Maybe you’ve thought of starting a website (maybe more than once). Perhaps you were up late and signed up for one of the many online web hosting plans; for only $7.95, you could have your website up and running. You might have built your site and shopping cart, saving hundreds or even thousands of dollars, or you could have paid a web designer.
You imagined a buyer thousands of miles away could go onto their computer, fire up Google or Yahoo, and find your product. You calculated the additional monthly revenue generated from your increased customer base and thought, “If I could just get one extra client per month from my site, then I would make $XX, XXX.XX more money.” You launched your website and patiently waited for people to visit it.
However, nobody attended. After all that time and money, you haven’t even made one sale. There, you flopped. You’re now among the millions who have gone before you and will follow in your footsteps. Your website has crashed.
Do not feel isolated. There are about 56 million websites, but only about half a million get significant traffic. Let me rephrase that. There are more than 55.5% of websites on the web that are utter failures due to a lack of visitors. (Visitors to the site, if you will). If you find yourself among the 55.1 million, take heart; we’ve all been there.
When do we call anything a failure?
When do we call anything a failure? A website is doomed to failure if it receives zero or negligible visitors. No one can reach you or hire you if nobody visits your website. How can people learn more about what you have to offer? What would lead them to your location and convince them that you have what they need?
Let’s look at the most common causes of website failure on the web and start planning ways to circumvent them, whether developing a new site or improving an existing one. Here are the top 10 causes of website failure.
Websites that don’t have enough content are doomed to fail. In my opinion, lack of genuine content is the most critical factor contributing to the demise of websites on the modern Internet. The web’s content must increase its knowledge base. Something fresh, innovative, or a different point of view that contributes to the web is essential. Content is the text you produce on your topic or service optimized for search engines.
This has nothing to do with a sales pitch. I mean answering a searcher’s question with material on your site. Keep in mind that most web users, not you, aim to gain access to information. People who type in something like “homes in Charleston, SC,” aren’t necessarily seeking a specific real estate agent but are looking for information.
Search engines will evaluate your site to determine if it provides relevant results for user queries. If it works, you may get ranked for those terms (and hence receive more visitors). If it doesn’t, you’ll join most websites that go unnoticed.
Second, people rarely think things through before committing to a domain name. The number of people who register websites with addresses like “haylorchurch. tv” or “bobsmithscrealty.net” is staggering.
Signing up for the wrong domain is one of the biggest blunders you can make. Why? People aren’t looking for “Bob Smith” when they go online; they want to find “Charleston homes for sale.” And in the case of Haylor Church, the domain name blatantly proclaims, “the.org was taken, so I took the. available tv.” Both of them are severe errors. The domain name you choose should define your product or service and provide an answer to a standard query. It needs to focus on behavior rather than individuality.
You are neither Yahoo nor Google, so understandably, you don’t have a question-answering name. You’re simply a regular person with a website who hopes to monetize it, increase church membership, or make new friends. Whatever the situation, it’s essential to select a domain name that accurately conveys the nature of your product or service and the purpose of your website.
Third, most site administrators don’t check for errors or make necessary changes. It’s hard to believe, but many people invest thousands of dollars in a website and then do nothing with it. I have lost count of the sites I have visited with egregious grammatical, verbal, or lexical errors. On some so-called “professional” websites, I’ve seen the English language wholly dismantled. When I visit a website and see many broken links, I immediately leave and never return. If your audience goes to your site, they won’t be back.
Errors and broken links will drive visitors away from your site faster than anything else. Despite how simple it would be to resolve, site owners rarely do routine checks for broken links. However, it’s not enough to have a well-written website. You must regularly add and update your content to keep the Search Engines interested in placing you at the top of their lists. When crawling your site, search engines scan for new content and when it was last updated. The more often updates are made, the higher in search results you will appear.
Too many banner advertisements, colors, flashy content, or external links are the leading causes of website failure. Websites that are nothing but advertisements or sales pitches rarely succeed. Why? Every day, people are bombarded by hundreds of billboards and television commercials. They are broadcast on the radio while they drive and may be found everywhere online. Internet users will leave your site if not organized around your offerings.
