A website is a hub for almost all internet marketing efforts. It’s the true face of your business in front of people. This makes it crucial to frequently monitor websites and keep an optimum website performance. After all, it plays a huge role in increasing conversions and ROI.
Anything that hinders the proper rendering, features, and functionality of a site should be immediately fixed. But before that, it’s important to identify various issues beforehand to come up with appropriate solutions.
Speaking of which, here are the 12 most common website problems and how you can fix them. Let’s take a look at these in detail.
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Outdated Web Design
Some businesses are still under the impression that they can save resources with a DIY approach. This prompts them to build their own website design with drag and drop. While it can make some parts of web design easier for those with less than sound technical knowledge, some things are best left to the pros.
To build credibility and authenticity, it’s important that your website represents your business as authentically as possible. It should reflect the identity and intention of a brand. To ensure peak performance, it’s important to use the best technology for website design.
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Cross-Browser Issues
If your website is fully functional on Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, congratulations! You have accomplished a major task by making your website usable on two major web browsers. But what about the rest?
Does your website render flawlessly on other less popular browsers and different browser versions? If not, it’s time to give cross-browser testing some serious thought.
There are other browsers such as Safari, UC browser, Opera Mini, and so on. You can get plenty of potential customers from here. It wouldn’t be a wise move to miss out on those leads when you can easily perform cross-browser testing on both mobile and desktop browsers. All you need to do is select the right tool.
Speaking of which, LambdaTest facilitates live interactive as well as automated cross-browser testing on more than 2000 real browsers online. You can also test with a variety of combinations of operating systems, browsers, and browser versions.
Features such as integrated debugging, geolocation testing, and the facility to test locally hosted pages make LambdaTest a versatile cross-browser testing tool. You can also integrate it with other popular tools such as GitHub get lab Trello, Jenkins, Asana, Slack, and many others.
Seamless collaboration is a cherry on top. Plus, auto-generated screenshots of web pages help make visual cross-browser testing more efficient.
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Broken Links
When you click on a link and it takes you to a page that doesn’t exist or work, it’s a broken link. When visitors click on it they feel frustrated since they don’t get the information they were looking for. Search engines would find them as an indicator of you not keeping your site up-to-date.
Therefore, you need to get rid of broken links on your website as soon as possible. If not it’s going to hurt your rankings and put visitors off to your platform.
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Slow Loading
Do your visitors have the time to prepare a customized cappuccino before some elements of the web page fully load? If yes, they’ll abandon your website in the blink of an eye and never look back.
Slow loading time increases the bounce rate of a website which is detrimental to the rankings. Lack of optimization for mobile devices and heavy visual elements are the topmost reasons negatively affecting loading speed. This makes it important to test for responsiveness and cut down file sizes.
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Lack of Responsiveness on Mobile Devices
Is it easy to come across a person who doesn’t own a smartphone? Probably not. Another common sight is that every other random person you see or talk to is busy scrolling down their mobile screen.
This makes it pretty obvious that most internet users nowadays are smartphone users. Doesn’t that make responsiveness testing a primary process of website development and designing?
If your site fails to load quickly and properly on mobile devices you will lose out on leads. A lack of responsiveness testing will also hurt your search engine rankings, thanks to Google’s Mobile-First Indexing. Regardless of the screen size, your website has to render flawlessly with all its features, elements, and functionalities intact.
We highly recommend a tool called LT Browser that offers 50+ mobile device viewports to test how your website is performing on the latest and legacy mobile devices. You can even compare the performance on two devices at a time.
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Too Much Clutter
Many businesses want to incorporate so much into the website that their own content keeps wrestling for space on the homepage. As a business owner, you might want visitors to see as much information as possible on your homepage. But cluttered pages often have the opposite effect. It confuses readers and distracts them from your primary message.
The clear solution here is to start prioritizing your content. Minimalistic designs always perform better than chaotic ones. The main message you wish to convey should reach the eyes of the user first.
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No Backups
There is nothing more devastating than all your hard work going in vain due to a hacking attempt or technical fault. This calls for an immediate need to back up your entire website. If things went downhill, you could instantly restore it.
There are plenty of plugins to create backups according to a customized schedule. It’s a great step to set up a system that consistently backs your website up in an automated way.
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Certification and Security issues
A website which security issues is open a primary target for attackers and hacking attempts. Not only can a secure website lead to compliance problems, but security issues can also destroy your brand’s credibility. Get an SSL certificate as it encrypts the data transfer.
Some extra steps to protect your visitors’ information include keeping your antivirus software and firewalls up-to-date. You can also deploy security tools that notify you of possible vulnerabilities.
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Incorrect Implementation or Absence of Tracking Codes
Cracking codes facilitate monitoring the website’s performance. They allow you to collect visitor data and show the number of people visiting your website, which pages have the most views, user behavior, and other important metrics.
Therefore, you need to implement analytics measurement code and tracking by directly adding a JavaScript snippet to the HTML of all web pages. However, if you fail to implement tracking codes correctly, it can cause ambiguities and lead to you wrong calculations.
Google Tag Manager is an optimum tag management solution that helps save time and identify incorrect implementations of the code.
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Lack of Social Media Integration
Your readers should be easily able to share content. This would complement your marketing efforts if people start sharing your website’s content on their own. Not to mention, additional exposure on different social media platforms can get you a lot of potential leads.
To fix this issue, you can put social media icons on your sidebar or footer area. It should be easily accessible so that users won’t have to navigate here and there to share with their peers.
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Improper SEO
There is no point in creating an awesome website and content if there aren’t any users to witness it. There is only so much paid advertising could do. Without supplementing it with SEO, you will be wasting precious resources.
This includes both on-page SEO and off-page SEO. Your content needs to be optimized and there should be high-authority sites pointing to your website. Of course, these are just some of the many vital SEO parameters.
The entire internet presents an information war. To get your business off the ground or keep it afloat, at some point you need to stay ahead of the crowd. Search Engine Optimization is one of the best ways to gain a competitive edge.
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Compromised Landing Pages
Landing pages are the heart and soul of your website if you are targeting to convert as many leads as possible. They provide readers with valuable information and guide them to a clear offer.
However, some business owners try the do-it-all approach to the single landing page. In other words, they use one landing page to direct all leads.
The solution is to create each landing page with a purpose and stick to it. Some landing pages either don’t have a call to action or lack clarity in the CTA. Call to action buttons are the quickest and easiest ways to prompt the user into doing what you want.
On a similar note, if they take the action you wanted, make sure you have a thank you page. This will make users feel appreciated and it gives a message that you care for your customers. Having a thank you page also plays a major role in lead nurturing throughout the customer journey.
Summing It Up
The bottom line, you have to adopt the approach of a perfectionist when it comes to developing and designing a website. This will help you alleviate the most common website problems and enhances the user experience. This increases the possibility of converting new leads.
Make both search engines and users fall in love with your website. When you maintain website performance and keep your site conversion-optimized, you can easily nurture existing relationships and build new ones with potential customers.
