Having and maintaining a website can feel like a lot, but it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Even so, small business website mistakes can happen.
At Boot Digital, we believe it’s important to have a business home base on the internet, where visitors can learn and interact with the people, products or services you provide.
You don’t have to be a webmaster in order to lay a good foundation for your website. But allowing a site to get stale and old, or worse – out of service – can cause issues.
Here are six small business website mistakes that should be fixed if you have them.
Not Having Responsive Code
We all used to access the internet on computers. Now we get it nearly anywhere we want it. Laptops, tablets, and smartphones are daily within grasp.
If your website can’t deliver a quality viewable experience on a phone, laptop, and everywhere in between, you will inevitably have some trouble with people finding it. This leads our list of small business website mistakes.
That’s because Google, the most used search engine, ranks websites based on how they perform across devices.
If yours is hard to read on a phone or loads slowly, Google drops it down lower in search results, below others that perform better.
Google is able to do this automatically, and has been doing it for years. So if your site isn’t made to handle different screen sizes, watch out – people searching for products or services like yours will have a harder time finding you.
Unsecured Websites
Another major site function needed wherever you browse or search is a proper SSL certificate. These free and low-cost items allow visitors to look at your site and even enter information over a secure connection.
Without it, many browsers will put our a warning to the visitor that the site they are on is not secure, and could be dangerous to proceed. Who wants that?
The simple fix for this is to install an SSL certificate, allowing viewers to visit over a secure connection.
Forgetting About SEO
SEO stands for search engine optimization. We may talk a lot about Google when it comes to sites and relevance in search, but it’s important since it is the world’s most used search engine.
Optimizing a website for search means to structure information on its pages in order to influence search engines like Google to display it as a top result in relevant searches.
Search engines like Google use an algorithm to read pages 24/7/365. Good SEO practices bring a website closer to conforming to Google’s algorithm.
The better SEO your site has, the more better engines like Google can surface it to people searching for things your website talks about. See how SEO played a role in this business case study.
Old Content
Bringing a website’s SEO on track is necessary and good, but not having recent content hinders this process.
Adding new content in the form of new posts or pages regularly can help you keep a higher level of authority in the eyes of Google and other search engines.
Even updates once a month are better than none at all.
Site-slowing image sizes and types
Just as important, although technical in nature, are the images on your site.
Using formats that don’t compress or file sizes that are too big can hinder the performance of your website. It can also negatively affect the site’s ranking in Google.
Avoid using images saved in .PNG format and others that do not have any compression over the internet.
Also make sure the images on your site are not overly large in file size. A 1 MB image is much too large of a file in most cases. Moreover, large image files take more time to load over mobile networks on smartphones, and cause Google page rankings to sink.
Bad links and faulty pages
If you have had a website for a while, make sure to tidy up any website parts that lead to pages that no longer work or have links that have changed.
Dead ends like these negatively affect user experience, and may erode customer trust over time.
Conclusion
Small business website mistakes can happen to anyone. That’s why it’s important to check what you’re doing, work with a host that you trust, and keep things updated. In time those mistakes will be a thing of the past. This is a concise list of 6 issues to address, but if you think another should be added, send us a message on Instagram or Facebook.