Are you sabotaging your own bottom line with programming errors on your website? These errors can lead to a slow, choppy or buggy website. And this will cost you a lot more than you think.
How much will it cost you? Well, consider that the average person won’t wait for 3 seconds for a website to load before leaving in frustration. 3 seconds! People will not wait.
Retail clothing giant Nordstrom took a massive hit when their site’s load speed slipped by half a second. This half a second cost them an 11% drop in online sales.
So let’s take a look at some of the most common programming errors that could be costing you valuable seconds, clicks and even dollars.
1. Going with a Free/ DIY Site Builder
We need to get this one out of the way early. If you’re looking to save some money by going with a free-or-cheap website template builder, you’re not getting the value that you think you are.
You really get what you pay for with these. Most people will use Wix or a similar site to build their website, just so they can put up something.
They literally feel like they need the bare minimum; an online presence with a few images and their contact information.
The first problem is that the end goal of a website should almost never be to just be there. You’re better than that.
And if you need your site to more than just be present, you’re going to run into search engine optimization (SEO) and performance issues. Their templated nature often means each page comes with bulky code that you simply don’t need.
This hurts your ability to customize the backend of things, which will almost always slow you down.
2. Assuming Cryptography Is Bulletproof
Don’t put too much faith in a magic box that was sold to you as being completely turnkey and foolproof.
It would be really great if you could just link in the encryption library and never have to worry about security again. But it’s not that simple. Most of these algorithms have flaws.
They’re subtle flaws and you may not know about them until too late. You will never have a problem until you have a massive problem.
3. Asking Too Much of the User or the Page
Website designers and programmers are really in the customer wrangling business. Their job is to attract as many visitors as humanly possible and steer them towards each page’s end goal.
Also, to be clear, when each page is in wireframe or on the whiteboard, it should only have one goal. One goal per page, and one call-to-action per page, whether that CTA is a form, a button or a link.
The function of a page should never be to book an appointment and sign up for our newsletter. Choose one of those things. Because the more you try to do multiple things, the less you will accomplish.
By trying to do everything, you do nothing.
It’s a simple principle called attention ratio. One goal, one CTA. Nothing more. If you have a “Buy” button, it’s getting 100% of the attention. If you add a “sign up for our seminar” button, they are now splitting the attention 50-50.
So make sure each individual page only has a single goal. Ask what is the most important thing that this page can do, and focus on getting it to do that.
Nothing more.
4. Not Optimizing the Online Store
This is sort of similar to using a freebie package or encryption library. You may assume that all the work is already done for you, if you’re using something like Shopify Plus for your online store.
Shopify Plus is great. So great, the average person thinks it’s a set-it-and-forget-it thing. It just works.
One of its key selling points is that people without any experience in programming or designing can put together a pretty solid online store. But their templates may come with programming errors that may hurt your site.
The good news is you’re able to customize things. You can edit the code from each of their “themes.” And you should.
5. Not Knowing Inexperienced Programmers Make More Programming errors
This is another cost-cutting measure that can end up cutting profits.
You may think hiring a new freelance programmer right out of school is a great way to keep costs low. And plus, “They’re young, so they’re more likely to be up-to-date on all the new trends. Right?” Wrong.
A seasoned programmer is more likely to be up-to-date on new trends, and be savvy and experienced enough to know which ones are programming errors waiting to happen.
6. Third-party Widgets
In most cases, they simply weigh your coding down and hurt performance. Let’s say you wanted to aggregate customer’s reviews onto your site.
Let’s say, a site like Trust Dale wanted to add a section to their homepage called Trust Dale new South windows reviews, via a third party widget. It’s just going to slow things down and they may be better off with a separate reviews page.
7. Too Many HTTP Requests
This is definitely among the top website-slowers out there today. Too many HTTP requests will just crush your load times.
There are dozens of ways to work around this. You might want to consider reducing the number of images on your page, or concatenating scripts and stylesheets.
8. Not Monitoring and Measuring
Again a website is not a set-it-and-forget-it type of tool. You need to constantly stay on top of it and measure its performance to find out where you can help it perform better.
At the same time, you need to keep on top of monitoring the site’s uptime. Every minute your site is down will cost you money and SEO clout.
We can help you stay on top of things in real time, with up-to-the-minute services like SMS messaging when your site is experiencing any issues.
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