There are certainly things that are no-nos on your WordPress website. Kori gives you her list of 8 things to stop doing on your website today!
Full Video Transcript
Hey y’all, welcome to another WordPress Wednesday. My name is Kori Ashton here at Webtegrity in San Antonio, TX and, today, we’re gonna look at 8…count them, 8 things that you are not supposed to be doing on your website. That if you are doing them, right now, I really hope you’ll take a moment to watch through this video and figure out how to improve your website; because, these things are not just my personal opinion, as a WordPress fan and as a web developer.
These things are actual facts and trends that are happening. Fixes that you need to get done, today, on your website. So, I’m gonna slide off the screen and we’re gonna get started with the very first one.
#1: Make the logo bigger
Alright, this is the one all clients ask for. “Can you just make the logo a little bit bigger, a little bit bigger”. The reason why it’s #1 is No, no, no. Stop doing that. People are already on your website.
They’re already familiar with your brand. You do need to have a logo present on the website; But, you certainly don’t need it taking up so much real estate on the homepage that people are missing an opportunity to see more content, to get to your call to action, to do things you’re asking them to do, or read the things you’re asking them
to read.
So, stop taking up so much space on your homepages and on all of your website with your darn logo. That being said, you also don’t want to
make the call to action too tiny. So, if you have a “Buy Now” button
or if you have your phone number, or if you have your address to your
location of your restaurant.
What you don’t want to do is have people have to search or click into a contact page to try to find out how to get to you, or how to connect with you.
So, be sure If your call to action is “Call Us Today”, that phone number is nice and big and gonna be clickable and you’re gonna be able to see a call to action within three seconds.
The third thing I want to talk about is Weak Content.
Stop putting little small phrases of content on your pages. Especially your service pages and think that Google is going to be able to understand clearly what it is that you do and start to outrank your competitors.
You need to have large paragraphs of content in your website so that Google can clearly read it and start to understand what your services are and how to get you found on their search results.
#4: Old Content
Still talking about content; because, content is king when it comes to
how search engines find you. You don’t want to have old, outdated content. You always want to be adding something new and something fresh to your website.
You don’t want customers coming to your site, right now in May. You don’t want people coming there seeing things that say “Happy New Year!”. We’re already past that. Be sure to have fresh content going on.
#5: Stop with the distractions
Now…yeah…What is that right there? (looks distracted)
Stop! If you’ve got a call to action happening on your website and you’ve got all these other things going on in your website, and you’ve got things flashing over here…A slideshow moving over here.
If you’ve got random photos down your sidebar or some other type of distraction, your conversion; what you’re trying to get people to do on your website, very easily could be being missed; because, people are distracted.
Here’s something very interesting about this distraction…Another distraction could very easily be these. (social media icons)
So, even though you think, “Hey, I wanna have social media on my
website.”. If you find that people are only staying on your site a couple of seconds or a couple of minutes and unfortunately, they’re clicking on
your social media and moving on, you want to make those options very small or perhaps put them in the footer so that people will stop coming to your website, clicking on your Facebook and being gone; because, you know, once they hit Facebook they’re gone.
#6: Slideshows
I’m probably gonna make a few enemies with this one. I’m gonna ask you to stop making slideshows on your homepages.
Here’s why: Nobody sticks around for slide 4,5,6,7,8,9,10, 17…How many you’re putting in there.
Nobody stays there and watches them and you don’t want people having to wait to watch through those slides. If it’s important information and it
needs to be on a slideshow, write that information out and put it on
your homepage. Have it sitting there where people can visually see it, consistently and not have to wait all of those seconds for those slides to transition through.
The other reason why you don’t want them on your site is because of the load time. Those large images will slow down your site and end up frustrating your users. What we’re seeing now is the large photo. One singular photo with maybe text rotating through.
Because text, is very lightweight and can rotate very quickly, very easily, without a lot of time spent. So, you can put one picture and maybe just text rotating on it. If you have to have some sort of
movement.
#7: Slow load times
So, that’s a part of having these slideshows or for that matter having these really large images on your website. Google wants to see your website load on the desktop in less than 3 seconds. On a phone, they’re even trying to get us to load in less than 1 second. Isn’t that crazy?!
So, how do you have that happen?
It really is understanding how to optimize your images. Understanding, as well, how to make your website basically, load fewer files.So, theres a couple of different things you can do to improve that.
You can use a content delivery network. It’s called a “CDN”. You can use a faster hosting company to make that work for you and, we’ve also got a couple other videos that we’ve done to help you speed up your website.
I’ll put the link to those in the description box below.
And…#8: The #8 no-no. Stop doing this…Is pop ups.
Alright, this one again might be frustrating somebody. When you first land on somebody’s website, you do not want to have something pop up immediately and kind of alarm you. It’s like you walked into a grocery store and somebody jumps in front of you. “HI!” It’s really more annoying than it is beneficial. What you can do, is you use a different option.
We’re seeing now that the browser, itself, has the ability to be aware of where your mouse is. So, I’ll show you over here on WebTegrity’s website.
Let’s see if I can show you this. I’ll shrink down the screen just a little bit and give you an idea of what we do for a pop up on our website.
So, what we do when people are scrolling down the bottom of our page.
Did you see this just happen? I’ll zip up here…and let’s see if I can
do this…Do you see this right here? How it pops up?
It’s not annoying and as they’re scrolling down to the bottom of the page. This kind of a appears and asks them if they would like to be a part of receiving our free WordPress tutorials.
This is a free solution brought to you by MailMunch and if you’re running on WordPress, of course, this is a free plug in for you. We’ve also done a video specifically about how to install this. Check that out.
I hope you liked these 8 no-nos. What NOT to be doing on your website. Next week, stick around and be sure to stick around and I’ll be telling you 8 things TO BE DOING on your website that you might be missing out on.
Have a great WordPress Wednesday.
Bye, you guys!
