Common mistakes seen on small business websites

Trojan

One of the top questions I get from small business owners is: "Why isn't my website making sales?"

Recently I offered to review a whole bunch of reddit small business websites for free in order to get some business intelligence, and to generate some reciprocation so I could get some surveys completed (if you haven't done it, it's a real pain to try to get survey completes).

In total, twenty-two websites were put forward for review during the 2 days the offer was open. Twenty included an answer to the simple question I asked (and I reviewed one that hadn't by accident). So this is not a massive study, and it certainly won't meet academic statistical rigour, but you should find the results interesting and helpful if you're a website owner.

I found 7 critical website mistakes:

No. 1: Does The Site Have a Compelling Email Opt-in?

While all of the sites reviewed had an email opt-in somewhere, not one of them had a compelling incentive to have visitors opt-in.

In general, email newsletters are not a good opt-in incentive, that's just not compelling enough:

"Sign up for our newsletter" is code for "We know you get loads of email, but if you subscribe here we'll fill your inbox with even more email you don't want to read".

You could test using a discount coupon – but save your profit margin, you can do better than that!

Recommendations

• Offer the visitor something that solves a problem they have, ideally directly related to your business. "Free Guide to XYZ": guides, checklists and cheat-sheets are great.
• They must actually provide genuine value, but they don't have to be very long – in fact it's better if they're quick to consume.
• Then start offering them valuable advice and building your credibility with them through their inbox via your autoresponder sequence

No. 2: Does The Site Have a Clear, Obvious Purpose and Visitor Benefits?

The first thing visitors look for is something to let them know they're in the right place. Usually this a clear statement of purpose, or visitor benefits.

"What's In It For Me?"

Of the review group, 30% made the website purpose very obvious and clear via a tagline or headline what the site was about. 25% less so, and a whole 45% of the sites didn't make it clear at all.

Recommendations

1. Have a tagline or headline front and center so that visitors know what they're looking at.
2. Read "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug to get a better understanding of what website visitors are looking for.

No. 3: Does The Site Have a Strong, Clear Call-to-Action?

After a clear purpose, the next thing to look for is the Call-to-Action. What action should I take? What does the site owner want people to do? Around 1/3rd of the sites did this well, with a strong, clear call to action (CTA), e.g. Book Now, Add to Cart, Contact Us, that stood out from the page content and told me what to do next. 25% had a weak call to action and 40% had none at all.

Recommendation

• ensure every page on your site has at least one clear, strong call to action that stands out visually from the rest of the page content.

No. 4: Does The Site Have a Quality "About" Page?

The About Page is the 2nd most visited page on a website – after the homepage – and crucial in building trust with a potential customer.

Only 10% of the sites reviewed had a good About page that included photos of the business owners/staff, names and a bit of background. The rest had far less, usually just a block of generic text that could be copied and pasted onto a competitor's site.

You're asking people to trust you with their hard earned cash, so you have to include more information than that.

Recommendations

Include details of why you want to serve your particular customers and what you do for them
Include the business owner and staff photos
Include your street address and photos of the business location if possible

No. 5: Does The Site Load Quickly?

The slowest sites were WordPress based, probably due to lack of caching, the fastest were Shopify and one of the custom builds.

Recommendations

1. If you use WordPress, enable caching.
2. Reduce your image sizes
3. Move to a better hosting company.

No. 6: Does The Site Have Good Design Aesthetic?

It's somewhat subjective, but most visitors recognise a professional design when they see it, even if they can't articulate the details. And it's a big factor in generating online sales. Visitors will spend money on a site they trust, and design aesthetic is crucial in building that trust.

There was a mixed-bag in the review group when it came to design aesthetic: almost a 3-way tie between good, average and poor designs.

Recommendation

• If you can, get a professional designer to tweak your site design.
• Reduce the number of fonts, colours and textures.

No. 7: Does The Site Have a Responsive Design?

