5 website mistakes to avoid

Your website is essentially your shop window, which makes it ever so important to offer a great experience for your visitors. With the incredible amount of information thrown at us every day, attention span is so little and precious that you can’t afford people dropping off your website just because of some easily fixable mistakes.

1. Too much text

This is the one that I see most often, also something that is the easiest to fix. People are impatient and want the information in seconds, so if you’ve written a blog on your home page, let me break the hard truth to you. They wont read it. I salute the exceptions.

Use headings, bullet points, bold text and pictograms to break up your text. Chances are that you actually have the relevant information in there but you have to help the reader to find that information quickly. Just think about how many times you’ve abandoned a website yourself because you didn’t get the information right away.

2. Lack of images

This actually ties in with the first mistake. An image can do an incredible job to replace whole sentences, even a paragraph. Let me demonstrate what I mean by this.

clueQuest newsletter header

Although this image is from a recent newsletter campaign for my escape room company, it can do the same on a website. It replaces the need to explain quite a few things:

• No need to talk about how they will feel playing the room as people’s expressions already do that

• It also explains in just three words that escape rooms are about new memories, which than can be built upon in the rest of the copy.

• Helps them visualise what kind of group types the experience is actually good for. (Friends and family in this case)

Visual elements not only breaks up the text but also delivers a lot of information. Often subconsciously without the reader even realising that information was relayed to them making the website visit that much less overwhelming.

3. One size fits all approach

This is another mistake I see quite often. Websites trying to talk to everyone at the same time which will result in talking to no one.

You should have specific pages for your specific audiences. Someone who is organising something for a friends outing needs a different tone than someone who is organising a birthday party for a group of 10 year old kids. The more they feel the website is talking to them directly the more likely they will buy/book something.

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Start with a generic page that’s short and sweet and then direct people to their relevant subpages where the descriptions and images talk to them directly.

4. Only looks good on desktop

Check your website on mobile! It’s incredible to see that there are still so many websites that dominantly cater for desktop view with the mobile version being almost unnavigable.

Most people won’t change devices to check your website unless they are super determined. They will simply abandon it and find a provider whose website works on the device that’s right in their hands.

So if you haven’t done so already, switch over to a responsive design that looks good on all platforms. And rigorously keep checking your design if it’s just as user friendly as the desktop version. You can easily do this even in your desktop browser, just hit f12 and switch to mobile view.

5. Lack of consistency

This one is a tough one, especially with bigger sites that includes loads of subpages. The lack of consistency is mostly damaging the trust in your brand. If you say one thing on your booking site about reschedules but then you say a different thing in the FAQ section, your customers will be left confused.

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This mistake usually simply happens due to overlooking things as its hard to keep in mind every single corner of your website. To battle this, you should either use an engine that allows you to schedule changes like promotions or leave a calendar reminder for yourself about things that needs to change.

You should also do at least one big check up each quarter where you go through literally everything on your website and vet out any inconsistencies.

+1 Tip: Use analytics

This is more of a tip than a mistake but it will absolutely help you get rid of problems you haven’t even thought about. I recommend the following two to start off with:

Hotjar. This software will literally take screen recordings of website visits. Which is incredibly insightful about people’s behaviour and interaction on your website. You will be able to see what they scroll through without even checking, what is that they actually read or if they get confused by the menu system just to name a few insights.

Google analytics: Probably you are already using Google Analytics so I am just going to point out one of the functions that you might have missed. It’s called Users Flow and you can find it in the Audiences menu. It will visualise for you how customers are flowing within the website from one page to another also pointing out where users abandon the website altogether. Combining this knowledge with Hotjar recordings you can do an indepth investigation into why people fall off at a certain point.