The goal of a business website is to make money either selling products, generating leads, or providing information to prospective customers. But how do you know if your website issues are working against you; causing you to lose money and potential business?
A business website is essential for several reasons. You want an online presence to build trust in your brand and show potential customers that you exist. The purpose of a business website is, quite simply, to grow your business.
But what do you do if website problems are causing your website to work against you, impeding your goal of creating more business and income? How do you know if your website is actually turning away potential customers?
The following are five common website problems that hinder marketing goals and may be causing your business to lose money and/or potential customers. If your website is suffering from any of these issues, please contact us today for a full website audit.
5 Ways an Inefficient Website Loses Money
- Web pages are slow to load
- It is not user friendly on mobile devices
- It isn’t secure
- It has been hacked
- Lack of Search Engine Optimization
1. You Have a Slow Website
Website speed is the first impression you make to potential customers and 79% of online shoppers said they won’t return to a website if that site is slow to load. Time is money and, if your website is slow to load, there’s a good chance you’re losing business because customers don’t have the patience to wait.
A slow website can be caused by many issues. Some of the most common website problems are poor server configuration, poor image optimization, too many HTTP requests, and failure to use caching.
Server performance
Poor website performance is almost always an issue with your web hosting company. Inexpensive web hosts cram hundreds of websites onto shared servers, which means your site is sharing resources with every other website. Website performance often suffers when shared hosting is used.
We provide efficient website hosting for our clients on our secure, fully-managed, dedicated servers, so consider coming on board!
Server location
Every time a visitor loads a page on your website, the data has to travel from their location to the location where your site is hosted, and back again. The further away your server is from the visitor, the longer it takes for pages to load.
Images aren’t optimized
Proper image compression, or image optimization, not only makes your website load faster, it also enhances SEO. It is important to reduce file size by ensuring the images on your website are the right dimensions, file type, and smallest file size possible in order to avoid long delays in page load times.
Too many HTTP requests
HTTP requests are requests for data that get sent to the server whenever someone visits your website. These requests contain a variety of information, including the files that need to be downloaded by the web browser in order to properly view your website. Each HTTP request increases the load time of your website, so it is extremely important to minimize the number of file requests if you want to speed up a slow website.
Not using caching mechanisms
Website caching can be very beneficial to website performance. Every visit to your website requires complex behind-the-scenes processing in order to build a web page. By implementing caching, which is the process of storing pre-built pages ahead of time, you can serve web pages in a fraction of the time.
2. Your Website Is Not Mobile Friendly
If your website is like the majority of sites on the Internet, it receives approximately 30% of its traffic from mobile devices. This is a significant amount of traffic that will end up costing your business money if you ignore the user experience of these visitors.
Mobile-friendly websites improve Google rankings
The overall number of searches from mobile devices now outnumbers searches from desktop computers. As a result, Google indexes your site based on how it sees your site from a mobile perspective, in order to provide a better experience for the majority of its users. It is recommended that you display the same content to both mobile and desktop users, otherwise, your rankings could be negatively impacted.
In addition, Google evaluates user experience when indexing websites. If you do not have a mobile website or responsive website, you will likely begin to see a decrease in search volume traffic, if you haven’t already.
3. Your Website Is Not Secure
Securing data on the Internet is becoming increasingly important, whether it is your password for logging into your online banking site or credit card information when you’re making an online purchase. SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is the method of encrypting the data transmitted over the Internet between your computer and a web server and all major websites employ this functionality in order to protect their customers’ information. You can see this by the presence of HTTPS in your browser address bar.
Why should you use SSL (HTTPS)?
First and foremost, SSL provides trust. Web browsers will soon provide visual cues to warn visitors if your website is insecure if it contains a web form of any kind. Eventually, browsers will show an insecure warning for all web pages that are not secured by an SSL certificate.
Second, if you have an e-commerce website, SSL is a requirement for meeting PCI Compliance. Most customers will also be reluctant to enter their payment information on an insecure website.
Finally, Google is using HTTPS as a ranking signal, which means their algorithm takes into account whether sites use secure connections when determining ranking.
4. Your Website Has Been Hacked
You may think “I’m just a small business, why would anyone want to hack me?” Unfortunately, the threat to small businesses is growing. Sixty percent of all online attacks in 2014 targeted small and midsize businesses, according to Timothy C. Francis, enterprise leader of cyber insurance at Travelers.
If your site is hacked, it not only compromises your information but the information of your users as well. This can result in a number of negative consequences for business owners.
In addition to data breaches, a hacked website will directly impact your search engine rankings. Search engines look to see if your site is safe for visitors and will display a warning similar to “this site may be hacked” in their SERPs, devalue your domain until the hack is cleaned up, and traffic from search results will drop drastically.
Most business owners lack the time or ability to stay on top of website security, which is the primary reason Ten9 IT Services adds security and maintenance services to every client website hosting plan we manage.
5. Poor Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization is one of the most important investments you can make for growing your business and, in today’s competitive market, is more important than ever. Failure to implement proper SEO will result in fewer people knowing your website exists.
SEO is not just about search engine visibility; proper implementation involves improving the user experience and usability of your website so visitors are more likely to complete the intended action when they visit. Because users trust search engines, having a presence on the first page automatically increases your website’s trust, and the value of being seen by hundreds or thousands of searchers per month is well worth the cost of an SEO marketing campaign.
How to Fix These Common Website Issues
You might be asking yourself, “How do I fix or prevent these issues from affecting my website?” That’s where Ten9 IT Services comes in! We specialize in optimizing websites to prevent all five of these issues and more.
If you’re concerned that your website is working against you, feel free to contact us to see how we can help you prevent these five website issues (and more).