In this study, thankfully the vast majority of sites were responsive. If you're one of the few who doesn't have a responsive website, you need to get to work on updating your website, or say goodbye to 50%+ of your traffic.

Recommendation

• If your site is not responsive, it's past time for an upgrade. Start looking for a responsive theme or talk to a web design company.

--

Breakdown of the sites reviewed:

Here's some background information on the type of sites by type:

1. Product or service: There was an almost even split of product to service business
2. Customer type: also equally split between business-to-consumer (B2B) and business-to-business (B2C).
3. The website platform or content management system (CMS) breakdown was 67% on self-hosted WordPress (.org), 14% Shopify, 14% custom CMS, and 5% Wix.
4. Domain TLD: 75% were on .com domains, the rest were .com.au, .co.uk and .io.

I wrote this up as a blog post here including charts: https://www.websitedoctor.com/common-website-mistakes/

Check out the original reviews thread for the actual reviews themselves - they're about 350-400 words each and most of the domains are listed so you can check out the sites yourself.

Have you got these problems on your own website? Any tips for resolving them as quickly and inexpensively as possible?

pedroeibar1

Interesting post , thanks. Common mistakes to add to the above findings - clichés, spelling, grammar and syntax.

Buttercake

Small business owners want to spend €0 on their websites and will get it done cheap & quick.

dudara

Great points raised above, particularly on the responsive. I write a personal blog and watch the analytics on my traffic. I recently installed a new design, which was an improvement over the previous one with respect to mobile responsiveness. I've noticed an uplift in mobile traffic since.

tricky D

For a local business: Not connecting your local social signals esp. Google properties which give a massive search boost and enhanced citation in the 7pack. Simple and quick to do but most 'SEO operators' don't do it.

Trojan

Thanks for the feedback, folks. I'm going to take your suggestions/additions and write them up as an update for the post later.

I also posted this over on reddit last night, on r/smallbusiness and cross-posted to r/enterpreneur - currently the number one post in both subreddits with 80 and 340 upvotes respectively. Over 16 hours it's driven about 350 visitors to my site, resulting in 4 email subscriptions. I'll be interested to see what the traffic is like over the next 24-48 hours as the reddit algorithm ebbs.

thecommander

tricky D wrote: »

For a local business: Not connecting your local social signals esp. Google properties which give a massive search boost and enhanced citation in the 7pack. Simple and quick to do but most 'SEO operators' don't do it.

What's the bit in bold about? Googled it but can't find anything, is it an SEO term ?

DubTony

Buttercake wrote: »

Small business owners want to spend €0 on their websites and will get it done cheap & quick.

Primarily because they don't know why the need/want a web site or what it's for them or how people can find it and what benefit it may bring the business and why anyone should visit the web site and what the web site does and what benefit it brings to a customer and what email opt-in means anyway and why you should have it and stuff.

I think the above sentence describes how the average small business person views the idea of having a web site. For many the real question is "WHY?", which is a question that no salesman in the Build-A-Website industry ever answered satisfactorily - to that small business person.

Looking forward to being corrected.

Trojan

thecommander wrote: »

What's the bit in bold about? Googled it but can't find anything, is it an SEO term ?

The 7 pack (or 3 pack on some local searches) is a list of local businesses highlighted with map pins on the map and listed in the search results near the top of the page.

tricky D

Trojan wrote: »

listed in the search results near the top of the page.

... for search the terms like [trade type] and [location] eg. 'landscaper dublin'.

Easy and quick to set up if you know what you are doing with fairly quick results, to the extent that I can almost 'no foal, no fee' on it.

Trojan

Buttercake wrote: »

Small business owners want to spend €0 on their websites and will get it done cheap & quick.

DubTony wrote: »

Primarily because they don't know why the need/want a web site or what it's for them or how people can find it and what benefit it may bring the business and why anyone should visit the web site and what the web site does and what benefit it brings to a customer and what email opt-in means anyway and why you should have it and stuff.

