5 Ways Your Website Could Be Hurting Sales

When you take your business online, you are taking huge steps towards the growth of your brand. While a local business is limited to the customers in their immediate area, that same business can reach people all over the globe online.

However, simply being online doesn’t guarantee more customers or an increase in sales. Setting up your website is half the battle. To be worthwhile, visitors to your site have to be turned into sales or leads.

With that in mind, there are a number of ways that your website can actually be hurting sales. Here are five of the most detrimental:

1. Poorly Designed

For most people, your website is probably their first encounter with your business. If your website looks like it was designed by a fifth grader, you’re going to have problems.

Think about how you would feel if you visited a company’s website only to find that it was poorly thrown together. Would you want to give them your business? Your potential customers feel the same way.

Of course, high-quality web design costs money, but it’s money that’s very well spent. A professional-looking site will make you stand out as an authority in your field and encourage customers to spend more time on your site.

2. Not Mobile Friendly

While you’re hiring a web designer to build your professional website, make sure they are also designing it to look and run great on mobile devices.

Not like this:

More and more people are looking at websites on their phones and tablets as opposed to their computers. If a website is not optimized for mobile users, it may look bad or load slowly, causing potential customers to simply click the back button and move onto your competitors.

3. Out of Date Content

If potential customers come to your site and find an update on your homepage that was posted two years ago, they may wonder about the quality of your services. After all, if you can’t be bothered to keep your website up-to-date, are there other quality issues in your company you haven’t bothered to address?

The best way to avoid out of date content is to think about what kinds of concerns, problems and issues are most important to the people visiting your site. Focus on addressing these concerns on a regular basis by creating blogs that give answers to these questions.

Keeping your content up-to-date will allow your customers to see that you’re on top of things and they’ll also spend more time on your website, which helps rank your page higher in the web searches.

4. Not Having a Call to Action

The goal of any business website is to turn visitors into customers and to turn customers into repeat customers. The best way to do this is to have a call to action (CTA) right after the important information on your site.

Once a potential customer sees that you provide a solution to their problem, they should be met with a CTA button so they can take action immediately. If someone clicks on your CTA and converts, you can also include a second CTA that allows them to share the service they just bought—like your social media pages—or sign up for a newsletter.

5. Lack of Trust Factors

Potential customers want to know that they are going to be able to trust you. If they don’t, they will leave your website and never come back.

Building trust in your brand takes a significant amount of time, which is a luxury you don’t have when trying to convert a website customer.

To get around this, be sure to publish testimonials from happy customers, reviews from people who have used your service, or lists of reputable affiliates that you’re associated with. Just make sure that you can fulfill on the promises in your testimonials, or you might end up triggering a rash of negative reviews.

Conclusion

It takes a lot of work to build a profitable business. Your website should be one of your greatest tools, not one of your downfalls.

Fortunately, if you’ve got a great, mobile-friendly design with up-to-date content, solid CTAs and high-quality trust signals, you’re well on your way to getting all the leads and sales that come with a powerful online presence.

How have you seen poor website design hurting sales performance? What other site design pitfalls would you add to this list?