Our collection of reasons why websites don’t perform and what you can do about it.

Quick Summary

We have defined 5 reasons why your site isn’t performing like you expect and what you can do about each:

• Reason #1: Your site looks like all the other sites out there

• Reason #2: Your site doesn’t appear trustworthy enough

• Reason #3: Social media is the only marketing tool you pay attention to

• Reason #4: Your site is missing social proof

• Reason #5: Your site has technical issues

Find out more about each reason and get insights on how to improve each of these by reading our full post below!

Most of our time at work is spent designing, coding, learning, or talking with entrepreneurs. When we first meet with a business owner who already has a website, it’s almost a certainty that they mention wanting to generate more traffic or improve traffic conversion.

“What can I do to get more traffic to my site?”
“Are there any quick changes you’d suggest?”
“Should I just do a full redesign?”
“Should I be doing ads?”

The growth in online business isn’t anything new, but one of the side effects from COVID-19 has been a turbocharging of the online business model. With all the added competition, it should come as no surprise that we’re frequently contacted by business owners who’ve spent months setting up their online presence and aren’t seeing results.

Here is our collection of reasons why a website might not be living up to expectations and what you can do about it.

Reason #1: Your site looks like all the other sites out there

While there are several best practices for online design, your site will quickly be forgotten if you don’t stand out from your competition. When your site looks like every other offering out there, your chances for success are harder.

Most great platforms, including Shopify and Squarespace, offer free theme templates, color schemes and typography options to expedite the website creation process. In many cases, their themes can help you launch a site before the day is over. Unfortunately, this also means that your site is that much more likely to look like others that were created the same way. Similar layout. Similar formatting. Similar images. Similar messaging.

With so many sites using similar ‘cookie cutter’ themes, it’s inevitable that yours will look and feel like another site. Unless your offering is vastly different from your competition, your logo, typeface, and company information aren’t going to help you stand out and be remembered.

If this is you, here’s what you can do about it...

Make more of an effort to stand out, to be different….without going against best practices. If you are on Shopify, for example, test drive a new paid theme or add an app that takes your site to a new level. If you don’t have the skills or time to make your site distinctive, there are a number of designers and developers who can help (including us!). Once you find a company that understands your needs and that you trust, you will ask yourself why you didn’t do it earlier!

Regardless of how good your offering is, it’s important for your site to stand out if you want to be remembered.

Reason #2: Your site doesn’t appear trustworthy enough

If your website doesn’t feel credible or doesn’t include fundamental information that people expect, leaving your site is just a simple click away! Is your site full of blurry images, broken links, and has no contact information? You may have what people think is an untrustworthy site! Although trust is intangible, a visitor knows it when they experience it.

What is it that brings about trust? Site design and branding (particularly your tone-of-voice) are two of the biggest factors. These should be consistent across the entire user experience and should match the expectations of your site visitors. Also important are things like serving all of your content via HTTPS (not just your forms and checkout page...but all of your pages), providing all the content that someone expects, and making sure that your messaging appears trustworthy (I’m looking at you Comic Sans and those of you who BELIEVE it’s OK TO TRY and make it so that Everything STANDS OUT only to find that then NOTHING stands out!!!

At the beginning of any customer relationship, before you can sell, there needs to be a trust that is established. Customers may never have heard of you or your business before, so they seek confirmation that you’re legit. Part of that assurance can be built by having a good ‘About Us’ page. Time and time again we see e-commerce sites with an ‘About Us’ page that hasn’t received much attention...or they don’t even have an ‘About Us’ page. What many don’t realize is, after the Homepage and Contact page, the ‘About Us’ page is one of the most visited pages on your site. Having an ‘About Us’ page is your chance to demonstrate to your audience what you stand for, what you’re about, and why you think you’re different. Your ‘About Us’ page is a big part of what makes your business unique. It’s the single biggest opportunity to introduce yourself and your business. It’s where you describe your business history and priorities. It’s where you humanize your business with images or videos of you, your team, and even your customers (more on that later). The ‘About Us’ page is such a big part of showing people that you’re a real person, and people love knowing who they’re buying from so yours needs to be easily accessed and contain good information.

