Monitoring and maintaining your website’s performance is crucial. It helps attract new users, keep current users engaged, and convert leads. However, website problems can undermine the experience of business goals and negatively impact user (UX), leading to frustration, confusion, and a lack of trust.
Sometimes, it’s obvious why a website isn’t effective, like missing buttons, a cluttered home page, or low-quality images. Other times, it’s less obvious, such as why visitors exit midway through their user journey. So, how can you identify and troubleshoot these website issues proactively and prevent them from affecting your business?
#1 Missing Local Keywords
Missing these keywords poses a significant problem for your website. It manifests in three key ways:
- Online Invisibility: Without local keywords, your website may become nearly invisible in local service-related search results. Consequently, fewer individuals will click on your site, reducing the possibility of acquiring potential customers.
- Losing Customers to Competitors: When people in your area search for the services you provide, your business must appear on the first page of search results. Failure to do so means you are essentially surrendering business to competitors who have optimized their websites using those local keywords.
- Irrelevance to Your Audience: Google relies on the keywords you use to make sense of your business website. Without those keywords, Google will fail to list you when your audience performs a search that matches exactly what you do or the content you have published online.
#2 Problems with domains
Encountering issues with expired, duplicate, blocked, or unsecured domains is akin to having multiple flawed entrances to your shop. Some of these entrances may be locked, broken, or unsafe.
Let’s delve deeper into each of these concerns:
- Expired Domains: When you initially purchase a domain for your website, there is a time limit attached to it that requires renewal every year (or a few years). While this may seem bothersome, it’s the norm in the URL world. If your domain name expires, your website becomes inaccessible, similar to abruptly closing your store for business.
- Duplicate Websites & Domains: Maintaining multiple live websites can confuse your customers and sabotage your online traffic. It is crucial to have just one website and ensure that all other domains you own redirect to that singular domain.
- Blocked Domains: When your domain is blocked, it is essentially displaying a “Closed” sign on your shop. This can happen if you receive penalties from search engines or if your website is marked as spam, effectively eliminating any opportunity to attract organic visitors.
- Unsecured Domains: If your website lacks proper security measures such as an SSL certificate (indicated by HTTPS in the web address), users and search engines may perceive it as unsafe, similar to a shop located in a questionable neighborhood. This can discourage visitors and significantly undermine the credibility of your website.
Also, try to eliminate access issues so that any user can open your website. Otherwise, users will use VeePN to unlock access. If you can’t provide free access to web content, then don’t prevent users from using a VPN. With a good VPN, users will not experience problems with slow-down internet and will be able to unblock your site.
#3 SEO Problems
SEO enables search engines to accurately identify your content, resulting in a higher ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs), increased web traffic, and better-quality leads. On the other hand, inadequate SEO can significantly decrease your SERP ranking and make it challenging for users to find your website. For instance, a study revealed that:
The top position on Google SERPs captures 34% of total website traffic.
Moving your page from rank #2 to #1 will double your website traffic.
The number one search result attracts the same amount of user traffic as ranks #2, #3, #4, and #5 combined.
In simple terms, users won’t magically find your website. That’s why SEO plays a crucial role in attracting users by ensuring visibility in the top position on SERPs.
#4 Confusing User Journey
We often encounter clutter and confusion on websites, and a lack of clear signposting is a common issue. Take a moment to ask yourself a simple question: How easy is it for users to reach their intended destination? If it takes more than two clicks for customers to make a purchase or booking, your conversion rate may suffer. One solution is to conduct usability testing with others.
#5 Broken Pages & Links
Encountering a 404 error page after clicking on a link or image is incredibly frustrating. It not only disappoints potential customers, signaling a lack of attention, but Google also penalizes websites that have numerous broken links or redirects.
To address this issue, it is crucial to periodically crawl your website and identify any broken pages, links, or images. You can achieve this by logging into your preferred website analytics tool or Google Search Console to obtain a comprehensive report on the detected issues.
Subsequently, take action by updating, removing, or redirecting the flagged pages or links. It is imperative to choose 301 redirects from the broken page to a relevant live page on your website.
Keep your website’s performance and search engine optimization to make the user journey as smooth and enjoyable as possible.
Conclusion
We have successfully tackled a range of website challenges, from SEO’s lack of local keywords to problems in website setup. Remember, your website serves a greater purpose than just a digital business card. It acts as your 24/7 storefront, and online sales representative, and often creates the initial impression of your business.
Addressing these common issues isn’t just about avoiding setbacks, but about creating ideal conditions for your business to thrive in a changing digital landscape. As customer expectations rise, having an effective, easily accessible, and mobile-compatible website is not just desirable, but necessary.
