Six Mistakes Business Owners Make When Building a Website.
As a business owner, one of the best things is to create a nice web design that introduces your business to customers. However, there are a few pitfalls you should look out for when creating your website.
Designing a website for your business can be incredibly fun. There are a ton of website builders to choose from, multiple ways you can bring your content together, and it's a great way to introduce your business to your customers.
However, the further you go into the rabbit hole of designing, building, and iterating on the website, the more you may start realizing what pictures are missing… how tedious it becomes to adjust each and every design element on the page… how much time gets sucked into tweaking the design so it works for multiple screen sizes… it gets to a point where you might be thinking “You know what? Everything is there… it looks decent enough. It’s good as-is.” However, this is just the beginning of a long relationship between you and your website. There are many mistakes that get made during the process that may negatively impact your website and its ability to bring in customers.
The website lacks a clear objective.
It’s common for someone to consider their website as a giant billboard in their own corner of the internet. However, a website is much more involved than that. It’s only as good as the amount of thought you’ve put into what it should be accomplishing.
This means it’s essential to define what the goals and objectives of your website should be. Is it to drive sales? Is it to communicate your products and/or services? Is it to educate your customers about your field or craft? There might be multiple reasons, and that is perfectly okay. Write all of these objectives down, rank them by priority, and start considering how the website comes together based on your rankings. Ideally, these all should come together to form what would be known as your value proposition to your customers.
What is a value proposition?
It’s the primary reason why someone should care about you and your business. It’s the one thing that makes you different from every other company you compete with. A strong value proposition enables you and your business to build a brand around your company.
Typically, your website is the best place to communicate your value proposition and what your company stands for. From the way your website is designed, to the content you put into it, the stronger you can make your value proposition the stronger your website inherently becomes.
The website is neglected after it launches.
Imagine that you just bought yourself a brand new car. The interior smells amazing, it runs incredibly well, and you want to drive it everywhere. Within all the excitement of owning your car you forget to check the oil as regularly as you should. Maybe you put in standard gas instead of premium. Then slowly over time, your car starts to fight with you more and more with different little problems. Similar things happen with your website when it isn't being taken care of.
Your website is the center of your online business presence. In some cases, the website may be the heartbeat that keeps your company going. To keep it running as optimally as it can, it's important to refresh it with new images, videos, and content so it remains appealing and relevant to your customers. Many companies fall into the trap of setting up their website and forgetting about it afterwards. According to TechReport, 33% of small businesses reported website maintenance as one of their biggest challenges.
Ignoring this work not only affects who comes back to your website, Google also notices and may start ranking your website down because of it. Regular website maintenance isn't the most fun thing to do... however, there are options we provide for getting the help you need. Just like how mechanics are a good investment for maintaining your car, we are available to help with website maintenance as needed.
The website becomes a dumping ground for everything.
On the opposite side of neglect, there’s also the risk of loading your website up with too much content. Some business owners get excited about standing up a website and fall into a trap of wanting to add anything and everything to it. Not only could this confuse your customers, it can also negatively affect your site's user experience… which Google is now taking into effect when ranking your website in search results.
Before adding something to your website, always consider the value of it: both for your business, and for your customer. It’s always better to refine your content and align it with the goals and objectives of your website. Not everything has to absolutely be on the website.
There’s nothing in place to drive traffic to the website.
It’s very common to see a company stand up a website and become frustrated that nobody is coming to it. According to HubSpot’s State of Marketing Report from 2024, marketers continue to face challenges generating traffic and leads. With how many companies and search engines are including AI into their workflows, it'll only become more difficult to bring traffic over time. Optimizing the website for search engines certainly helps, but there are still other avenues for bringing customers to your website.
Easy ways of bring traffic to your website would be adding your web address to marketing materials and business collateral, leveraging digital marketing and social media advertising to build awareness, or even standing up a blog to share updates and industry knowledge. It’s important to understand that not everyone is at the point of purchasing your goods or services, so having multiple avenues of engagement becomes incredibly important for building awareness for your website.
Not getting the correct hosting solution for your website needs.
There are a ton of hosting solutions out there, and it’s easy to get confused or overlook what exactly you need to keep the website running. It’s common to look at the most affordable hosting solution and call it a day. However, not all hosting solutions are created equal.
Most hosting companies sell what’s known as “Shared Hosting”, which means your website is sharing the same computing power and resources with hundreds of other companies and websites. This can result in your website taking much longer to load compared to competitors in your market.
According to HostingAdvice, in Q1 of 2023 around 58% of global website traffic came from mobile devices. Also, 47% of mobile users won't wait longer than two seconds for a website to load. This is a very short amount of time to grab someone's attention, and sharing important website resources with hundreds of other websites certainly won't help.
Another consideration… what happens if those other companies mistakenly allow a hacker or malware into the system? That could potentially leak into your website and cause bigger issues down the road.
Lacking, or possibly messing up, analytics for your website.
The best way of understanding how your customers are using your website is by setting up analytics in a way so you get a clear picture of what they’re clicking on, which pages they’re looking at, and what content they’re spending the most time with. Many small business owners only track sales and conversions… but overlook everything else happening on the website.
It’s important to get a full view of how your customers are engaging with your website. Are your customers dropping off the website the moment they arrive? Maybe they're not finding the content they're looking for. Do they seem to be going directly to frequently asked questions? That could be a sign that the page they're looking at isn't as descriptive as it should be. There's multiple micro interactions a customer exhibits that are all vital for making your website more user friendly.
Thoughts and next steps.
There are a ton of things that go into building a website. Sometimes it can be difficult to pinpoint what exactly is driving your website to perform the way it is. However, you don’t have to go at it all alone.
If you’d like help with your website, we’re always available to jump on a quick call and discuss what’s going on. We can even handle the website updates and maintenance so you can focus on running your business. Send us an email for a free consultation today.
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