Critical Website Errors + How to Fix Them on a Budget

A website is vital to the success of an online business. There is a direct correlation between how well the website functions and the company’s overall bottom line. A website that is not designed properly can harm the brand and create a negative perception in the minds of its customers. Problems such as an inaccurate contact form, broken links, and 404 errors can create a very bad impression that would make it difficult for brands to recover from as people who leave your site due to technical issues rarely ever come back.

The Importance of a Well-Functioning Site

A good website helps to attract new customers to your business. Companies spend millions on maintaining a secure website. They also hire User experience specialists to help craft the right user experience for their digital assets. In this age where there are millions of websites, companies must try to do everything in their power to stand out from the competition. There are a lot of free tools that help you build a site on your own, but they often lack the advanced functionality that professional websites have. This is why working with a professional web development firm is important.

Below are some website mistakes that you would want to avoid if you want to grow your business online.

Low Page Speed

The speed at which your site pages load is vital to your site’s success. Most users abandon those sites that take longer than 3 seconds to load. Among the things that can slow down your site’s performance include code problems with your server-side, large images or videos, and poor or cheap hosting.

One free tool that can help you pinpoint the issues affecting page speed is PageSpeed Insights from Google. After analyzing the content of your site’s pages, the site recommends optimizations to help boost speed for both desktop and mobile devices.

Broken Links

A 404 error is an HTTP status code that means some client-side error and the page is being searched for is not available on the server. The page could have been moved or removed, but the URL wasn’t updated. It could also mean that the URL might have been inserted incorrectly. 

Broken links can have serious negative consequences on your site’s SEO ranking. They can also cause frustration for visitors when they see an error page show up instead of their desired information. When people see outdated information through these broken links, it negatively affects the credibility of the site.

There are a lot of free online tools that can help detect these broken links. Google also has a free extension checker called Broken Link Checker that helps scan each page and find broken links, be it to internal or external sites. To fix this error, simply check out the URL source and see if the web page is still three or not. Based on that, you might have to update it. Often, the website is also down, so try to search on sites such as Twitter if the particular website is down or not.

Permissions Errors

This type of server-side error occurs due to wrong permission settings. These settings control who can access files on your website. These permissions are put in place so that people coming to the site cannot upload malicious content to your site or modify sensitive information. This is a big concern because of the rising cybercrime globally.

However, sometimes due to typos, relevant people might face this issue which stops them from uploading to the site. To fix the permission issue, connect to your site using the FTP client and then select all root folders and select file permissions and simply enter 755 in the dialog box. Make sure to select the application to directories only option.

Secondly, select all files in the root folder of your site and again select file permissions and enter 644 in the numeric value in the dial-up box, and press okay. Make sure to select apply to files only.

Not Being Mobile-Friendly

The majority of the world’s web traffic now comes from mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones. If your site is not able to adjust its display size depending on the device, then it is not responsive, which means your sales can get affected.

Try to use design templates that have a mobile-friendly layout. These templates don’t allow for horizontal scrolling on mobile and ensure that the text is readable and legible on all devices.

Having an Outdated Website with Flash

The more updated a website looks, the greater the impact on the overall user experience, which will result in more sales. A lot of websites today use HTML animations or Flash on their pages. A lot of search engines cannot read Flash content. This is why if you want to have good SEO rankings use CSS3 instead.

Check Analytics

Website analytics are critical to avoiding all these issues. Google Analytics is a free tool that helps you understand your digital asset, including visitor behavior and web traffic. Using such information, you can avoid critical errors, improve the experience of people visiting your site, and ultimately boost your company’s bottom line.