It’s easy to understand why so many online sites don’t follow this advice: It requires a strong understanding of your brand and your customers along with a design and development work and an understanding of evolving online expectations. It also requires a periodic review to confirm that your messaging remains current. In most cases, companies create their ‘About Us’ page at launch time and then forget about it.

If this is you, here’s what you can do about it…

Here is a helpful list of ideas that can help you build trust with your online visitors:

• If your site isn’t fully on HTTPS, then make this happen asap. Bonus: Google rewards security changes like this. Also another bonus, if you’re on Shopify or Squarespace, your site will likely already be running on HTTPS, and if not, it’s a click of a button to make it happen!

• If you are trying to make everything stand out, then nothing will stand out...keep focus on having one primary call to action per page, limit the number of different font sizes (max 4), and reduce the number of times you bold, italicize, or change font colors. Keeping things consistent shows your professionalism too.

• If you don’t already have the following, create them (and if you already have them, improve them): About Us; Privacy Policy; FAQ; Contact Us (and if you have a contact page, be sure to include a phone number, email address, and business address...not just a form). Note: If you’re running your business from home and don’t feel comfortable listing your home address, then get a PO box number; if you don’t want to list your phone number, get a Google Voice number. Though these aren’t as ideal as a real address or phone number, it’s better than having just a contact form and build trust as people know that they contact you!

• When clicking through the pages of your site, check that the upper quarter and lower section of each page looks and feels the same (consistent navigation, heading style, and footer).

• Have your contact email address match your site’s domain (ie hello@yourdomain.com rather than yourstorename@gmail.com). This costs less than $10 a month and presents far more credibility than a Gmail, Yahoo, or AOL email address.

Once you’ve got your site visitors understanding who you are and have them on your side, getting them to do business with you is soooo much easier.

Reason #3: Social media is the only marketing tool you pay attention to

If periodic posting on Instagram and Facebook is all you do, then you shouldn’t be surprised if your traffic and conversions decline. Unless you are an influencer and are amazing at content creation, social media on its own isn’t going to be enough for most businesses.

Many entrepreneurs go into business thinking that social media and e-commerce will be a breeze. All too often you’ll see people online say: “People like me and my work, so if I build a site and talk about myself on social media I’ll get way more business than I can handle”.

Within a couple months, most come to the realization that their lack of plan has resulted in little to no sales.

If this is you, here’s what you can do about it…

• Succeeding online requires a good plan and sustainable actions to keep things going in the right direction. Here are a few ideas that will help in these areas:

• For any effort, build a solid foundation. For example: Before jumping into Google ads, be sure you have a website and a high performing landing page to point people to; before jumping into Facebook / Instagram ads, be sure you have been on the platform for at least a month and have some good posts people can review and that you have a plan to share more posts on a regular basis.

• Create a marketing plan for your online business just like other businesses do for their offline business. Do the research, interviews, analysis, customer segmentation; define your brand, value proposition, channels; the list goes on. Once you can communicate your business clearly and have defined goals, creating an execution plan and making periodic adjustments will more easily follow.

• If social media is your primary channel for getting leads, be sure that your plan includes things like regular posting, advertising, sponsorships, collaborations, public relations, and influencer outreach.

• Have a solid grasp of the entire consumer lifecycle for your business. Where will they learn about you? What will their experience be when they encounter your site? What if the item they wanted was out of stock? If they buy from you once, how can you get them to buy again? If they left an item in their cart, can you give them a nudge to encourage a purchase? If they sign up for your newsletter, will your messages be what they expect?

If social media is currently your only marketing plan, make progress with the list above and you’ll see more visitors and more repeat visitors.

Reason #4: Your site is missing social proof

Customer opinion is a powerful sales tool and is often more trusted than anything you can say about yourself. Social proof provides much needed credibility and trustworthiness. It typically involves sharing insights from customers that have already done business with you, commonly shared in the form of testimonials or reviews featured on your site, your social media accounts, or via links from another site (like a blog, article or review site).

Since most new customers won’t have heard of you, encouraging people to write about you and making this visible will ease the initial barrier to sale. Many sites, though, don’t have a way for people to share a review or aren’t promoting social proof.

