Top 5 things hurting your website sales (and how to fix them)

Is your website silently sabotaging your sales? Discover the crucial mistakes that could be crippling your online business in our latest episode of the e-commerce made easy podcast. From slow pages to clear call to actions, I will give you actionable steps to turn things around and maximize your online sales!


Mentioned Resources

-> Tools to Measure Your Site’s Performance

Google Page Speed Insights

GTmetrix

Web Page Speed Test

-> Optimize your Website Images

Episode 22: The Power of Image Optimization

Downloadable Banner Optimization Guide

-> How to View your Mobile Website on Your Computer

Check out episode 60's show notes to see how to  view your Website on Mobile with Firefox & Chrome!

Episode 60: How to Skyrocket Your Website Conversions with Effective Navigation

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Before we dive into this week’s episode I have to tell you about our awesome 12 days of holiday deals my team and I came up with!  For 12 days only, December 8-20 we have a daily deal that is either deeply discounted or Free to help you take your online business to the next level.  Check it out and sign up for our newsletter so you don’t miss out!   Find all the information at www.bcsesolutions.com/gift/

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Chapters

• 0:46 Common Mistakes in Website Sales
• 10:26 Website Design Best Practices

Transcript

Carrie Saunders: 0:46

Running an online business means constantly working to improve your website to boost sales and grow your business. However, there are some common mistakes that can hurt your website sales, even if you have great products or services and a solid marketing strategy. Today, we're going to discuss the top five things that might be hurting your website sales and how you can fix them. So join me as we explore these critical issues and learn how to turn things around to maximize your online sales. Welcome to the e-commerce made easy podcast. I'm your host, k Saunders.

Carrie Saunders: 1:19

When we started this business, all I had was a couch, a laptop and a nine month old. My main goal to help others. Now, with over 20 years in the e-commerce building industry, and even more than that in web development, I have seen a lot. I love breaking down the hard tech into easily understandable bits to help others be successful in their online business. Whether you're a seasoned e-commerce veteran or just starting out, you've come to the right place, so sit back, relax and let's dive into the world of e-commerce together.

Carrie Saunders: 1:47

Welcome back to the e-commerce made easy podcast. Today, we're focusing on something critical for every business owner the top five things that could be hurting your website sales. It's not always about the products or the services that you sell, but how you present them and create the experience that encourages your visitors to buy. So let's dive into these pitfalls and explore how you can avoid them to boost your sales. Now, if you're anything like me, I know that I will get really busy and running my business and forget to check these things off. So I feel like these are a great reminder, not only to myself, but all of you out there listening, whether you're, you know, driving in your car or walking your dog or on a run, you know, process through these things and then, if you need to come back to the podcast later and take some notes, because I know when we absorb information twice, it really helps and really gets us to really think about it and maybe act upon it too. So, first off is slow page loading times. Now we talk about this sometimes on the episode. Something I frequently talked about before and it's one of the biggest reasons customers leave a website is slow loading times. In today's fast-paced world, people expect websites to load in the blink of an eye. In fact, studies show that a delay of just a few seconds can significantly increase your bounce rate and reduce customer satisfaction. So you really need to get the speed of your website down to a minimum and to fix this, I want you to regularly check your website speeds.

Carrie Saunders: 3:18

We're going to link to several different tools in our show notes and they are Google Page Speed Insights, gtmetrix and webpagespeedtestorg. So we're going to link to those. So don't worry about having to remember them. But I personally like to use all three of those tools. They provide a little bit different perspective and I feel like they also kind of give like a gut check on the other one, because they are testing your website from different locations in the world as well as kind of doing it in a little bit different, nuanced way. They're very similar but kind of different. So I like to use all three. I'm an engineer. I like to use all three and really kind of aggregate them together. Now, if you don't want to use all three, then I recommend at minimum using the Google PageSpeed Insights, because that's really what Google is going to be looking at. But I do find that the other two tools can give you even a little bit more in-depth as to how to fix your website.

Carrie Saunders: 4:17

Now, some of the things you're going to need to do is optimize your images. Now we have an episode and a freebie on how you can optimize your images. We'll link to that in the show notes too. So you'll want to make sure that you're using optimal images for the web. Many times we'll find customers who will have a really large, beautiful image. You know it might load fine on desktop, it might be fast enough for that, but on mobile it's really slow and Google tends to penalize people on the mobile version when it's really slow. So you want to make sure that you have an image that works both for mobile and desktop, or you have somebody help you do a little bit of advanced coding and show one image for mobile that is more optimized for mobile and then the other larger image for desktop. Whenever only desktop is being viewed, there's ways to code that in there. So if you really love your big image for desktop but you know it's slowing you down on mobile, get a hold of someone like us, because that's going to. We can help program to make sure that we're having two different images. Then that's one of the really big things that I see all the time when optimizing people's website is the image is simply too big for mobile. So that's one thing to keep in mind.

