It can be hard to realise that a project you’ve put time and effort into structuring is faulty or has not given you results you had hoped for. At these times, the best thing to do is review your progress and figure out what might have gone wrong along the way. In this blog, we look into the reasons your website is bad… even if its just a bit.
A good way of getting around this problem is to identify those issues that you may or may not have noticed or contributed to. In this post, we hope to make that process easier to deal with by discussing five reasons your website may be dysfunctional, or, quite frankly, bad at achieving the purpose it’s been designed for:
Problematic Mobile Compatibility
It’s estimated that around 72% of website activity is found through mobile devices or devices outside of the usual ‘desktop computer or laptop’ web browser environment. For this reason, it’s essential to make sure your website offers suitable mobile compatibility for a range of devices and screen sizes.
What matters is utilising a web design agency like Trident, which can help you make image spreads compatible and adjustable, and that features or widgets can be loaded. Regular testing is also important and the smooth running of your website can be helped with regular maintenance.
Poor SEO & A Lack of Google Optimisation
If you hope to encourage organic traffic, you need to make sure your website is optimised for Google. Appropriate keywords, helpful content that solves issues, and good formatting gets you most of the way there. It’s also a good idea to make sure that the custom links for each post are properly defined.
Check the best SEO tips to make sure you conform to those standard practices.
A Lack Of Cross-Platform Promotion
Ultimately, you need to promote your website. Cross-promotion can be achieved by posting article titles to sites like Twitter, for example, using the hashtag feature there to increase visibility. If we wait for solely organic traffic to come from our search engine ranking, we’ll effectively neuter just how many visitors may be exposed to our website in the first place. Make sure you’re promoting outside of your own page and reaching people on other channels.
Slow Loading
Slow loading pages are often caused by unoptimised web formatting as well as large images. This can be a problem when those with slower connections wish to visit your website, but it can frustrate those with fibre broadband, too. Google now includes page speed as a ranking factor, so a slow website can hurt your SEO. Remember, a good portion of your users will rely on cellular data. As fast as 5G is, our foresight in web design should perform the grunt work when delivering our content to visitors.
Broken or Defunct Pages
Most people know exactly how frustrating and tiresome it is to utilise a website only to be greeted with pages that don’t load, are broken in their formatting, or return a 404 as if they had never existed in the first place. This is especially annoying if it’s encountered when trying to do something essential, like managing an account or booking a service. Make sure that all of your links redirects head to valid pages, and it can be healthy to integrate a ‘report this page/bug’ feature so that users can quickly inform you of any issues you may be unaware of.
Poor user experience
A poor user experience can be a number of the above adding up to a poor user experience, but it goes beyond this. A poor user experience relates to the design and how the person can use your website. This might mean them missing key bits of information, or not accessing the right pages because the layout is poor, through to not purchasing or getting in touch because the call to action is in the wrong place or missing altogether.
With this advice, you’ll be able to go back to the drawing board and manage a much better website next time around. If you need a bit of help and would prefer to put your website in the hands of professionals, then get in touch with us today. We take all the hassle out of your website design, ensuring that it functions intuitively and innovatively. If you have a website that you think is performing poorly in search results, or you need support maintaining it – we can help you.