If this is you, here’s what you can do about it…

When you have a good customer experience, encourage them to share their experience with others. The best trust building is if they would provide this in written form via a third party service (Facebook, Google Maps, Yelp, social media, etc). If they aren’t comfortable with that (maybe they don’t post reviews or want their name visible with the review), you could ask if it would be okay if you shared their feedback via your own channels (website, social media, etc)...and you can obscure the person’s name but just sharing the first name (eg Mark), first name and last initial (Mark R.), or first name and where they are from (eg Mark from Eagle, Colorado).

In our experience, adding social proof where there previously wasn’t any is very powerful in building trust and, in most cases, leads to more people willing to share their experiences by writing a review.

Reason #5: Your site has technical issues

To keep costs and workload to a minimum, many entrepreneurs rely on their technology to handle all their needs. If you are paying Shopify $30 per month, then it should be safe to assume that they are doing all that is necessary to make sure you have good SEO, mobile device support, and that your pages are presenting a good user experience. If you’re spending $20 per month on a WordPress site, then you’d expect that they are keeping your setup secure and that the apps you added will always just work. Right? Wrong!

Shopify, Wordpress and their peers provide some amazing tools and services, but they are not miracle workers. The smallest issue could result in a person not purchasing from you. Here are a few examples we commonly see: security software blocking visitors because of potential malware issues; a link/button target too small or not visible enough; mobile version of a page hiding important information or even the logo; an important graphic that wasn’t optimized properly so it looks terrible; a styling code put in the wrong place that makes all the content refresh while it’s loading; an important script that blocks another script from working; the list is endless in terms of what could go wrong and might not be obvious to you.

To dive into one area that many sites have an issue with: Unoptimized images take longer to load and need more resources, slowing down your page load time. This not only negatively affects a user’s experience, it also strongly impacts SEO.

If this is you, here’s what you can do about it…

• Optimize your images’ dimensions, quality, and weight. Blurry images don’t provide a good brand experience. Part of this is ensuring that each graphic is the right dimension for the area you place it, renders well to minimize distortion, and renders quickly. Some hosting services, like Shopify, automatically optimize images you upload to your site and add ‘lazyload’ technology to serve the right sized graphic to optimize for placement and speed.
  Tip: If you are looking for a free online service that will quickly change the size and optimize the weight of your graphic, try https://squoosh.app/

• Confirm that all of the server technology is up-to-date. Services like Shopify and Squarespace make this easy (though updating a Shopify theme can be involved if you made changes to your liquid files). WordPress, on the other hand, can get a lot more involved if you aren’t using a host that regularly updates core areas for you (Operating System; HTTP server; PHP; MySQL; OpenSSH; OpenSSL; WordPress; Plugins).

  Tip: There are several resources that will do a basic website security check for free. One that we like is https://sitecheck.sucuri.net/

• Check the important pages of your site on a mobile phone to confirm that what you see is what you expected and that you can perform any calls-to-action without issue.

  Tip: If your site isn’t live yet and you aren’t able to test your site on your phone, Chrome has a feature to allow you to mimic the mobile environment: Right click a blank area of your page, select ‘Inspect’, the click the ‘toggle device toolbar’ icon to switch between mobile and desktop views. Bonus tip: When you are in mobile view, you will see an option to switch between different phone types and you have quick access to Google’s Lighthouse service (where you can generate insight reports on your page’s performance, use of best practices and SEO).

Online Marketing Is Like Any Business Marketing…Just With More Competition

Having an online presence for your business offers tremendous opportunity, especially as the world does more and more online. Just as with any business plan, getting marketing right is a key to success. Marketing efforts involve costs, time, and expertise, so having an understanding of who you’re targeting and setting goals for every marketing effort is important.

Based on what you define as a priority, you can then move forward with a mixture of conversion-based initiatives (such as email marketing and advertising) and longer-term brand building efforts (such as social media, content marketing, and SEO) that is right for you.

Since many marketing efforts these days are mostly digital in nature, tracking effectiveness and measuring success is more possible than it’s ever been. By rolling out even small changes, you can better see what’s working, what needs more work, and what’s a waste of time. From there, you are in a better position to allocate time and money to dial up the volume on efforts that meet your goals. After that, you can ‘rinse and repeat’ on a regular basis to get that right marketing mix at any given time.