Why your website sucks: 6 questions you need to ask yourself

Simply put, the biggest reasons your website isn’t performing could be because of a lack of mobile responsiveness, contact forms, unclear website navigation and no search engine optimisation. Do you understand who your target audience is? Why do people visit your website? Is the design of your website appealing?

With that in mind, let’s take a look at 6 questions you should be asking if your website is of the ‘sucky’ variety.

Who is your website for?

If you are designing your website for your own personal enjoyment, then you’re doing it wrong. You need to step into the shoes of your potential customer. Ask yourself, “What are my customer’s needs and wants?” and figure out how you can help them through your website.

Identify your customer’s needs, their pain points, and create a list. From this list, establish and think about the user journey of your ideal customer. Make sure your website addresses your customer's needs not yours. Your customer wants to know you can solve their problems; they don't want to know about you!

Why are people visiting your website?

Now you need to ascertain why people visit your website. You must understand the particular reasons why someone is visiting your website. Don’t only think about new leads, but also existing customers and even future employees.

Being concerned with purely lead generation is problematic, although that may be an end goal for you. Website content must be developed with the needs of your audience in mind so users can achieve their goals with ease.

Some users are not ready to fill out a contact form and are only browsing for information. Users are all at different stages in the buyer’s journey and not every user is ready to convert. Your website needs to cater to all stages of the buyer’s journey that the user may be in.

Are you findable on search engines?

Have you optimised your website for all popular search engines, most importantly Google? When you’re designing your website, you may have made the very common error of focusing on design and ignoring how search engines ‘see’ your website.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is vital to the success and overall positive performance of your website. Make sure that all your website pages are easily indexed by Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Optimise your website pages’ URLs, page titles and meta descriptions with a list of keywords (search engine terms) in mind. The Yoast SEO plugin is an indispensable tool if your website is a WordPress website.

Is your website mobile responsive?

What are visitors seeing when they browse your website on a smartphone, mobile device or tablet? If your website isn’t optimised for mobile devices, they’re probably seeing a right-old mess involving a lot of frantic swiping.

In today’s world, you have to build a website with mobile in mind. You have no control of how people view and interact with your website. They can browse it on a desktop computer, mobile phone or even their LED TV.

Be certain that your website is mobile-friendly as it’s no longer a nice add-on, but an actual necessity. Google has a great tool to score your website for its mobile-friendliness called the Mobile-Friendly Test.

Do you have contact forms and CTAs?

So, you have awesome content and service offerings available through your website? But are you making use of any type of call-to-action (CTA) or contact form?

On your most visited web pages, you should place CTAs to attract visitors’ attention and bring them into your sales funnel, or direct them to new content you’re trying to promote.

Remember to place contact forms on pages concerning your services and other offerings. Keep in mind that without contact forms on your important pages, you’re missing out on some potential leads.

Do people know where they’re clicking?

Unclear navigation on a website is one of the biggest pet peeves for any internet user. If the user experience on your website is sub-par and not clear to the average joe that’s probably why you’re not capturing many leads.

When the navigation process on your website is user-friendly and understandable it saves visitors from bouts of anger and frustration. It also makes your services and products easier to find for a potential customers. Avoid multiple layers and drop downs in your navigation, complicated and cryptic navigation structures are a major contributor to user drop-off.

All of the above advice will help you to make your website suck less and gain more quality leads, and by extension potential customers.

If you don’t want to suck, download our FREE eBook on the “10 Steps to Prepare Your Website For Inbound Marketing”. Suck less and generate more high-quality leads with your website!