10 Often Overlooked Website Mistakes that May Harm Your Business

10 Often Overlooked Website Mistakes that May Harm Your Business

Reader Comments (22)

  1. Chris I love that buffalo picture. It is amusing the heck out of me. Maybe I need more sleep LOL! Great choice though.

    All 10 mistakes baffle me but #1 kills me. I wrote a series of guest posts on hosting mistakes and going for cheap hosting is among the worst boo boo. Because spending like 3 bucks a month on hosting is online suicide. Imagine paying big bucks on a billboard and other high profile ad channels, than paying cheap rent for a rat hole storefront in the lowest traffic area of town. This is like spending more on business cards than you do on hosting.

    As for domain names, I got a good one 🙂 Super aligned to grab Blogging From Paradise because it is a gem and a reader told me 1 day after I bought it that he tried to grab it a day prior. I nabbed it in the nick of time.

    Super post Chris.

    • Exactly, don’t cheap out on your storefront and hope people will come back repeatedly until you reopen … sometimes real estate (physical and virtual) is priced low for a good reason

  2. These are all good points. However, the move over to SSL one is the one i have been procrastinating on.

    Copyblogger is also not on SSL.

    • We do have a certificate but right now we only use it for logins/transactional on Copyblogger – our other, more commercial sites are SSL. That said, we have the luxury of having a whole bunch of authority for a loooong time 🙂

      • Great points Chris! But as you said about SSL that you use it only for the transaction and commercial part of your business, which makes complete sense. That means if I have a simple website with a blog with no transnational or online business part then SSL is not required right?

        • Right now, not required, but with warnings getting more visible and stronger when you don’t have SSL, eventually it will erode trust so we will all need to move, social share counts or no 🙁

  3. Great post Chris, totally agree. The SSL is something I’m holding back as well because of the social shares. This is just the only thing holding me back, I think CP site as well. Do you think maybe someday sites with a high share count would be able to move for SSL?

    • The problem with the social shares is the tools look for unique URLs, and they include the http or https in that – all it would take would be for them to count regardless of http/https 🙂

  4. Some excellent points here. I especially appreciated your warning against digital sharecropping. Small businesses can do no worse than entrusting all of their creative and financial efforts to a site-builder software, which at the end of the day owns all rights to any material created while using said software.

    As you mentioned, “Landlords Go Away.”

    • A popular photo hosting service just showed how dangerous it is to put all your assets in one “bucket” 😉

  5. Totally love this. I am going to look at upgrading my hosting now! I was penny-pinching (need to slap my hand for that one) I thought I could start small, but my site is ridiculously slow because of it.
    Great article, thanks.

    • Penny pinching is fine and even necessary if it is just for fun or you need those pennies to keep the lights on, but at some point yeah, your customers deserve better 😉

  6. Hi Chris,

    Nice Post!

    It is fairly simple to build a website in this day and age, but an exceedingly good one that fulfills its purpose and meets business goals is not. As easy as it may seem to design a website, one crafted without an expertise, can be loaded with problems that turn visitors away.

    Turning a blind eye to the proliferation of mobile devices is especially harmful to e-commerce. Buyers in this era use them to make purchases. To be current and to stay relevant, businesses must meet the customers where they are, and take customers’ mobile devices into account.

    Website load time can directly affect sales rates, search engine rankings, and customers’ loyalty.

    I will tweet your post.

    Thanks a lot for sharing.

  7. Interesting article, I’m newer to wordpress sites but have already noticed the difference in hosting providers. I wonder though, does upgrading to SSL make that much of a difference for sites that don’t have any type of login or eCommerce?

    • The trend is that google and browsers will get more aggressive about calling out sites that are not secured :/

    • It is such a simple process to request an SSL Cert from your hosting provider and then 301 redirect your non-SSL domain that it’s not worth the risk of not doing it. Any little things you can do to improve your sites standing with Google will be beneficial!

  8. Great article! I used to use really cheap hosting which made my site load in 5+ seconds. I switched about 3 months ago and my site loads in about 1.6 seconds, which is great considering I have quite a few images and Javascript calls to external APIs.

    I still can’t believe that people who want to create a professional website for customers or readers are not willing to invest in their infrastructure before they release their website. Having a fast website is key where, like you said, search engines penalize you for not having one.

  9. Great tips Chris. This was a very useful read. I especially like the point about digital sharecropping. One of the things I have noticed is poor navigation. For example, too many menu options in the top navigation which make it look cluttered. Also, I sometimes see odd names for common navigational elements which make it difficult to understand what they are about.

  10. “Choosing a domain nobody can spell or remember” yet having a KW in your URL is something Google still gives points for. Besides, nobody needs to remember any URL since there’s this great browser feature called “bookmark”. Other than that, I really enjoyed reading this post.

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