way to display your website on mobile devices.
All websites should be designed using the latest design standards. Your users will thank you, and so will Google. A responsive website is easier to maintain and is often more usable for your customers.
Here are some action items to improve your website’s mobile experience:
- Use your website on as many devices as you can (desktops, tablets and mobile).
- Invest in responsive mobile design so your customers enjoy the best possible experience on your website and on their devices.
In conclusion, these are the 9 main problems that small business owners run into when managing their own website.
For each problem, I’ve included a few tips to help you succeed. Take advantage of the resources available to you.
You will be able to grow and scale your service offerings much more easily, more quickly and without headaches than if you do it all on your own.
These tips will give you enough knowledge to help you optimize how your website works while letting you focus more on what matters most to your business. Keep your website up to date and fresh so that search engines love you.
When you rank high on Google, you naturally attract more customers. Make sure you have a backup plan that lets you restore your website if something goes wrong.
I wouldn’t want to hear that you lost your website because you didn’t have a backup when it was hacked. You would be surprised how many people I’ve talked to have been hacked and had to start over.
Did you find this article helpful? Let us know, and if you’d like to know how we can help your new business, or if you’d like to learn more about our e-commerce website development services, don’t hesitate to call us at 1-877-426-7272 or use our contact form in the menu above.
