Sure-fire Signs That Your Website

Sucks

You like your website, right? You enjoy the way it looks, appreciate all the distinct design details and all, but this doesn’t change the fact that your site can still suck.

Well, basically, websites are not that much about looks … they are

more about goals, and proper content presentation. Check out

the following list to find out what I’m on about.

How come?

The fact that your website does not convert is the first and the most important indication that something bad is indeed going

on.

It does not convert

First of all, what’s a conversion? Basically, it’s when a visitor does exactly what you want them to

do – a specific predefined action.

Such action can be signing up to your newsletter, buying your product, clicking your affiliate

link, or whatever else.

Now a bit more important question: What’s a bad

conversion rate? This all depends on your market, site, and

audience, so you’ll have to use your own judgment. I just want to draw your attention towards this

issue.

However, if you’re experiencing conversion rates in the range of

0.1% then there’s much room for improvement.

However, if you’ve got your theme from other sources then your mileage may

vary.

The problem here is that Google might find it hard to crawl and index your site

if it has many HTML errors. And this means only trouble for your SEO.

You can do a basic error check with the Firefox extension

– HTML Validator

Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) is a great package of software for

many different web management purposes. It can really help you to

structure your site in a way Google actually enjoys and

appreciates.

Google Webmaster Tools errors

After you sign up and add your site you can go to Health > Crawl

Errors (the left sidebar):

[gwt-errors]

You can also go to Health > Malware to check if there’s anything

else suspicious going on.

In the end, GWT is your way of speaking with Google, take

advantage of it.

If your site is slow, Google won’t give you high rankings. Website speed is as important to Google as any other

ranking factor.

It’s slow

Start with Pingdom Tools. You can check the loading time of any

domain. If it’s more than 4 seconds, you’re in trouble.

How to check if your site loads fast?

What to do in such a case? Start with your hosting account … maybe it’s

time to get a better one? If that’s not the case then the problem lies

somewhere within your site. Try installing a tool like Yslow and doing

a more in-depth analysis.

This is actually pretty fundamental, but people still forget to update their

sites on a regular basis.

WordPress not updated

There’s a reason why WordPress gets updated so often. The internet and

the technology behind it is constantly evolving, and every web

management platform needs to follow the trend.

If you decide that you don’t want to update anything, soon enough you will have a slow, un-optimized, and

malware-prone site. In a word … you’ll have a site that sucks.

Do you know of any other factors indicating that a website sucks? Feel

free to share.