Is Your Website Hurting Your Business?

Are you struggling to get leads or sales from your website? This guide will help you figure out if your site is hurting your business and what you can do to fix it so it works for you, not against you. Your website is a critical piece of your marketing, and it’s important to make sure it works for you so your business can grow.

5 Ways Your Website Might Be Hurting Your Business

• Visitors can’t tell what you do in the first 5 seconds (without scrolling!)
• You get traffic, but very few leads or sales
• Your call-to-action buttons aren’t clear or easy to find
• It’s not easy to navigate on mobile
• Your font or color choices are hard to read

You Built a Website, But Is It Working? How Do You Know?

You’re doing everything right. You’ve got a website, you’ve added content, you're posting on social, trying to figure out SEO, doing everything you can think of to get people to your website, but it still doesn’t seem to be helping your business grow.

Sure, you get some traffic, but it’s not a lot, and it doesn’t seem like it’s generating the leads or sales you hoped it would by now.

You’re starting to wonder if you need to redesign the site completely. Maybe you need a new logo or it’s time for a rebrand. Maybe that will make it work better.

You wish you knew what wasn’t working so that you could fix it because you have a feeling that something’s off. But you’re not sure what the problem is. Don’t worry, you’re not alone. I speak with a lot of entrepreneurs who have websites that aren’t helping them get traffic or make money. In fact, in many cases, their websites are keeping them from making money. Let’s talk about what causes a website to hurt your business so you can make sure you’re not causing problems for yourself.

5 Signs Your Website Is Hurting Your Business

1. It’s Not Immediately Clear What Your Business Does

When someone lands on your website, you have less than 5 seconds to secure their attention. They need to be able to figure out what you do and who you help immediately, or they’ll leave. Your homepage needs to have a clear headline, at the top of the page, that very simply states what you do and who you help. People need to be able to see this without scrolling at all, even on their phones.

To test your site to see if it’s immediately clear what you do and who you serve, open your website on your phone and see what shows up on the screen without scrolling at all. What information do you see? If you don’t know who you help and what you do, and ideally have an opt-in box visible without a scroll, you need to make some changes to your homepage.

Next, look at your homepage on desktop and tablet to make sure your homepage looks good and is easy to understand on larger screen sizes, too. In most cases, it’s the phone screen that’s the most challenging, but we want to be sure it looks good and is clear, no matter what size screen they’re checking you out on. They won’t give you another chance. If they can’t immediately figure out if you’re going to be able to help them, they’ll be gone.

2. You’re Getting Traffic, But Your Email List Isn’t Growing

If you aren’t really getting traffic to your website, then I wouldn’t expect your email list to grow much. You need people coming to your site before you start to grow an email list because not everyone who visits your site will want your freebies, help, or products. That’s normal. If you’re getting 100 visits a month to your site, you can’t expect your email list to grow by 100 or 200 or more people in a month. It’s simply not possible. On average, they say if 15-20% of the people who visit your website opt in, you’re probably OK. So, if you get 100 visits monthly, you can hope for 15-20 email opt-ins each month.

If you’re getting 500 people to your site each month and your email list is only growing by 5 or 10 people, then there’s probably an issue, and you need to do a bit of troubleshooting to figure out what the issues are.

Either you have the wrong opt-in. What you’re offering doesn’t align with what they’re looking for. Or, maybe your call-to-action buttons are hard to read, hidden, or simply don’t catch your visitors’ attention. It’s time to do a bit of troubleshooting to help your website work better.

3. You Have an Issue with Your Call-to-Action Buttons (or Phrases)

In marketing, you need to tell people what to do and how to work with you. Don’t simply assume they know how to opt in to your email list. You want to actually say, to get a copy of my freebie, click this button and sign up, or you can download your copy of X here. Something like this can help with your conversions. Not sure what conversions are? They’re the people who take the action you want them to take on your website when they visit.

If you want your visitors to book a free consult call with you, you need to have that information easy to find, above the fold, and with a button that says, book a consult, let’s chat, whatever terminology works for you.

Don’t assume that people know what to do or how to work with you (or even that they’ll look without you leading them).

4. Your Site Looks Good, but it's hard to use on Mobile 

A beautiful design is great, but a site that’s hard to navigate, confusing, or doesn’t have the information where people expect to find it isn’t going to help your business grow. You want to make it easy for your visitors to work with you and find the information they’re looking for on your site.

Grab your phone and go to your homepage. What can you see without scrolling? Yes, this is the test from step 1. What information is visible? Now, scroll down. How easy is it to read everything on your page?

Go to each of your core pages on your phone and see what your visitor sees. If your site is hard to read or understand on mobile, you have a problem. People often search first on mobile. Some will research on mobile and then convert (opt-in or buy)

If your site is hard to navigate or read on a phone or computer, it will impact the site’s performance. You won’t generate as many leads or make as much money.

5. Your Site is Hard to Read

There can be several different issues that make a site hard to read or understand. If your text is super technical, uses jargon or terminology that the average person might not be familiar with, you’ll lose people. The recommendation is to write at a 5th-grade reading comprehension level. I have a 5th grader who is way ahead in reading, and there are moments when I’m surprised by the words he isn’t familiar with. Pay attention to the words you use. Are they ones that your kids, grandkids, neighbor kids, etc., could understand too? If so, you’re probably OK, but if you wonder if you’d have to explain it to a 10-year-old, you might want to use a different word.

Your text color choices can be beautiful, but really hard to read. You want to choose high contrast colors for your text so that it’s easier for people to read. I’ve seen white text on light colors or black text on dark, and it’s almost impossible to read. Choose a light color and a bright or dark color. 

You don’t have to hire a designer to create a beautiful site for you. Just use a template and make sure you choose colors with enough contrast to be easy to read.

Another way you can make sure your site is easy to read is to keep your sentences and paragraphs short and insert extra white space between paragraphs. White space makes it easier to read the text on a page. If you open a page and it’s just a giant block of text after a giant block of text, you’re probably not going to read the entire thing, and neither is your website visitor, no matter how much they want the information you have.

How to Fix Your Site’s Problems

You don’t need to do a full website redesign or anything that fancy in most cases. Simply make some changes. If you realize your site isn’t super clear about what you do, rewrite the top of your homepage and create a one-liner that says who you are and who you help. Move your opt-in up to the top of the page. Make sure it’s clear who you are, how you help, and how to get your freebie at the top of the page, without scrolling on mobile and desktop.

From there, make sure that your content is easy to read. Choose high contrast colors for your website images and call-to-action buttons. Add white space between your paragraphs. Break your paragraphs apart into smaller ones if necessary.

Start with the simple fixes and go from there. Yes, there’s more you can do to troubleshoot a website, but for now, get started with this and see if it helps. Track the amount of time that people spend engaged on your site (in Google Analytics) and the percentage of people who visit your site and opt-in to your freebie, schedule a consult, or purchase something from you. You want those numbers to increase.