You’ve invested heavily in your brand new website, but you’re not seeing a return on that investment.
This new site was supposed to bring in new customers and new traffic, while also taking some pressure off of your customer service/ sales team. But none of that has happened yet.
So what happened? You may wonder if you chose the wrong web designer or CMS system. But the solution is often more simple than that.
Even the newest and most modern websites still frequently suffer from some classic barriers that prevent customers from using them. You may find that some very simple fixes can help you explode your organic traffic and unplug your sales funnel.
Here are 4 of the most common barriers and how you can fix them.
1. Nobody Can Find You
If you don’t have a solid SEO and keyword strategy in place, a new website is not going to make much of a difference. An older website with proper optimization could actually be better than a new site with no optimization.
A new website can’t make up for stale keywords or out-dated tactics. And if you were making SEO mistakes on your old website, they will absolutely follow you to the new site.
2. Slow Speeds
It’s also very possible that people are finding your website, but leaving because it’s taking too long to load. Over half of your visitors will abandon your site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
Your site’s speed is crucial to its traffic and its SEO value, and Google’s upcoming Core Web Vitals update is poised to make it more important than ever.
The update will introduce 3 new speed metrics into everyday marketing conversations:
- Largest Contentful Paint: The amount of time it takes a given page’s biggest asset to load
- First Input Delay: The amount of time a user has to wait for the page to be interactive
- Cumulative Layout Shift: The amount of time it takes for your site’s layout to stop shifting while it loads.
It’s also important to be aware of the speeds on all of your pages. For example, you could be looking at huge abandonment numbers if your home page loads quickly, but your payment gateway is slow.
There are countless things that may slow your website down. But a few of the most common problems include:
- Non-compressed images
- Too much/ unnecessary coding on pages
- Too many WordPress plugins
- Too much content (you should prune your content regularly)
If you launch a new website to replace your older and slower one, it may work great right away, but soon slow down if you add too much to the back end.
But if it’s slow right out of the gates, you’re most likely dealing with a poorly designed site (i.e. too much coding), or bad hosting.
3. A Bad Chatbot Experience
Installing a chatbot on your site is a fantastic way to help your customer service team and take some tasks off of their plates. Chatbots are incredibly handy for helping customers get general information, book appointments, or make payments. In fact, only about a third of your customers would rather speak to a human agent to do these things.
But the more complex your business is, the more potential there is for a bad chatbot experience. Keep it simple. Program your chatbot to perform very simple and popular tasks, but make sure that your visitors can request a human agent/representative at any point.
4. A Bad Mobile Experience
You may not spend too much time worrying about your mobile site, assuming that most of your customers aren’t accessing your site through a mobile device. But over half of all web traffic now comes from mobile devices, so you may be underestimating how many people are actually trying to navigate your site from their phone.
At the same time, Google will look at your mobile site before it looks at your desktop site. This means that if your mobile site isn’t properly optimized, it could be hurting your SEO.
There are dozens of reasons why your website could be underperforming, but those are 4 of the most common. Any one of them can prevent customers from finding your website, or cause them to close the page out of frustration.
And when this happens, you may be sending that visitor directly to your competition’s site.