There are many additional options if you need banner ads made for your website. Please don’t. You won’t make any money from them; all you’re doing is boosting that business’s search engine rankings. Since an external link allows the user to leave your site, you should only provide useful ones. They may become sidetracked and forget about your offer altogether.
Five, the actual cost of a website, including hosting, installation, and domain name, is excessive. Some web designers are taking advantage of the general public to the tune of a tidy sum because they have no idea what they’re doing. I need you to hear me out. Putting money into your website should be treated like any other investment you make for your company. Take the hypothetical scenario of selling water skis as an example. A new range of water skis is something you’re thinking of offering. Would you purchase many thousand dollars worth of skis without determining whether they will turn a profit? You don’t want to. As sales increase, you’d start with a small number (excuse the pun) and gradually grow your stock.
The website is only another advertising platform in the same vein. Make sure the initial design is clean and polished. Don’t go crazy with the spending at first. The first-year fee of $500 is quite affordable. Then, once the website starts bringing in paying consumers, you may beef up your service by adding things like a shopping cart or flashier visuals.
Sixth, website owners don’t invest enough time in finding the right keywords. Search engines rely heavily on keywords to locate websites. Picking effective keywords doesn’t need making a mental inventory. Spending time using online tools designed to assist you in discovering what people are genuinely looking for online is a necessary first step. Before generating content for your website, wouldn’t it be helpful to know what people are trying to find?
Since covering all the available resources would be too lengthy, let’s say that this is a significant setback.
People do not spend effort making their websites search engine friendly. If you want to be in the top 10 results on Google, Yahoo, and MSN, you can hire a “Search Engine Optimizer” (SEO). This is done before they create helpful content, conduct in-depth keyword research, or make their sites user-friendly. The SEO firms that provide these services capitalize on the fact that most individuals have no idea what factors contribute to a site’s high placement on the significant SEs.
Let’s have a clear discussion. SEO firms cannot guarantee a top-ten placement for specific keywords or search terms. If they did, everyone would be using them and occupying one of the top ten spots. Remember that only the websites whose pages include the material that puts them in the top ten for a particular keyword will remain there. You won’t stay in the top 10 for more than a day or two, even if a search engine optimizer (SEO) manages to bring you there.
You can’t fool the top computer scientists in the world into ranking in the top ten, or even the top thirty, or even the top thousand, and they all work for Yahoo, Google, and MSN. However, you will be accepted if your site provides content that answers their queries. It’s not easy to get into the top ten, but once you do it correctly, it’s nearly impossible to fall out of the top ten.
Eight, website owners rarely get back to visitors quickly. It puzzles me why so few website owners answer emails sent to them. During my recent relocation, I contacted several real estate brokers. I identified a few brokers that I felt would be able to assist me in finding a property in Charleston, South Carolina, while I was relocating there from Denver, a distance of 1,600 miles. I emailed around five different people, but just one responded within the allotted time frame. The rest didn’t email or were delayed over a week. About eighty percent of them have slow response times.
I don’t know how this will ruin your company. Within 60 days, we had closed on a house thanks to the one lender who reached out to me. The takeaway is that you must respond swiftly to email inquiries or risk losing customers to competitors. It’s essential to reply to emails promptly, but it’s also important to react professionally and show that you read and understood the message. You must use spell check and provide complete contact details.
Nine, people don’t submit their sites to local search engines, even though the big ones spend millions on local search development. The meaning of this is unclear. In my estimation, the main SEs will surpass the Yellow Pages as the most popular tool for finding a local business in the next three to four years. Engineers are already working around the clock to develop algorithms that will route users to relevant results and regional companies that can fulfill their requirements.
Any business that doesn’t come up in a user’s local search, from barbershops to dental offices, will suffer. According to my calculations, 90% of sites are invisible to local searchers and rapidly fall behind the pack.
Inaction is the leading cause of website failure (10). Several potential pitfalls could render your website ineffective, but the worst would be not having one at all. People use the internet today. There is no denying this. Millions upon millions of people in the United States now use the Internet on a regular basis; it is no longer a luxury item. They need your assistance right now but can’t get it if they can’t locate you online.
Bill Nixon creates websites, runs a hosting service, and oversees multiple sites for various organizations. Check out his most recent work at http://www.coastalvideography.com. You can check out his leading site at
Read also: What Exactly Is UX Design?