I think the above sentence describes how the average small business person views the idea of having a web site. For many the real question is "WHY?", which is a question that no salesman in the Build-A-Website industry ever answered satisfactorily - to that small business person.

Looking forward to being corrected.

I think it's a bit from column A, a bit from column B.

The web design and development industry has grown and developed a whole lot since 1996 when I build my first site on GeoCities, but it'd be just past toddler stage if it was a person.

Website technology has grown exponentially, as has our understanding of visitor behaviour -- and yet there's still room for someone like Apple or Nintendo to come along and disrupt things massively.

Speaking as a web guy, there is an onus on designers and developers to see things from a business perspective, to get to grips with marketing and business concepts like "value proposition" and "buyer persona".

And speaking as a business owner, there is an onus on entrepreneurs and business owners to self-educate more. We have to learn about accounts and pricing and traditional marketing and branding and systemisation and processes and customer service and everything else - so why not online marketing?

There is a sector of the market that's working on educating the web providers - guys like Brent Weaver and Brennan Dunn.

There's also a whole bunch of people working on trying to help businesses get to grips with online marketing. You can see from my posts here that I'm trying to be one of them. And then sometimes I forget to explain things like "opt-in"

mrawkward

Excellent work which explains why so many SME owners are unwilling to invest substantially in their sites.... The traditional supply side has been delivering very poor quality. Too many bedroom keyboard jockeys that have no clue about the critical aspects of graphic design, marketing, SEO or visitor experience/expectation. All the technical web skills in the world are useless if the builder does not have these skills and be able to craft a site that is appropriate to the opportunity available to the business. A real commercial/business comprehension is also essential.

Web site building rip offs by useless providers have made many businesses very sceptical about websites, from bitter experience. Ignorant buyers working with deficient providers is a classic recipe for a really crap result.

The problem of educating buyers is every bit as important as improving the skills of the supply side. It very far from a mere SME issue, most large company sites are even worse with the function dumped in the IT Dept, when in fact it is a critical Sales and Marketing core function.

Perhaps your next project should be a concise guide on "How to Spec and Buy a Website Foy YOUR Business"!

Best thread on this topic in a very long time, well done!

CelticRambler

Trojan wrote: »

No. 7: Does The Site Have a Responsive Design?

In this study, thankfully the vast majority of sites were responsive. If you're one of the few who doesn't have a responsive website, you need to get to work on updating your website, or say goodbye to 50%+ of your traffic.

Recommendation

• If your site is not responsive, it's past time for an upgrade. Start looking for a responsive theme or talk to a web design company.

... and remember that "responsive" is not a euphemism for "optimised for smartphones". :mad:

A large number of sites that I regularly visit have been re-designed in the last couple of years, now being supposedly "responsive" but becoming irritatingly more difficult to use in the process if viewed on a standard PC/laptop. Ryanair and Eurotunnel would be the worst offenders on my list, where the front page booking form falls off the bottom of my landscape oriented screen.

I've had to apply custom CSS to both to make them usuable, and only bother because the commercial proposition is unbeatable.

If you're targetting business users, remember that they (we!) are quite likely to be accessing your site via old-fashioned technology, possibly even using the tab key and more than two fingers to whizz through your enquiry/order/booking form. :pac:

Trojan

mrawkward wrote: »

Excellent work which explains why so many SME owners are unwilling to invest substantially in their sites.... The traditional supply side has been delivering very poor quality. Too many bedroom keyboard jockeys that have no clue about the critical aspects of graphic design, marketing, SEO or visitor experience/expectation. All the technical web skills in the world are useless if the builder does not have these skills and be able to craft a site that is appropriate to the opportunity available to the business. A real commercial/business comprehension is also essential.

Web site building rip offs by useless providers have made many businesses very sceptical about websites, from bitter experience. Ignorant buyers working with deficient providers is a classic recipe for a really crap result.

