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A business or ecommerce website is one of more important tools used to promote business entities and showcase products. It may not be the most effective way of engaging your clients but is effective nonetheless. Through the content you post in its pages, it gives you a platform to tell your story and what your company is all about.
Your business website helps you build and strengthen connections with your clients and potential customers. More often than not though, small business owners tend to fail at managing and maintaining their websites. And neglecting to resolve the most common website issues that usually comes up in the course of time. These can have a negative impact on your brand and could lead to you losing customers instead.
Common small business website problems that makes you loose sales
1. The #1 common small business website problems is a snail like page load speed.
Check this out:
10 years ago, Amazon found that every 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales. Google found an extra .5 seconds in search page generation time dropped traffic by 20%. A broker could lose $4 million in revenues per millisecond if their electronic trading platform is 5 milliseconds behind the competition. The expectations of today’s NOW customers continue to grow and the amount of data generated and accessed is mind boggling. Bernard Marr, in his article in Forbes describes how 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are generated every day and that over the last two years alone 90 percent of the data in the world was generated.
Slow website page load drives away potential leads and sales.
The best fix to this is to implement a cache system
2. Another common small business website problems is little to none social media visibility
Social media has taken the largest pie in the internet marketing strategies. Some business entities have not leverage this immense potential for business. Business accounts are created but they are not being updated regularly or they are not being utilized to their full potential.
Social Media can be a powerful tool in digital marketing and it provides another channel for interacting with potential and current customers or clients. This also makes the business ‘more human’ as lighter topics, conversations, and stories can be utilized to spark interest. Social media can give a business the face and the soul that it often needs.
Link your website with all of your social media accounts
Create a measurable social media marketing strategy. It doesn’t need to be a formal and final word file but it can be a work in progress until you develop clear goals and objectives. This is where the use of all of your social media accounts will revolve. Share articles and stories that are relevant to your business and add a personal spin to it. Just be creative and update regularly. Interact with clients and those who post questions. Being a responsive business owner pays in the end.
3. Un-optimized and badwebsite design.
Website design has been constantly evolving since internet use boomed in the 90s. The introduction of mobile internet devices such as internet capable feature phones, smartphones, and tablets have changed the way sites are structured too. While most small business owners realise the importance of investing in a website to establish a web presence, design maintenance isn’t one of their priorities.
Check the image below of a really bad and outdated website design.
Some websites are not optimized to be viewed in different devices and usually does not follow the latest convention of using structured data per Google policy. Consequently, old websites that have not been updated in ages will start to look clunky when compared to updated sites with modern designs. These will not only look bad but will be full or problems due to incompatibilities too.
An bad website design or an unresponsive site is the most common small business website issues i have seen so far. Bar none! It doesn’t build confidence. In fact, it ruins your chances of converting your leads into sales.
How might you fix common design problem?
Easy! Get a good free theme for your business website. There are thousands upon thousands of free wordpress theme that you can use to start with. Get its HTML file and apply the design to your website. You don’t have to re-invent the wheel so to speak. And majority of these free themes comes with a responsive markup. Customers need a mobile site that is as easy to use as the desktop version. Google search prefers websites that are mobile-friendly and the tech giant considers it a requirement if you want your site to come in search results.
A simple, clean responsive design that looks great on different devices is an automatic need for an business website. This needn’t be expensive and in the age of mobile, simple designs are preferred.
4. Bad website forms and submit buttons that don’t work
Sometimes, a design is not the problem. Everything looks cool on a PC and a smartphone. However, your contact form does not work. Your visitor gets frustrated and your potential customers decides to just go away. Another missed chance of converting lead to sales.
A fully functional contact form and buy now buttons provide your site visitors the opportunity to fulfill their own needs. They help the client interact with your site and your business. Remember, you already lead them to your website and maybe to your product page. They are about to decide to make a purchase. Pour in your resource and make that button work or that contact form process seamlessly! Test it regularly to be sure!
Forms that don’t work may be due to many things.
Some parts of the code might have been edited or deleted altogether, test and check it out! It might be a server issue, visit your cpanel or server every week! Your server might have upgraded to a new PHP version that you didn’t notice or have failed to notice in your inbox. Perhaps a module or an addon that needs updating or auto update that causes compatibility issues and render the forms useless. Unresponsive forms is one of the most common small business website problems we can find. It comes up from time to time. Sometimes, too often. Or on a serious note, someone might have hacked into your ecommerce files. Be cognizant of this issues. The best way to prevent it is to have a regular check up of your server and codes.
5. Another common small business website problem is poor SEO.
Many small business website owners complain about their site not attracting enough visitors. But fail to accept that they have done NADA on search engine optimization! They think that just because they have a company website, Google will put them at the top of the ranking!
Have you made efforts to make your website sniffed by search engines?
That is what SEO is all about. Making search engine sniff the smell of your website. The quickest way to find things in the web is to use Google or a search engine. For this to work, websites should be structured specifically for search engines to recognize and recommend. Sadly, website owners fail to do this and their business website is buried amongst the billions of pages in the web.
How might one resolve this?
The quickest answer is to hire an SEO company to run ad campaigns that will improve your website’s search visibility. Do keywords research, create consistent quality content. And implement Google’s structured data for content. There are tons of benefits of having a secure website. Developing your website around the elements that affect SEO generally improve overall website performance.
In conclusion
The list above of the top most common small business website problems is not in the order of importance. It also is not the only problems that leads to lost sales there is in the web. There are many others like cluttered contents, too little contents, security issues, little to no customer support, unclear navigation structure, etc should also be considered.
Your small business website problems are not unique to you alone. We have known this for years as ecommerce and business website developers. We have years of experience managing websites for ecommerce businesses and have a range of support packages to help remove those headaches. These 5 are the top most common small business website problems we have encountered for years!
If you have any questions or are interested to find out we can help improve your small business website, feel free to use the contact us form and give us a nudge!
