Having a website is vital in today’s information age. With digital marketing proving to be as effective if not better than traditional marketing, it’s paramount that you take a look at your website carefully so that it can compete with your competitors. In order to do that, you will need to stay clear of the website’s don’ts that could be to your detriment. In this blog post, I will share with you 5 website mistakes you should avoid.

1. Not optimizing your website for mobile

With 50.81% of website global traffic attributed to mobile users, ensuring they have the very best user experience would definitely work in your favor. Further to this, when Google announced that they would be indexing mobile versions over desktop in 2018, it meant mobile optimization should be at the top of the things you should do to get the most out of your digital marketing efforts.

Optimizing for mobile is totally different, improving user-friendliness. In the same way that you need to optimize your website for desktop users, you need to optimize your website for mobile. To do this consider, using a mobile-friendly tool to audit your site, choosing a WordPress responsive theme, test your website’s loading speed, etc

2. Mobile page upload time takes too long

With the convenience of having information readily available on mobile, the statistics of mobile to desktop use will definitely climb year-on-year. With that in mind, things like slow-loading pages would no doubt deter many users from your site. It should generally take a website 3 seconds to load – anything longer than that causes users to become disinterested and bored enough to find another website to get the information they may need.

3. Social media links

Social media is no doubt a very effective method for adding more clients to your books. The benefits of having social media accounts are that you have a way to attract and connect with customers, increase market reach nationally and abroad and so much more! If you do have social media accounts, there are a couple of mistakes that could rob you of seeing its benefits. The first is not linking your social media accounts to your website at all. This could be due to forgetting to or just not seeing the importance of doing so. The second is placing your social media icons distractingly right at the top of your website. Your logo and site identity should be the focal point of the start of your website. If your social links are right at the top, this could distract users from your brand and cause them confusion.

4. Images are not optimized for the website

Formatting images for optimization is a part of an effective over-all SEO strategy for your website, however, many forget about doing just that when the euphoria of finding the perfect graphic that communicates what they intend for it too.

You can optimize the images by decreasing the size of the stock photo as large photos have the potential of negatively affecting the loading speed of your site. Also, be sure to change the meta-description of your images for SEO.

5. Putting Growth-Driven Design (GDD) on the backburner

When a website is up, it shouldn’t mean that it’s done. It should be viewed as an ongoing aspect of marketing that should be constantly viewed, reviewed, and measured up against competing sites in order to keep up to speed with the website and mobile trends.

Keep in mind that your website should be an extension of you and your brand and, although there should be an emphasis put on its personality, just as much effort should be placed in optimizing it for mobile, adding social media links and continuously developing it – all done within what you have stipulated as your brand guidelines.

Here at JDC, we are committed to providing you with the necessary tools you and your business need to set you up for online success.  When you speak, we listen, and deliver top-quality digital marketing services so that you don’t have to worry about the nitty-gritty involved in the industry, allowing you to focus on whatever you need to so that we can secure a return on your digital investment.