Carrie Saunders: 5:30

And then you can also use a content delivery network if you're a bit more advanced in your business. This is something that I find beginners and those that are still working on building their revenue. It might be a little bit maybe out of your price range or it might be a little bit more complex, so don't worry about it if you're in that stage. But as you advance and get your business growing, you might want to look into a content delivery network, especially if you have a lot of images on your website. It's a really good idea. It's called a CDN for short, if you've heard of that slang, and I'd also consider upgrading your hosting plan if necessary. So if, when you're doing these tests, especially on the GT metrics and the web page test domains, those really kind of and really Google does tell you this too, but they tell you the time to first byte, so when that number is long, that means that your server is not large enough, it's not powerful enough. Think of it as like an old computer. It's just not powerful enough to serve the beginning parts of your website fast enough. So you may need to upgrade your hosting plan to something a bit more powerful, and I want you to keep in mind that every second counts. So we want to make sure our website page loads quickly as possible. All right, so let's go on to item number two. That's a top mistake is poor mobile optimization. I kind of touched on this when we were talking just now about the page speed, because we want to optimize for mobile too, for speed, but we also want to optimize for mobile for how it looks.

Carrie Saunders: 7:06

More and more people are browsing the website, your website, from their phone. They are either searching from their phone, they are either clicking on a link from social media. I'm sure you can relate, I'm sure you do this as well, and you'll check out the website on your phone, if at least not first. I know for me I don't really like to browse on my phone. I like to. I'm so spoiled with a big computer screen. I actually have three in my office here and I prefer to shop and browse on my computer. But I will do that initial viewing, shopping, browsing from my phone, if that's where I found the website first. And if it's a horrible website on my phone, I may not go to it on my desktop to see if it's better there. It kind of depends on how interested I am in that information.

Carrie Saunders: 7:53

So you may have shoppers, though, or people that are wanting to buy your services, that only shop on their mobile phones, so we really want to make sure that you're testing your website with various mobile devices. Now, the one really nice thing about this now is that most browsers, like Chrome and Firefox, you can actually tell your browser to emulate or act like a mobile device, so this gives you lots of opportunity to test all the different mobile devices out there all the various Androids, all the various iPhone versions and some of the less common versions as well, and you can test your website right there on your browser, so we kind of anymore don't have an excuse not to test for the other different types of phones. Now, I know, you know I can totally relate I completely forget to do this sometimes for our own website, but it is something that I'm trying to remind myself to do, because you know we all get busy and it's something easy to forget, but it's so important, so I'm going to actually do this. After recording this podcast episode. Let's go check our website on various mobile devices, and we want to make sure that your website is fully responsive, and basically what that means is it will shrink to these different devices. It will look good on all these various devices. So we're going to want to make sure we test that and we will link in the show notes on how you can do that in Chrome or Firefox, maybe at least give you a screenshot, but it is not too hard to do anymore. So I highly encourage you to make sure you're testing for this.

Carrie Saunders: 9:36

Okay so common mistake number three is complicated navigation. I talk a lot on this podcast about. We want to be clear, not clever. So if customers can't easily find what they're looking for, they're going to leave. They won't stick around for very long. Complicated and confusing navigation is a major turnoff for visitors and can make them leave your site so fast and very frustrated. I know. For me, I prefer and like to see and I find this helps all of our customers a very clear about a section, a very clear contact section, an easy, quick way to get to that. So those are two areas that can build customer trust that I want to make sure you have easily to get to. It's one, at most two clicks away, but it really should be one click away and up in your menu.

Carrie Saunders: 10:27

Now, depending on your business, you're going to want to have other things as well. You're probably going to want to have testimonials or case studies too. That also builds customer trust, but we want to make sure that navigation is clear and it's easy to find those things. We want to be researching for language that our consumers are using too, because if we're using our own language, it may not quite match our consumers and that might make it confusing and they might hesitate to figure out which thing to click on. When they hesitate, that's a chance for them to decide to leave your website. So you want to make sure they're not hesitating as they're browsing your site.

