When it comes to creating a website, whether you’re an experience developer or just a business owner who’s looking to create an online presence, you need to put in a lot of thinking.
While you may create a website that is feature rich and looks stellar, there are still many important aspects that often get overlooked and turn out to become a disaster as your website grows. One great example of such disaster could be 405 Error where the request method is known by the server but is not supported by the target resource.
It is errors like these that cast your website out as a non-credible source for the audience and prospects.
Today, in this read we’re going to discuss 10 of the common mistakes that people avoid when developing a website.
Let’s begin.
Mistakes To Avoid When Developing A Website 2021
1. Lack of Planning
Back in the day, all you had to do was to create a website and deploy it on a server. The story is different today as the world is highly tech driven. You need to stand out among the audience in order to become successful in this dense competition.
To achieve that, you need to thoroughly plan about your website and your expectations from it. The best way to conduct this planning is to research about your audience and their needs. Now identify your USP and promote your website accordingly.
Another great aspect of plan comes around future growth and how you’re going to enhance your audience’s experience.
If you’re building a website blindly without having long-term planning, then you’re most likely to get caught in a situation where you’ll need to revamp your entire site in the future.
2. Choosing An irrelevant Domain Name
While this often goes neglected, the domain name of your website is what your audience will remember you with.
There are quite a few mistakes that people make when choosing a domain name for their website.
They either go with too fancy vocabulary or too generic one. Now it’s understandable why people do it because fancy domain names sound interesting initially and they also feel unique.
But the problem around fancy or too creative domain names is that it is hard to remember them – which becomes a big problem in future in terms of user retention.
As for the too generic terms, people use them as their domain names because they believe that these names are going to help them with the Google rankings.
Although it is partially true that simple domain names are much easier to remember and they somewhat help you with the SEO as well. However, the names should be highly relevant to your business nature and niche.
Here are some tips that you need to consider when choosing a domain name.
- Shorter names are easier to remember. Ideal length for a domain name is around 20 characters. Try to keep it within this count.
- Although it may sound quite interesting to use creative grammar for your domain in order to stand out, but it’s a disaster because people are most likely going to forget it after visiting your site once.
3. Your Website Is Not Mobile Friendly
Considering the fact that more than 50% of all the website traffic comes from mobile devices and more than 60% of the consumers believe that they’ll purchase from a mobile friendly website, you can tell that the importance of mobile-friendly website is nothing to ignore.
Doing so would mean that you’re missing out on a ton of revenue on the table.
Therefore, it is important to remember when creating a website that every element or feature you integrate in your website design and functionality should be mobile responsive. Also, the design of your website should look stellar on handheld devices.
Read More: How To Use SEO On WordPress?
4. Poor Website Design
Let’s be honest, A good website design goes a long way. If your website doesn’t look good, nobody is going to purchase anything from you.
The design and visual elements of your website should match your brand tone and business nature. That’s not all, navigation is yet another important aspect that you can’t ignore.
Suppose you have a killer website design, but the navigation is complicated, then you’re getting nowhere because nobody likes to use a website where they can’t find stuff they’re looking for.
Therefore, you also need to make sure that your website design is highly navigable and all the optionsare deployed at their respective categories.
5. No CTA (Call To Action)
Following on from the design standpoint, If you’ve got no CTA on your website, then there’s no point in raising your traffic. This is because if you’ve got tons of traffic on your website, but they don’t know how to or where to contact you from, then there will be no conversion at all.
Make sure that you have interactive CTAs in the blog posts where they’re relevant and on all the landing pages of your website.
6. Ignoring The Importance Of Maintenance Mode
Suppose that your website is live on a server and you need to change something or add more functionality in the runtime. If you do it straightaway, then your website would fall prey to errors like ‘briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance check back in a minute’.
Now, this error mostly occurs when you’re trying to conduct WordPress maintenance services on your website without using the WordPress maintenance mode.
This sends out a horrible impression of your website because the audience is not able to access the content on your site and start looking for alternatives immediately. Using the WordPress maintenance mode, you can showcase a maintenance timeline on your website so the users can know that your website would live again shortly.
7. No Focus Towards SEO
Even if your website has a world-class design and perfect functionality but you’re not working on Search Engine Optimization (SEO), you’d still struggle with the traffic and conversion rates.
This is because there’s a throat-cutting competition over the internet when it comes to the conversions and if your website is not on the first page of Google, then consider that you don’t even exist on Google.
Practicing good SEO on your website would ensure that the pages of your website rank higher in the SERPs. This would eventually benefit you in terms of the relevant website traffic, and ultimately the leads.
Read More: How To Find Low Competition Keywords
8. Lack Of Security
Security is the major concern for people visiting your website. If your website lacks the necessary security protocols such as the SSL certification, people are most likely to ignore your contact form, let alone making purchases from your website.
Moreover, it is your duty as a website owner to provide the necessary security protocols to your audience because when people fill out the form or make payments on your website, they disclose their personal information which could be used for unethical activities if your website is hacked by any means.
9. Slower Loading Times
Humans have shorter attention spans. In fact, around 40% of the users online abandon websites which take more 3 seconds to load up. Therefore, you need to make sure that your website loads up as fast as possible.
Note that the ideal time for a website load is around 2 to 5 seconds. If your website is any slower than that, then there’s a lot of optimizations that you need to conduct.
A great practice to improve your website loading times is to compress the media before you upload it on your website. Also, you need to remove the extra plugins from your website because they significantly add up to the loading time of your website.
10. Outdated Content
Last but not the least, outdated content on your website is a disaster when it comes to the Overall search rankings of your website. Google highly favors websites that are updated regularly the fresh and timely content.
Also, from a user’s perspective, one would always expect to find the timely information about stuff they’re searching for.
Therefore, you need to regularly update your website the fresh and timely content so that you can survive the throat cutting competition for the top rankings.
Using a solution like WP Umbrella to manage multiple WordPress sites and keep them up to date could save you a ton of time and give you a competitive edge.
Wrapping Up
A website is not just a matter of development and deployment on a server. There’s a lot that goes into building a website with proper functionality and performance.
While many website owners overlook the mistakes mentioned above, if you address them by making a perfect website plan, you’re sure to build a website that catapults into success.
Read More: Top 6 Best SEO Tools For Digital Marketers & Agencies 2021
