The Most Common Mistakes While Building a Website

Even the simple mistakes, as everyone knows, can have large consequences. And this is true when setting up a successful website. Many of our readers have complained that they have already tried their best to beautify the websites and create high quality content, but still fail to attract as many visitors as they want. This is because they are unaware that they have made some mistakes which may cause a seriously negative impact on their websites. Therefore, in this article, we have listed the most common mistakes that you should avoid when building a website.

Choosing Free Web Host

One of the biggest mistakes you may make is to get your website hosted with a free web hosting provider. Admittedly, you will save money by using hosting services for free, but you can never provide your readers with a smooth and fluent visiting experience, for the page loading speed is slow, and the occurrence of website shutdown is frequent. Besides, the free web hosts will place pop-up or banner ads on your website without the need of getting your permission, and these ads are very likely to distract your readers’ attention from your content, or may annoy them to click the back button.

Remember that all good things come at a cost, but it does not mean that you need to pay a lot to get a truly reliable hosting service. In fact, there are so many budget-friendly web hosts in the market, and we highly recommend Arvixe, WebHostingHub and JustHost, which offer the best hosting performance with rich features at affordable pricing. Remember that avoid extremely cheap web hosting costing you no more than $1/mo, because these hosting services are often full of scams.

Bad Website Safety

Website backup has been emphasized by businessmen and large website owners, because they have a lot of valuable information placed on their sites. For beginners or new bloggers, however, backup has often been ignored. In fact, backing your WordPress site up in a regular interval is one of the most necessary steps to protect your website away from any potential dangers. This is because once hackers or malicious intruders have changed or deleted your website files or important data, you can utilize the backup files to restore your site back to the normal.

In addition to website backup, there are also some other useful practices to keep your WordPress site safe and secure, such as using complex username and password, pay attention to login credentials and file permission, remain updated, and install safety related plugins.

Poor Readability

An attractive web design is indeed crucial for a website, and poor readability or unorganized content layout can never drive traffic. Here, we have listed some methods of improving the users’ reading experience.

• Visit some famous websites to learn how they use color schemes to improve readability.
• Don’t use more than 3 different main font sizes to render your main content which includes main header, sub-header, and body.
• Use a sans-serif typeface.
• Left-aligned text content is easier to read than the right-aligned one.
• Don’t overuse capitalization for it may cause slow reading.
• Use margins to create enough whitespace between your text and images.
• Add the new content regularly, and 3 new posts each week is recommended.
• The content needs to be relevant to your niche.
• Insert keywords or related words into your articles.
• Add beautiful images with appropriate formats, sizes, and alt tags.

Ineffective Website Navigation

Generally, if your visitors can’t find what they want in less than 3 clicks, most of them will leave at once with probably no wish to come back. Therefore, you need to make your navigation seamless, intuitive, and consistent. Therefore, in order to implement effective website navigation, you can pay attention to the following tips.

• Don’t use too much Flash or JavaScript which may spoil your navigation presentation.
• Use text description for all links, with a view to describing them clearly and leading visitors to the proper pages.
• Try to avoid using images for your site navigation, but if you really need one, then remember add an ALT tag for search engines to understand what it is.

Slowness & Downtime

The online performance of your website including uptime and page loading speed will affect your traffic and search engine rankings to the largest extent, but not all the webmasters have realized the importance of speeding up the websites and remaining at least 99.9% uptime.

As tested, if your webpages take more than 7 seconds to load, the majority of visitors will leave your site at once, so you even have no opportunity to show them your appalling content, let alone to attract them to stay for a while. Likewise, if your website always be inaccessible online, how can search engine spiders and site visitors find your content?

Improper Page Title and Meta Descriptions

The page title tells your visitors what your web page is about, and Meta descriptions are the HTML attributes that provide concise explanations of the contents. In order to give readers a comprehensive impression of what you have said, some of you may put a long and detailed page title and Meta description. However, from a SEO point of view, it is good to keep the 2 parts under 70 characters and 150 characters respectively, for search engines and browsers may cut off your page title and Meta description if they are too long.

• Write a keyword rich page title that can summarize your content concisely and precisely, but is no more than 70 characters long.
• Come up a Meta description that adds detail of your webpage, but remains under 150 characters long.

Unreasonable Design

Many webmasters just pay more attention to the quality content creation, but forget that the website design and layout are also very critical. In fact, when people enter your website, the first thing they will see is the overall appearance, so you need to make it as attractive as possible to retain your visitors. For instance, if your website is designed to sell makeups for young ladies, then you’d better choose a feminine WordPress theme with pink color background, and place all your products on the first page with high resolution.

Publishing without Testing

More often than not, you will generate some spelling mistakes, broken links, bad grammar, alignment issues, and many other tiny errors that are very easy to overlook. It doesn’t matter during your writing process, but may damage the whole content if you publish your post without proofreading these mistakes.

Summary

As you can see, building a website is quite easy, but building a quality and popular website require a lot of efforts. Fortunately, most of these mistakes are very easy to avoid and correct, so you only need to pay more attention to them and set up your site carefully, then your visitors will come back to visit your site again and again.