Your website is the place where clients develop their somewhat harsh first impressions (oh shit). Let’s be honest, as a person who spends all day on Pinterest reading websites and blogs, if you are not catching my eye or providing me with valuable content right off the bat, you can guarantee an instant click off, and we don’t want that! Let’s take a look at a few of the worst culprits so we can tackle them quick!
1. Not having your website mobile optimized.
It is 2021 babe, if you don’t have your website optimized for mobile users you are not going to be able to keep up! Over 51% of internet users browse using mobile. If you’re website has giant images and hard to read text, I’m up up and away. This is why I design my website templates and custom designs using Showit. Showit allows for you to completely customize the mobile version of your website using the drag and drop capabilities. Many companies like Squarespace create mobile versions for you based on your desktop designs which is great, but can often turn out with oversized images, or important sections like email sign ups being a strange sizes.
2. Broken links.
Before you even think of launching your website, you need to walk through it as if you were a potential clients. Are the links on every page working? Broken links can be extremely frustrating for new visitors to your website that can’t get to where they want to be. Take your walk through slow, and maybe even ask a friend to check and let you know if they find anything.
3. Your website loads slow.
This is the big kicker for me and the number one culprit that makes me turn away because guess what… websites are not meant to load at turtle speed. Trust me, no one will be sticking around to see that giant header image load (Especially for people like me who have way too short of an attention span). A lot of website owners just upload their images from their photographers immediately to their site not remembering that with high quality comes even higher file sizes.
I always always recommend clients to put all of their website images into a file compressor like Compressjpeg. The files remain high quality, while the lower file sizes allow for your website to load like the professional site it is.
4. Hard to find contact information / outdated information
Now it be a bad look for a potential client to try to call you and end up getting a hold of Ollies pizza emporium instead right… yeah I think so too. If you’re someone that changes their phone number, email, or instagram handle often, I would recommend at least twice a year setting a reminder to check all contact information to make sure its easy to find and up to date. And for the love of Ollie the pizza guy, please make sure that you can quickly get to the contact page / content from the homepage.
5. Poor design
A lot of smaller businesses choose to make the quick fixes on their websites that leave them with a very (to be honest) ugly design. I wouldn’t recommend creating a website until your branding is clear and concise, because it will end up giving you a headache trying to remember what font you used before. Here are some of the worst design choices that can turn visitors away from your website.
- Your text is either too small or too large
- No contrast (if you have a light colour scheme, please don’t layer light text on a light background.)
- Too much copy or not enough copy
- Inconsistent branding
- Hard to navigate / find navigation
- Using poor quality photos (dark Iphone photos just doesn’t cut it)
- Unclear clear call to actions
- A kazillion pop ups
Frinklys website templates and custom designs are created to be clear, concise, and help you convert with strategically designed pages!
6. No call to actions
A large percentage of potential clients leaving websites has to do with little value being presented to them. Having a strong call to action and mission statement above the fold of your website can make it clear what you provide, and link them to a page or service that might be of interest. Some examples of call to actions can be links to your services, your blog, a lead magnet that they can download, a share / subscribe button, and call / book now. Adding a clear call to action can raise your conversion rates up to 200%!
7. Not having a secured site.
Lauryn isn’t every site secure? Oh no no no and google makes sure visitors know that! When you visit a website, the url can either have http or https. Https is used when the site is secured and has a certificate. Without the certificate, the visitor is often warned, or blocked from the website until they agree for it to be shown. If a potential client thinks they can’t trust your website, that can be an instant red flag. This is yet another reason why I use Showit. If you have an account/subscription with them they will automatically apply the certificate to your website for free.
Is your website guilty of any of these? Time to kick up your game and make the small changes!
