3 web design mistakes that cost you money

Written on 03 April, 2016 by James Baylis
Categories Web Design & Content Tags online business web design

A website today is considered a direct reflection of how a business operates, with 57% of online shoppers saying they would not recommend a website to a friend that is poorly designed for mobiles. Combine this with the fact that 50% of all Australians now use the Internet to shop online, an optimised website is no longer a “nice thing to have”, it’s a must.

Here are the 3 biggest optimisation design faults local businesses and new startups in Sydney tend to make on their websites.

1. Not thinking about the mobile experience  

Whether you’re catching the train to work, meeting your friends for dinner or getting ready for bed, your mobile phone will never be more than an arm’s length away. Over half of global Internet traffic is mobile and businesses must optimise their websites for mobile and tablet users.

The online mobile space has become so huge that Google changed its entire online algorithm to place mobile friendly websites much higher in search engines. As a result websites that were not mobile friendly saw a drop in traffic of up to 35%.

How can you check if your website is mobile friendly? Run it through Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.

2. No search bar

If users cannot find what they are looking for quickly and easily, they will leave your website and go somewhere else. That’s why having a search bar on your site is imperative, even more so if you run an online ecommerce store selling hundreds of products.

Search bars have been proven to lower bounce rate and increase conversions. Users who use a search bar have a much greater shopping intent.

Don’t have a search bar installed? Get on that! Place one above the fold on your website and make sure it’s visible on every page.

3. Poor load times

Did you know that 25% of users exit a website if the load time exceeds 4 seconds? Well, it’s true – and it almost cost Amazon over a billion dollars in sales.

Internet users today are very impatient and don’t want to wait more than a few seconds for a website to load. You can check the speed of your website by visiting Pingdom.com.

Don’t only test your homepage: look into the load times of all of your most visited pages. If any of your pages take more than 3 seconds to load, it’s a sign that your website can be further optimised. 

Google’s PageSpeed tool offers suggestions on ways to speed up your website by following their guidelines. You should also be looking towards your host provider, as they too can influence the performance of your website.

Summary

Even if your business generates 100% of its sales offline, having an optimised website is crucial. 50% of mobile users visit a store within 24 hours after searching them on Google:


If your website is hard to navigate or not mobile friendly, your local business will be losing out on leads to your competitors.  

How SEO optimised is your website for visitors?

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