Carrie Saunders: 11:03

A great tip here, too, is to get a friend or a business friend and say hey, I want you to. Well, one. You can just do it in a generic way Say hey, I want you to go to my website, let me know what you think of navigation, try a few just like that. You're going to get some interesting feedback Now. Then you can also, for another set of people, be like I want you to go to my website, please, and see if you can find page X, and you want them to try to find a specific page. So in both ways kind of test different things. The first way just kind of test general intuitiveness. The other way, test how easy is it for them to find something specific they might be looking for. So I encourage you to have a few sets of friends that you can use to test things like that. It really can help bring to light some things you might not have seen or noticed yourself.

Carrie Saunders: 11:57

And then the last not the last, but number four is a lack of clear call to actions or CTAs. So this is a mistake. I see a lot for people is they don't have very clear call to actions, and your website should guide your visitors towards taking a specific action, whether it's making a purchase, signing up for your newsletter there are so many different call to actions that you could have there, but those are the most common Also contacting you for more information. And if you don't have clear call to actions for these things, then visitors may not know what to do next and just leave your site. They're just, if they get confused, they're going to leave. It's just simply how things are, and you want to make sure that they are prominent and very easy to understand and you want to use action-oriented language. So we want to use action-oriented language such as buy now, sign up today, learn more is a little bit more generic but it is a common thing. But it can be very appropriately placed. Could be book a call with me. Similar things like that are really good.

Carrie Saunders: 13:00

Call to actions Rather than click here. We really kind of want to avoid the click here mentality that used to be okay back in the day and is still used, I feel, like, a lot to this day, when people aren't quite sure what to put and they feel like it flows better in the sentence or in the flow of the page. But really click here is super generic and honestly, it doesn't really help your search engine optimization because there's so many click here's out on the website. You know, if you have something a bit more specific that says you know, call Carrie, you know, click here to book a call with Carrie today. Or you know, book a call with Carrie today. I added the click here there. It's so natural, right, but book a call with Carrie today or book a call with Carrie Saunders today, then that's going to get actually my name a bit more important to Google because it's part of a link. So making sure those call to actions are very clear is super important and really a simple, easy tweak to do. It's just something really easy to adjust.

Carrie Saunders: 14:01

And then the last one, number five, is inconsistent branding and design. So we want to make sure that our experience for our consumers and our customers is very seamless as we go through the website. We want to use consistent fonts. We want to use consistent colors. Industry standard is no more than three fonts, typically sometimes four, but three is a general. Two to three is a general pretty good idea. So you don't want to bombard people with a ton of fonts. Even though you might like it and it might look pretty, it does still create a bit more processing need for the consumer's brain to process the visual difference between all the fonts. So keeping it simple to tune a three fonts really helps lighten the mental load on the person as they're looking at the website. And it's something that people don't think about quite enough, I feel like is a mental load of looking at your website. And that's kind of where consistent branding and design come in here.

Carrie Saunders: 15:02

Because if we're inconsistent in our design and branding, then we all these questions come up in our brain. We're trying to figure out where to go. We aren't quite sure you know if this is the same website. Sometimes. I mean, when you click around, sometimes if it really dramatically changes in the color and the logo and the fonts, you might start wondering. You know, somebody new to your website might start wondering whether it's the same website or not. So when we want to be easy on the brain and make things simple, we want to kind of design this for an elementary school person.

Carrie Saunders: 15:38

As far as how easy we want to make it on the brain, we want to be very intuitive because, like we say a lot on the podcast episode, a confused mind says no. So the more complicated you make it, the more potential confusion is there, even though you know an adult can handle this information. They're bombarded with so much information on the internet and on their phones all day, every day. We need to make it simple and easy, like a third grade level, so that it doesn't take anything to really process and it's more intuitive and then the intuitive brain takes over it and the logical brain. So we want to make sure that we have high quality images and simple fonts. That's like the main key point to the consistent branding is that we want it to look good consistent colors and fonts and not too many colors or fonts. Really, I didn't even talk too much about colors yet, but we want to make sure it's only a couple of colors as well.

Carrie Saunders: 16:36

Okay, so let's recap. So the top five mistakes you could be making with your website is one slow load page times. Two, poor mobile optimization. Three, complicated navigation. Four, lack of clear call to actions and last number five, inconsistent branding and design. All right, so that's all we have for this week's episode of the e-commerce made easy podcast. Thank you so much for joining us. We truly appreciate every listener out there. We have been loving all the feedback we've been getting too as well, so we totally appreciate that. So make sure if you have a comment, you can email us at podcast at bcsengineeringcom. Let me say that again. I said that a little fast podcast at bcsengineeringcom, and if you're on your mobile device, did you know you can text us? Just look in our show notes and there's a link that says text carry here. Make sure you do that and let me know what you think. It's super easy and super fun and I'll be sure to reply back. Don't forget to subscribe wherever you're listening, and we will see you next week.