7 Ways You May Be Losing Money Because Of Your Website
Your website is either working for you, helping you to make money for your business, or it’s working against you, causing you to lose money and potential new business. How do you know you’re not losing money because of your website?
If you’re a business owner or entrepreneur, it’s likely that you have a website for your business.
Why? Why do you have a website for your business?
It could be for a number of reasons, right? Building an online presence, getting potential consumers to know you exist, building trust in your brand, selling your product or services… lots of reasons. But ultimately, you have a website to bring you even more business, right? When it comes down to it, you have a website to make money.
Here’s where I’m going with this: your website is the 24/7 online storefront to your business. But how do you know if your website is working for you and not actually working against you? How do you know your website is not actually turning away potential customers or clients? Is your website bringing you more business, or are you losing money because of your website? It’s one or the other.
7 Ways Your Website Is Working Against You
If you are unsure whether or not your website is working for or against you, here are 7 ways that your website could turn away potential new business.
1. If your website is too slow.
Statistics say that the majority of website viewers don’t like to wait more than 2 seconds for a page to load before they will back out and go somewhere else. If your website is slow, chances are you’re losing business due to websites viewers not having the patience to wait for your site and pages to load.
2. If your website is down.
It could be down and you might not even know it! How often do you check your website to make sure it’s up? If it’s down for a day, few days, a week or even weeks without you knowing, how much would that have cost your business?
3. If your website gets hacked.
If your website get’s hacked it’s either going redirect website viewers to a malicious website, display malicious content on your website, infect their computer with malware, or something else bad. Any potential buyers of your product or service will forever lose trust in your business or brand. You may be thinking, “But Joshua, I doubt my website will ever get hacked.” Let me tell you, an average of 30,000 WordPress websites are hacked each day to unsuspecting business owners and entrepreneurs. I’m sure they said the same thing, but it happened to them.
4. Your website is not up to date and is instead displaying stale or old, outdated information.
Maybe you blogged something relevant to what you’re offering, but that was a year ago or longer. Or maybe you have an event listing up for something that happened several years ago. Possibly you just have incorrect, old information. This makes your website look bad and could make potential buyers think you’re no longer in business or not on top of your game.
5. Your contact forms are not working.
Similar to your website being down, if you don’t actually test your contact forms, how do you know they are working? Of course, if you recently got a contact form entry in your Inbox, then chances are it is working, but what if you haven’t heard from anyone in a while? It could mean your forms are not working and therefore you’re losing business.
The last few points are a little bit more technical, but just as important.
6. Your have the WordPress auto-updater on.
These days, a lot of website hosting companies are enabling by default an auto-updater to update your WordPress website to the latest core version. Some newer installed WordPress websites have this feature built in as well. Though this is good (you want to be on the latest WordPress version for security reasons), the problem with this is that updating the WordPress core of your website can actually “break” your website, causing it to display PHP errors or even render your entire website useless with errors. However, this doesn’t mean your website is down, as it’s actually up. It’s just displaying errors. How would you know this happened unless you checked your website after every core update? This would make potential buyers leave your website without thinking twice.
7. If your website is not using the secure HTTPS technology.
You know how when you look at a website address, it’s usually something like http://www.mycompany.com or https://www.mycompany.com? Your website can either be encrypted, which is the green HTTPS that you see, or not encrypted, which is just HTTP (which you actually usually don’t see the HTTP at all in this case). Here is our website using the secure HTTPS technology:
Having a secure website using HTTPS builds trust to the website viewers and it also helps in your Search Engine ranking with Google (check out post How to Avoid Google Penalties By Securing Your Website). By not having a secure encrypted website via HTTPS, you could be losing some potential customers.
So there you have it; 7 ways in which your website could actually harm your business.
Now you might be asking, “Well… how do I prevent those 7 things from happening?” I’m glad you asked! That’s where we come in: Smart Web Ninja. We optimize websites to prevent all 7 of these issues and more.
If you’re interested, feel free to contact us to see how we can help prevent these 7 website disasters.