Wondering why your website is not performing the way you hope? Is your website failing to generate new enquires, phone calls & sales for your business?
If your day to day job isn’t online marketing it can be confusing to know where to start when you find your website is not generating the results you desire.
- No one can find your website?
- Visitors leave your site quickly after arriving
- Visitors don’t convert into paying customers
If any of these problems are true for your website then you will be able to benefit from this list.
Follow the common causes for poor website performance and check off each as you go along. We have also included some simple suggestions for how to resolve each issue.
Why is my website not performing?
10 reasons your website might be under performing
Your website is not mobile friendly
This is one of the biggest reasons your website could be under performing. A website that isn’t mobile friendly can be a big frustration for mobile users, leading them to leave your site in favor of another.
Recently Google announced that mobiles now account for more searches on the site than on desktops, signalling the importance of a mobile friendly design.
What action should you take?
Hire a mobile friendly designer to make your website “mobile responsive”. Then use the “mobile friendly test” to check if it passes Google’s requirements.
Your website is too slow
Speed is a big contributor to how well your website performs. If your site is too slow to load visitors may leave without making a purchase.
- 47% of users expect your web page to load in under two seconds.
- A 1 second delay in load time can result in a 7% drop in online sales
What action should you take?
Run a Page Speed Insights test to see how fast your website loads & what you can do to improve load time. Ask your developer to implement the suggestions.
It is not clear what you sell/offer
People should know what your business provides within seconds of loading your website. If this is not clear or obvious they will leave in search of another site where it is clearer.
What action should you take?
Make sure that the purpose of your website is obvious as soon as people load your website, especially for mobile devices where people are much more “goal orientated”. Ask yourself, what problems am I trying to solve? Is it clear what these are?
Your website looks dated
A dated website is not a good look for any business, potentially costing you money.
People will feel little trust towards your business, especially if information is incorrect & out of date. They may even struggle to use your website compared with other more modern sites.
What action should you take?
Check that your content is all up to date, check phone numbers, address details & prices.
If your website is more than 5 years old consider an upgrade, your site will benefit from more efficient design practices & increase its performance.
Your navigation is poor
It is essential that visitors can easily navigate your website without any trouble. Decide where you want your visitors to go on your site and make it easy for them to achieve this.
What action should you take?
- Keep it consistent
- Use accurate, simple text to describe each link
- If your site has a lot of content use a search box
You are targeting the wrong people
If your website is not attracting the right people you aren’t going to make any sales & it is not going to perform the way you want it to.
Ask yourself:
- How many people visit your site each week?
- Where do these people come from?
- Are they the types of people that would buy your product/service?
What action should you take?
Install analytics on your website (if you have none already), look at the types of people that typically visit your website, if they aren’t the sorts of people that would buy your product then you are targeting the wrong people.
Your website has no call-to-actions
A common problem is that websites often give a lot of information but don’t make it easy for people to act upon it. If your website doesn’t have any strategically placed call to actions visitors are less likely to use your contact form or buy a product.
What action should you take?
Place buttons or text that encourage people to make an action alongside valuable content. Ensure that these call to actions stand out & make an impact.
Your forms are too complicated
Reducing the number of fields in your contact forms or opt in forms can have a significant impact on how many submissions you receive.
What action should you take?
Include no more than 3-5 fields or questions if you are able to.
Your site has poor SEO
If you rely on search engines for most of your website traffic you could be suffering from poor SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Even if you ranked well before your website may have disappeared from the first page due to a lack of SEO or quality SEO.
If your business does not appear on the first page for the right keywords you could be missing out on highly targeted traffic to your site.
What action should you take?
Invest in improving your search engine ranking; this will help to drive more of the right people to your website so that you can start converting them into paying customers.
These days, working on a new websites is getting harder.
There are active websites for almost every niche. So, it isn’t surprising when people pick the first one that appears in a search engine results page.
As for the SEO, it is a slow process. Most of the website owners give up half way, as they can’t seem to keep up with the competition and not to mention the algorithm’s of search engines.
Well, thanks for the tips. After reading your article, I realized that my site is slow and my seo tricks are pretty outdated too. So, I will have to work on them.
Forums have been hit very badly due to social networking sites ruling. And same ideas won’t work in the current market. Patience, proper SEO, mobile-friendly websites surely help everyone.
Hi Oliver,
As a SEO Expert, I think your article provides very nice tips, thanks for sharing it with us!
After my reading, I realized that the article I wrote on my website on the same topic could be interesting for you to read. The ideas are a little bit different from yours, and I recently updated it.
Hope you will like it:
https://www.codedesign.org/how-to-know-website-performance/
Thanks