Top Website Mistakes That Hurt Your Business

There’s really no right or wrong way to design or maintain your website. There’s certainly a wide range of functionality and style preferences that work well for different business types and purposes—and no one-size-fits-all approach to building a successful website.

But, there are a few particular web design “oopsies” that truly don’t work well across most industries and websites, because they end up hurting your business image, traffic or sales.

Here are some of the most common website mistakes that hurt online businesses—plus what to do to avoid them (or fix ‘em if you’ve got ‘em!).

Avoid these common mistakes on your website:

Broken links

Not only do broken links appear unprofessional to your website visitors (and give the impression that your content is not kept up-to-date), but they can also hurt your SEO, as search engines aren’t able to properly crawl and understand the broken links and how your website relates to the “web” it’s connected to.

Though Squarespace (my favorite website platform to build on) doesn’t have a built-in broken link checker (…yet!), there are several free broken link checkers available online, like this one.

I recommend running a monthly(-ish) report to be aware of and fix any broken links that may have come up on your website.

Why do links break? Links break for several reasons, and you’ll often find that the broken links on your site are for external links (those pointing away from your site, to someone else’s). Some of the reasons a link may be broken:

the URL may have had a typo when you entered it
the page may have been taken down
or the URL to that page may have been changed (this is why it’s so important to properly publish your blog post URLs from the beginning 😄)

Typos

In the era of spell-check, it’s pretty frowned upon to run a website laden with typos.

Sure, the occasional mistake now and then is only human! But reading through an otherwise professional-looking website and coming across a blatant typo instantly reduces the quality and authority of the website/business for many readers.

To give the best first impression of your website and business, I recommend paying special attention into your website copywriting (and editing!).

I like to think of it this way: you want to put the same level of detail and care into your website as you do into your business products and relationship with your clients—because your website is a reflection of your business values and practices.

A few tips for avoiding typos on your website:

Write your website updates or blog posts in browser like Google Chrome, which has a built-in spell-check feature and will underline any misspelled words.
Proofread, proofread, proofread. Unfortunately, not all typos are caught by spell-check, as words may be spelled correctly, but misused or out of place. Some of the most common typos are simply omitted words the writer forgot to add as they were thinking faster than they were typing.
Have someone else review your work too. An extra pair of eyes may catch something yours didn’t.

Mobile-unfriendliness

With an ever-growing percentage of web searches occurring on mobile devices, it’s not in your best business interest to design a website that looks great on desktop… but is choppy or illegible on mobile.

One of the reasons I recommend Squarespace as a website platform is that all of their site templates are mobile-friendly by default. This can save you plenty of time and $$ hiring a web developer to make your site mobile responsive after-the-fact.

I also suggest that before publishing any new page or blog post you confirm the appearance on mobile (Squarespace has a useful mock-up of this in their editing interface). Sometimes, imagery may display differently or text may line break differently on mobile than you had intended, and it’s good to be able to catch this before you hit publish.

Here are my top tips for ensuring mobile-friendly design on your Squarespace website.

No favicon

A favicon is the small icon that appears in browsers, specific to your website. In the screenshot below you can see the favicons for Google, Facebook and Five Design Co.:

Favicons also show up in your browser’s bookmarks bar, browsing history and other places across the web (in fact, Google recently announced they’ll be displaying favicons in search result listings).

Customizing your favicon adds to the professionalism and branding of your website, as well as helps visitors to recognize the site in a list of bookmarked pages or a window of many open tabs.

If you don’t upload a custom favicon, your site will use a default icon—for example, sites built on Squarespace will use this default cube icon. (Recognize it?)

Learn more about designing and adding your own favicon to your Squarespace website.

Unclear navigation

Visitors (aka potential customers) need to be able to find their way around your website content easily.

Most people visiting your website (especially for the first time) will have certain questions they’re trying to answer. It’s a good idea to think through the types of questions your audience will have as they’re looking through your site—and then make sure those answers are available and easy to find!

Unfortunately, an otherwise beautiful and informative website ends up being significantly less useful if the user can’t easily find their way to what they’re looking for—and they leave the website before finding it. ☹️

This contributes to your “bounce rate”—the percentage of website visitors who happen upon your website and then leave before ever clicking around to another page. A high bounce rate negatively affects your website’s SEO.

Be sure to use a clearly structured and labeled navigation bar, with plenty of references throughout your website to the various pages visitors may like to explore.

No way to “get more”

Your website is a prime opportunity to connect your visitors with a range of content and offers that may be relevant and useful to them.

For example, you may have come to this website looking for information on setting up a new blog, and then ended up discovering content on how to optimize SEO for your blog, source photography for it, and perhaps even set up a membership program for your audience.

Be sure your website offers plenty of opportunities for visitors to connect with more of what they’re interested in. That could be: