5 Common Website Mistakes to Avoid

When creating or editing the website for your business, it’s worth being aware of some common mistakes you’ll want to avoid. As basic guidance, less is more. Focus your message and your branding to what is representative of your business to ensure website visitors want to engage with your business.

Busy Homepage

Every visit to your website should be considered an engagement opportunity. A busy homepage cluttered with tons of content will only overwhelm new visitors and push them away rather than encouraging them to explore.

Complex Navigation

Navigation that’s easy to understand will help ensure that visitors to your website will have an easy time navigating to the information they’re looking for. Keep all of your tabs and subtabs simple and easy to understand and limit drop-down menus only to what is necessary. They should be as straight forward as possible and capture the content within each of the tabs as clearly as possible.

No Social Engagement

Not embedding social media links within your website is a missed opportunity. With so many users visiting your website via mobile, giving them the opportunity to connect with you across various channels is a smart move and a great way to build brand engagement organically.

Burying Content

Many companies have incredibly valuable content created but they bury it deep within their website where visitors are unlikely to find it. Use one of your main pages (or your home page) as the location for hosting your most valuable content. Hooking a visitor from the outset will also serve to improve the time spent on site.

Poor Stock Photography

Even if you can’t afford to have custom photos taken, that’s no excuse for using generic stock photos. Market demand in the past few years has created opportunity for incredible, on-brand, stock photography.

The underlying thread connecting all of these common mistakes is a commitment to simplicity to ensure clarity for visitors.