The problem of educating buyers is every bit as important as improving the skills of the supply side. It very far from a mere SME issue, most large company sites are even worse with the function dumped in the IT Dept, when in fact it is a critical Sales and Marketing core function.

There's a whole bunch of issues that affect the quality of web design services to the SME sector. Here's a couple of the big ones IMO:

• web technology in general is moving so fast that education can't keep up with it, so there are very few good web design courses (3 of the top 4 discussions in the Design forum right now are people looking for good courses)
• self-service technology has improved vastly, and is getting a lot of traction at the low end, pushing out the entry-level freelancers and solo providers due to self-serve businesses and part-timers doing nixers at below cost
• any provider with an understanding of the value they can bring is charging commensurately, which is pricing out a lot of SMEs

There's more, that's just the highlights

mrawkward wrote: »

Perhaps your next project should be a concise guide on "How to Spec and Buy a Website Foy YOUR Business"!

I am actually working on something related to this right now - it's about helping businesses plan their new site, and take advantage of a particular grant...

5rtytry56

spelling.


gugleguy, the spelling nazi.

EIREHotspur

Great discussion.

I would agree with a lot of what has been said.
As someone who loves great web design I dispair at the absolute muck that is out there.

I saw a program with George Lee last year when he was in Dubai in the harbour on a boat interviewing an Irish Tech guy and he asked him why he couldn't do what he did back in Ireland?
"Because Ireland isn't good at change".

Where are the guys from Ireland with their Stripe idea? America.
Our Taoiseach has a Nokia Phone...

Only the big corporations it seems are willing to spend on their Websites and that is because of dedicated people they have in house to do it and maintain info etc..
All small Business who do get a website think if they have a huge rolling banner...thinks that is them sorted and never update it again...

County Council websites are amongst the worst in the country.
That is because of the majority of these types of organisations with older people with no clue about anything with Technology.

I see they are trying to bring in a coding program in schools.
That is a first step but will the Teachers who teach it only do it with a half hearted approach.
Coding...Tech skills is a passion that cannot be instilled.....usually you have it or you don't.

Also the Website designers are also at fault with not moving with the times.
Mr Zuckerberg changed the industry with his easy, fast & free Facebook offering. A classic Trogan Horse marketing plan to get it on as many computers as possible and then make money off adverts and watch his money grow while the people provided the free content.
Brilliant!

So as Web Developers we have to get real....the days of the €300..€400...€500 websites are long gone....

We need to work harder....faster...and yes cheaper...

There is a reason those two famous cheap supermarkets are doing so well and it isn't because of their fantastic sophisticated wire mesh shelving or the fabulous layout of goods on a pallet....

Trojan

EIREHotspur wrote: »

So as Web Developers we have to get real....the days of the €300..€400...€500 websites are long gone....

I think I agree with you there...

EIREHotspur wrote: »

We need to work harder....faster...and yes cheaper...

... or maybe not.

I do believe the days of €400 websites should be gone - businesses at that price point might as well use a self-serve option.

But I don't agree that web developers participate in the race to the bottom. Charge more, and deliver true value.

EIREHotspur

Trojan wrote: »

I think I agree with you there...



... or maybe not.

I do believe the days of €400 websites should be gone - businesses at that price point might as well use a self-serve option.

But I don't agree that web developers participate in the race to the bottom. Charge more, and deliver true value.

yes but that market is gone.....

Big companies hire agencies....they have huge budgets and don't mind the cost...

The small Business owner looks at Wix....Weebly and then expect you to design for next to nothing or they camp on facebook.

There is no middle ground as far as web design goes....

You either "know enough" to put bad websites together and be happy with it or you know nothing and don't care about features that you don't understand....cannot change because you have no interest to learn how to do it in the backend etc...

5rtytry56

Not pure "freemium" but the small business owner can also check out

Google sites:

Access the interface here to see what I am talking about

http://sites.google.com/

Log in with your gmail.