Slow speed, poor UX design, or outages could make a website highly dysfunctional. Web hosting experts Fasthosts.co.uk have teamed up with web designer Ruth Nineke and compiled a list of the best advice to tackle the most common website problems.
1. Site speed
Google has indicated that page speed is one of the main factors used by its algorithm to rank pages. The time it takes for your website to load and be seen by the user is one of the most important factors for its success and increase your sales, whether it’s an e-shop or a service company.
Various aspects affect a website’s loading times such as image size, broken links or even the website’s HTML code. As Ruth states many businesses choose the cheapest hosting provider and rely on shared servers which results in speed problems even with the smallest amount of steady traffic.
Slow load times can be avoided by not uploading huge photos on-site, and by compressing videos. What’s even more important experts should pay attention to minifying the site’s background code. Ruth suggests keeping photos to 900px max width and 100kb max file size.
2. Bad navigation
Landing page experience refers to how good an experience someone will have when navigating this page. A user-friendly website should focus on the users’ preferences, how they navigate and what they expect.
Website navigation is one of the most important elements in a site’s design. If it’s confusing or trips up the users in any way, there’s a risk of higher bouncing rates. To avoid this you should provide fewer possible choices to the user so they can quickly evaluate and make a decision, implement a dropdown or a fly-out menu instead of submenus and avoid inconsistency.
3. Unexpected outages
Recently, we’ve seen major websites and apps suffering outages. These incidents highlight that global outages are one of the biggest challenges of a centralised system and raise the question of what causes them?
Commenting on this Ruth points that between a website and the consumer, there are a lot of mechanisms that pull the strings. Businesses should look at implementing the steps to prevent outages and ensure that website downtime is kept to an absolute minimum. Choosing a reliable hosting package that offers daily back-ups, investing in a top-quality website monitoring service, and backing up your data are just a few of the steps to avoid outages.
4. Mobile incompatibility
More than half of website traffic worldwide was conducted on mobile phones1 in 2021, up 2% from 2017. For this reason, your website has to display well on mobile or else you’ll be missing out on a lot of potential business!
”Responsive means the site design adapts to the viewport. The viewport is the device – mobile, tablet, desktop. The web designer should be able to manage these inside the code. You can code for multiple-sized view ports but there’s generally a set and accepted range”, Ruth adds.
The most important step for this is to create a responsive design with adaptable layouts, content and element size to suit different displays. Having a dedicated mobile site in addition to the desktop site is also advisable.
For more information, please visit https://www.fasthosts.co.uk/
Good tips to keep our blogs running well — thanks for sharing!
You’re welcome. Thanks for reading!