On our last blog post, we covered Things you can do when your business is slowing down. Today, let’s talk about 5 common website mistakes you are doing right now. Awareness is key to improvement and knowing what aspects you can work on will tremendously improve your website statistics.

Since 86% of consumers rely on the internet to find local businesses, having a website is a no-brainer regardless of your business type. Although building a website is great for business, you’ll want to avoid making these common website mistakes that will stop you from getting the most out of your investment.

Here’s are 5 website mistakes you are doing right now and how you can fix them:

👉🏻 Too little (or Too Much) – Text, Forms, Images

First on the list of common website mistakes is having too little or too much of something. Search engines read text better than anything else. So, it’s important to have text on your web page. Knowing this, some people cram as much text, image and lengthy forms as possible into a page. As a result, search engines then struggle to make the website relevant.

Solution: Be direct a possible while still making sure your page is readable and contains the keywords you are targeting.

👉🏻 Slow Load Times

Nobody enjoys waiting in a queue, especially not when they have other options to choose from. You can say the same of your website visitors. They’re not going to wait around if your website takes forever to load when they could hop on the next website that loads almost instantly.If your website loads slowly, it could be because your hosting is insufficient, you have large images across your site, you have too many redirects, or you’ve installed too many unnecessary plugins.

Solution: Compress your assets. You can use applications like adobe or optimizilla to do this. This means reducing the file size of your images, embedding videos instead of uploading it to your website, uninstall unnecessary plugins, Choose a web hosting platform that’s designed for speed.

👉🏻 Unresponsive Website

Mobile devices account for over 54.8% of global website traffic. Since most people use their handheld devices to access the internet, it’s in your best interest to make your website responsive on mobile screens.

Solution: Avoid including content that is only accessible on desktop. Avoid large and unnecessary header sections so that mobile users get to the content quickly. Make sure the font size is not too small to read.

👉🏻 No consistency in branding

Is your website’s consistent all throughout? Your website is the go-to place to showcase your brand; who you are, what you do and who you do it for. Branding helps your website stay consistent and memorable. Having visual cues helps anchor your online presence across multiple platforms. Without branding, your website will loose authority and trust.

Solution: Build a brand system that you will use all throughout your brand touchpoints to stay consistent. This includes your online touchpoint: website, social media platforms, etc. And your offline touchpoint: brand collaterals, print guide, proposals, etc.

👉🏻 No Call to Action

Another common website mistake people make is not including a CTA on their website. You’ve probably spent lots of time and effort directing people to your website. But what happens once they arrive on your website? Do you want them to buy a product? Sign up for a newsletter? Share what they’ve read?Every step in your website should guide them in their decision making process.

Solution: If you are selling a product, make purchase buttons stand out and guide visitors on the next step to take. If you want them to sign up for a newsletter or something similar, create a sign-up form available as soon as possible before they leave your website. It’s also good practice to place your calls to action above the fold.

Making these website mistakes is more common than you think. A great way to resolve this is by spending time to really think about the goal of your website. Do quarterly audits and set specific key objectives you can track each month. Having a clear vision will help you spot any inconsistencies in your website and keep your actions aligned with what really matters.