Whether you are a local business with an online presence or a large e-commerce company relying on the Internet to deliver all of your visitors and sales, the quality of your website will dramatically impact on your bottom line performance, which is why making sure that you avoid the common website mistakes will make sure that you get more from your site and make more sales in the long run.

Too many businesses rush to get a website live and then wonder why, 4 months down the line there are few to no sales, never really understanding that although the product or service is important, the quality of the journey and the end point of the website is even more important, with just one or two errors or issues able to stop those sales flowing in. Although we all strive for some kind of perfection in our business, our marketing has to be as close to perfect as possible and your website falls into this category.

If your website makes these mistakes, then your online marketing, SEO, PPC or Email Marketing campaign is pretty much a no go from the start, as although it easy to blame other platforms for your lack of success, quite often, failure begins at home.

Below, we look at the 7 website mistakes that are probably costing you sales and business if your website is guilty of them.

The Journey

So many businesses underestimate the importance of the customer journey online, as the first time they see your business mentioned elsewhere, through to landing on your website has to be a consistent journey in terms of brand and product / service information. If your visitor clicks through to your website expecting to find a blue car for sale, but ends up on your car service page, you have just ruined the journey for the customer and only if you are lucky will they decide to hunt through your website to find what they originally came for. Think about the customer journey to and through your website and aim for total consistency at all times and make the journey so simple that all customers will find it easy.

Your Content

Your content can make or break a potential sale or enquiry, so if your website is packed full of irrelevant, not checked and just basically rubbish content, the reflection on your business is pretty obvious. Service pages should be concise, engaging and sell your company, product pages should be relevant, informative and allow the customer to quickly make a decision or lead them to more information should they want it. Your content has to be perfect, it has to be grammatically correct and it has to be engaging, else your content is going to let your business and ultimately your potential sales down.

Slow Loading Pages

Your modern day website visitors do not hang around and they are simply not prepared to wait for ages to see the full page load and get the information they need, so if your site is slow and the pages take an age to fully load, you have a problem. Bear in mind that we now live in age of quick decisions based on immediate information, if the customer does not get what they want within a few seconds, they will hit the back button and go, leaving you with a high bounce rate and very low sales from your website.

Lack Of Calls To Action

The lack of a phone number or contact address on your page is proven to lower your enquiries and sales, as at any point during the visit to your website, it needs to be easy to see how to contact your company or how to make the purchase. Tucking your contact details away simply will not do, as not only does easy access to contact information make for quicker decisions, but it can also reassure the customer that you are a “real” business and not some scammy website that has been set up quickly to capture their credit card details.

Not Responsive Or Mobile Friendly

With over 50% of your traffic now likely to come from mobiles and other types of smart devices and tablets, if your website does not work on them, you have just lost half your sales, simply by not having a fully functional and responsive website. It is crucial that your site works on phones, tablets and traditional PC’s / Laptops, as the use of mobiles to surf, find and buy is only going to get more and more over the next few years, so making sure you capture this market is crucial if you want to increase your business online.

Terrible Images

So very often webmasters and business owners forget just how important images and videos are for their business, especially for those that sell products, meaning that for these type of businesses the images can help or hinder that sale immediately. If all of your images are low quality, hard to see and just look rushed and poor, this reflects on your product and ultimately your business quality, so if you have images on your site, make them high quality, easy to find, relevant and make sure that they do not stop your page loading quickly.

Technical Errors

Around a year ago I had a client call me to say that enquiries had really dried up and they were getting nothing from their website, despite the fact that they were getting 5 – 10 really good enquiries a day previously. The client panicked and thought the worse but I simply asked them have they tested the contact routes, and no, they had not, and yes, this was the reason – the contact form had broken due to a website upgrade. So, the moral of this story is that always make sure if you notice a drop in enquiries or you are simply not getting any, check all of the forms, shopping baskets and page loading, as this could well be the root cause of your issues.