You’ve poured your heart, creativity, and frustration into building a gorgeous website design for your business, yet it just isn’t delivering the traffic, leads, and sales you expected.
What’s going wrong?
As someone who recently launched (and failed) my first agency, I have an intimate understanding of the pitfalls that can sabotage even the most well-intended online efforts.
I spent months metaphorically running into ‘sliding glass doors’, awkwardly bouncing off opportunities and rookie mistakes in the entrepreneurial world.
While painful, that failure was a blessing in disguise. I learned more during this chapter, than any other time in my life. It transformed me into a battle-tested site developer & optimizer with nuanced expertise about what separates an underwhelming online presence from a high-converting digital marketing flywheel.
You see, throughout my journey, I made (and learned from) virtually every website design sin in the book. So, I’m opening up my copybook to expose the 10 deadliest offenders I see business owners unintentionally committing over and over…
Resolving these will be like injecting a magic conversion-boosting serum into your funnel…
- An Unconvincing Value Proposition:
From the moment someone lands on your homepage, you have 7 seconds to capture their distracted mind.1 Your value proposition needs to reach your ideal customer with crystal clarity on how your offering solves their painful problem better than anyone else. - The Black Hole Navigation:
Don’t let your visitors disappear into an endless labyrinth of confusing navigation menus and aimless page clicks. Organize your site architecture and nav with ruthless simplicity so their desired destination is easily within reach. Make sure to map out your site’s architecture to flow towards the call to actions (CTAs) you want to garner on the site. - Repelling Walls of Text:
Our digital era attention spans are shortening by the minute. Break up those intimidating slabs of dense text with some padding of white space, visual elements, and bite-sized content chunks. Make it skimmable, scannable, digestible content.2 - Visual Chaos and Confusion:
Your visitors’ eyeballs should be able to smoothly glide around your website design through intentional use of visual hierarchy principles like contrasting colors, font weights, directional cues, spacing, and content prioritization. Don’t let it feel like a disorienting free-for-all. - Sluggish Page Load Wasteland:
Each second of load time drudgery increases bounce rates and cripples your precious conversion flow. Relentlessly strip away bloat from un-optimized images, excessive plugins, redirects, and cheap hosting solutions to satisfy today’s speed expectations. - The ‘Tiny Screen’ Blind Spot:
With over 60% of traffic now from mobile devices, your website can’t just be a shrunken, clunky afterthought on smartphones. You need a laser-focused mobile-first responsive design that delivers premium user experience (UX) on every viewport size. - The ‘Where’s Waldo?’ Call-to-Action:
Make your main desired conversion goal like signing up, joining a membership, or purchasing utterly unmissable. Some common ways to enhance your CTA is through striking call-to-action color contrasts, directional cues, white space spotlighting, and psychologically persuasive copy triggers. For some of my favorite copy tips and tricks I’d recommend you visit Alex Cattoni’s youtube channel and watch as much as you can. Ultimatelly dont let your CTA get lost in the shuffle. - Stock Photo Foolishness:
Lazy, cheesy stock imagery has become the online equivalent of cheap used car salesman tactics in today’s authenticity-obsessed digital climate. Show off real people, using your products/services, and behind-the-scenes shots to humanize your brand and build trust. - The Trust Desert:
In the faceless online world, skepticism is the default reaction for prospects considering your offer. I can vouche for this first hand. Strategically weave in elements like testimonials, customer reviews, security badges, credentials, portfolio case studies, and impressive stats to melt away doubt. Your going to want to map out the most common objections to your services or products and create some copy to address these frequently asked questions (FAQs) for your visitors. - Leaky Pipe Conversion Funnel:
Even with a gorgeous aesthetic, conversion performance will decrease due to slow load times, broken links, form field issues, obtrusive pop-ups and mediocre messaging. To avoid bottlenecks in your pipeline, try scientific A/B testing with your messaging and meticulously optimize after results are found.
Now you’re aware of the deadliest website sins to avoid at all costs. Relentlessly exterminate them from your digital property to dramatically boost online engagement, leads, and sales.
If optimizing your website for maximum conversions still feels overwhelming after this guide, I’m here to help. As a website design and development consultant who learned these lessons the hard way, I can conduct an audit to identify the specific bottlenecks strangling your funnel.
Then, I’ll prescribe and implement the critical fixes needed to transform your site into a high-converting sales machine. Simply click here to book a free strategy session where we’ll get to the root of your website’s underperformance and map out a game plan for unlocking its full revenue potential.
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/serenitygibbons/2018/06/19/you-have-7-seconds-to-make-a-first-impression-heres-how-to-succeed/ ↩︎
- https://dmjcomputerservices.com/blog/why-you-shouldnt-align-html-justify/ ↩︎
