Having a good website is important in today’s eCommerce landscape, where customers often visit a brand’s website before making any purchase or even making a purchase online. There are some mistakes that people often make with their websites that hurt their SEO rankings and customer experience. In this article, we’ll address those mistakes in detail and share with you how you can avoid them to enhance your digital presence. 

Your website takes too long to load

Customers are impatient these days; they expect websites to load in seconds and aren’t hesitant to leave a website that takes forever to load. This means that if you have a low website, you can lose tons of customers without even knowing it. Fast websites aren’t just good for customer experience, but they get higher rankings on the Google search engine as Google doesn’t favor websites that take more than 3 seconds to load. 

So, what makes a website load slowly? There isn’t just a single reason but many, such as large media files, unclean code, bad hosting, cashing issues, etc., so if your website doesn’t load fully in 3 seconds, get your development team or a third-party vendor to diagnose the issues and fix them to improve your website optimization.

Too many pop-ups

People try to use pop-ups on their websites to capture visitor leads, but this practice has become annoying for web browsers. Isn’t the first thing you do when a pop-up appears is look for the exit button? On top of that, pop-ups can slow down your website’s loading speed and lower its rank on search engines, so the more pop-ups you use, the more your website’s rankings will suffer. 

We aren’t saying that pop-ups are all useless, but you should use them reasonably where they are relevant and valuable to the customer in their shopping journey. Showing an eBook offer to every visitor seems like a bad way to use pop-ups, but a discount pop-up at the checkout page can work very well.

No clear CTAs

The next mistake that people often make is not having clear CTAs on their websites. CTAs, such as “Message us”, “Get a quote”, and “Visit product page”, act as directions for visitors to navigate a website and allow them to know what they need to do to find what they need. The last thing you want to happen is lose a customer who’s highly interested in your product but ends up leaving because they couldn’t contact you for further information.

Your website violates design norms.

You only have the first few seconds to impress a visitor when they land on your website. A well-designed website can quickly generate trust with the visitor and motivates them to keep browsing, so make sure that you spend a lot of effort on making your website as attractive as you can to grab your customer’s interest. 

Here are some tips on how you should approach your web design:

• Make sure that content on every page is clear and easy to understand. 
• Create an intuitive route throughout your website for visitors to navigate your products.
• Avoid using non-standard link colors. 
• Take quality photos to showcase your products.
• Use the right colors that represent your brand aesthetics.

No responsive design

Responsive design allows your website to adjust to any device which your customers use. Unresponsive websites are abandoned immediately because the content, even if looks great on PCs, becomes unviewable on mobile devices. As the use of smartphones and tablets for web browsing is surging in recent years, having a responsive website is a must if you want to grow in the digital world.

Your website lacks simplicity.

When it comes to web design, simplicity wins over sophisticated design. Have you ever left a website or an app because you couldn’t find out how a certain feature works on them? Many people think that if they make their website look like a piece of art, visitors will be impressed, but the reality is visitors only get impressed by websites that make their lives easier, not harder. So don’t add unnecessary features and pages on your website, and don’t add unnecessary imagery or video that distract your visitors, just stick to what’s relevant to the customer’s buying journey.

Typography mistakes

Can you read this message?

Web visitors enjoy the content that they can read and chew effortlessly, so don’t use artistic fonts that look great but are hard to read. 

Your content isn’t focused on visitors.

Knowing who your customers are is one thing, what’s more, important is creating website content that is relevant to those customers. After you create content that is valuable for your target audience, you can track how visitors flow through your sites to see what type of content does best with Google Analytics. This tool will allow you to gain insights into your audience’s content preferences and create what’s relevant to those. You can also view what pages your visitors are dropping without taking your desired actions and improving them. 

No chatbots

One important element that many people forget to add to their website is a chatbot. A chatbot is a software that allows website visitors to communicate with your customer support staff directly on your website. There are tons of chatbots on the market, and many of them are free, like Tawk.to. Chatbots can provide personalized answers, suggest related products, direct your customers to relevant pages, etc. You can set up automated answers with a chatbot to provide your customers with commonly asked information quickly when your staff is absent. 

Final words

When people first hear about your brand, they can’t know how good you are behind the scenes, and your website is the first place they visit to find out whether you’re trustworthy and live up to your marketing or not. A good website will help impress your customers, acquire leads, and build your brand. 

If your company doesn’t have the expertise to execute your software development project in-house, it’s best to find a service provider to help you. 

CMC Global is among the top three IT outsourcing services providers in Vietnam. We operate a large certified team of developers, providing a wide variety of stacks to help you build your application in the most cost-effective way and in the least amount of time. 

For further information, fill out the form below, and our technical team will get in touch shortly to advise!