If you’ve got a website and have a feeling it isn’t working as well as it should, check 5 common signs to look out for. Whether your website is new or several years old, it’s worth keeping an eye on these – a website that isn’t working is a poor investment and can often be improved relatively easily.
1. Low Number of Enquiries or Orders
The most obvious sign your website isn’t working well is that you have a low number of enquiries or orders (for an e-commerce) site. These may have been low ever since the site was launched, or they may have been higher before and dropped off over time. This low number of leads can be caused by a number of reasons, the most common ones to look out for are listed below.
2. Low Traffic
If the traffic (number of visitors) to your website is low, then however good your website is, it will be very hard to generate a good number of enquiries or orders. For some very specialist sites, low traffic may be normal, but for most websites low traffic is a warning sign. The most common reasons your website has low traffic are:
- Poor SEO
- Weak (or no) promotion via social media or paid advertising
- Lack of email marketing
3. High bounce rate
A high bounce rate means that many visitors are coming to your website and then leaving without browsing to other pages. To check your bounce rate, you need to have an analytics tool enabled on your website – the most common is Google Analytics. A high bounce rate can be caused by poor usability or call to actions, an out-of-date look and feel, lack of mobile optimisation (see below) or slowness (see below).
4. Not Optimised for Mobile
Over 50% of website traffic is now from mobile devices. So, if your website isn’t optimised for mobile, you’ll be missing out. A key thing is whether your website is ‘responsive’, meaning it will adapt and change to display better on a mobile device. If it isn’t, it will be difficult or impossible to navigate on mobile – if it is many visitors will simply give up (and potentially go and visit one of your competitors instead).
5. Slow Website
If the initial page load for your website takes a long time and/or certain parts of site are slow, this will annoy users. Most users will wait a few seconds for a webpage to load – if it takes longer, some will leave. Slow websites can be caused by poor coding, out of date plugins/themes and/or an overloaded server.
What To Do?
If you don’t have it in place already, the first thing to do is to get analytics in place – we’d suggest Fathom Analytics. This will allow you to view usage data (including traffic volume, bounce rate) as well as analyse things such as the type of devices (e.g. desktop, mobiles) and browsers being used etc.
If you already have knowledge, you can then review your website and make adjustments yourself. Alternatively, you may wish to view our Website Optimisation & SEO Services to see how we can help.
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