7 Signs Your Poor WordPress Design Is Hurting Your Business

7 Signs Your Poor WordPress Design Is Hurting Your Business

Improving your business processes is an essential part of growth. Letting things become outdated will only slow you down and cost you money. If there’s a faster way to do your payroll, you’ll use it, and if there’s a more efficient way to outsource content creation, you’ll utilize it.

But do you apply the same principle to your website? When was the last time you updated your WordPress site? If the answer puts you sometime in the last decade, you’ve got a web design problem on your hands. An out of date or poorly designed website can seriously hurt your business.

Consumers have high expectations for websites. They’ve been spoiled with top notch designs, fast-loading pages, and interconnected business websites. Therefore, they’ll throw a fit if they experience anything less than the best.

You don’t want consumers abandoning your website on a daily basis, just because it hasn’t been updated in a few years. This is a relatively easy fix if you know what change.

Here are a few suggestions:

1. Out of Date Information

Many businesses make the rookie mistake of not updating information on their websites. They still have last summer’s hours posted, even though these changed three months ago. It’s essential that your contact information and operating hours are up to date on your website. Otherwise, customers won’t be able to make contact with you.

2. Broken Links

If your site has missing pages, broken links, or anything else that isn’t working properly, it’s in your best interest to fix things immediately. Review these broken pages and repair any problems.

In addition, you might come across broken links in your content. Webpages get put up and taken down all the time. There’s usually nothing you can do to stop this from happening, but you can replace broken links in your blog posts and landing pages with an updated link from a different source. If you can’t find a replacement link, then remove the broken link altogether.

3. Failure to Connect Your Blog to Social Media

Social media has only been a popular feature on websites for the last five years or so. Before that, hardly anyone connected their blogs and web pages to their social profiles. Everything is different now, and not having your website connected to social media is like putting a noose around your own neck.

4. Difficult Navigation

Navigation usually isn’t a priority when designing a site, but it should be. Research shows that about 50 percent of search traffic on ecommerce sites is generated from deep within the site’s system. That means, there must be great navigation if you want users to find your homepage.

Is it easy for visitors to find and use your navigation? Web visitors are creatures of habit. They’ve come to expect a useful navigation bar at the top of every page and a set of footers at the bottom of the page to direct their paths. Without that, they’ll likely to get lost inside the information.

5. Cluttered Pages

A sleek, easy-to-follow blueprint is key to great modern web design. Cluttered, busy pages are unattractive and not useful to web visitors. In fact, two-thirds of people would rather read something that’s beautifully designed than something that’s plain and cluttered.

6. Amateur Photography

Today’s spoiled web visitors aren’t interested in anything less than high quality photography. They can tell the difference between low-quality stock photos and photos taken with great lighting, engaging subjects, and stellar editing. Skip the stock photos and give them what they want: high quality photos.

7. Slow Loading Speed

Nearly 40 percent of web visitors will stop interacting with a website if it loads slowly. Your site must load within just a few seconds if you want to satisfy viewers. If your site is sluggish, you’ll want to invest in plugins that can cache and compress files in order to improve the speed.

Whatever the cost, it’s worth keeping your customers engaged with your business site.