Having a website online isn’t enough for businesses. You must provide enough value to your visitors and prove your company is worth engaging with. And when 59% of people prefer to engage with beautiful websites, you can’t afford to take things easy with your website design.
With how crucial designing business websites is to a successful company, you can’t afford to make common mistakes. Avoid the five small business website mistakes below to create a fantastic experience for your visitors.
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1. Cluttered Design
While cramming as much business website content as possible on every page is tempting, doing so is a mistake. Each page should have a single purpose. If you distract people from that purpose, it’s hard for them to find the necessary information.
Design your site to focus on the primary content of a page. Keep other elements to a minimum and use other design strategies to help people focus on the main page. You can give people more information after they finish reading what they came to a page to figure out.
2. No SEO Optimization
You can only get so far by paying for web traffic. Your profit margins are constantly squeezed in this case. It makes more sense to get free traffic where you can.
One of the best ways to do this is with SEO. You target Google with keywords on your site and optimize everything to rank higher. You’ll get free traffic for as long as you retain your keyword rankings.
3. Missing Call-to-Action
A call-to-action is a critical piece of business website content. It isn’t enough to have informative content if you want to generate new business. How does someone know what to do to continue down the sales pipeline?
A call-to-action gives people direction. You can direct people to do anything from joining an email list to contacting your company directly. You may get a few conversions without one, but a call-to-action drastically improves your customer acquisition.
4. Slow Page Speed
Site speed wasn’t an issue when most people browsed the internet on desktop computers. Most people had cable internet, so they had access to fast internet speeds.
That isn’t true anymore with mobile devices. If you have images for a website that are large and tons of content, it can add bloat to your design and website download size. Minimize this as much as possible to improve your website speed for people with slow connections.
5. No Responsive Design
It’s no secret that much of the internet traffic today comes from mobile users. This is a problem if you only design a site for desktop devices. Your design will look bad on smaller screens and make it hard for people to read your content.
A mobile-friendly website will use a responsive site design. Design for mobile users first and add elements to your design to appeal to visitors with larger screens. Your responsive design will detect your visitors’ screen size and change the design to fit the screen.
Don’t Fall Victim to Common Small Business Website Mistakes
There is more to a business website homepage than finding a nice-looking theme and installing it for your website software. While this can give you an excellent design, it isn’t always enough to give your visitors what they need. Avoid the small business website mistakes above to ensure you offer a valuable experience to potential customers.
Head back to the blog to find more tips that will help you optimize your website.