7 Website Mistakes that Content Creators Need to Fix Today

Maintaining a website can be a full-time job, and ensuring it is functioning as designed is vital if you want to continue to grow your audience and sell products or services. These website mistakes will harm your business for different reasons, so we recommend fixing them as soon as possible.

As a creator, you will be super focused on consistently creating content, which means your website is often neglected.

Here are 7 website mistakes that you need to fix today.

No email list

You have written an engaging piece of content. Your audience finds the content, reads the advice you’ve offered and leaves, never to be seen again. Do you see something wrong with this scenario?

That’s precisely what happens when you do not have a way to capture visitors’ email addresses so you can continue sharing your content.

There are several email marketing providers, but our favourite is MailerLite. Why? It’s easy to set up an account. The support is fantastic but more importantly, implementing forms and popups on your website is simple.

Without an email list, your visitors are lost forever, so make sure you offer your visitors a way for them to be able to consume future content.

The website is not mobile-friendly

A beautifully designed website that looks great on a desktop computer is useless if it’s not viewable on a phone or tablet. You need a responsive website that changes its design based on the device it is being viewed on.

Visitors will click away from the website if they are unable to navigate around it or are not able to read the content. Another issue with a site that is not mobile friendly is Google – a small part of their algorithm looks at if the website is mobile friendly, and if it’s not, you might have problems getting on the first page of search results.

Browse your website on a mobile device and note areas you feel can be improved. Are buttons too close together? Is the font hard to read? Can you quickly scroll down the page, and is navigation easy to use?

Within Google Search Console, you can run a performance tool to check if your website and pages are mobile-friendly. We recommend that you run this when making design changes to your website.

Pop up Form issue

Imagine your perfect website visitor is reading your content on a post and as they scroll down, a popup appears asking them if they want to sign up to your email list. Having an email list is a must, but the mistake we will cover here is one that hit us today while testing our website.

Previously, when the popup appeared, the visitor entered their first name and email address and hit the signup button. They are then redirected to a page on our website asking them to check their email inbox.

What is wrong with this?

You have taken them away from the content they were reading, reducing the session time and increasing the bounce rate. It also annoys the visitor because they have to go searching to be able to complete reading the post.

Instead, the message to ask them to check their email inbox should be within the popup message when they click signup. All the visitor has to then do is close the popup form and continue reading the post.

We cannot tell you how silly we felt when realising this mistake.

No social sharing icons

You’ve written a masterpiece, but no one is going to share it on social media because there are no sharing icons on your post. No one will copy the URL, log in to Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn and share the content.

Make it easy for your audience to share content online. If you’re using WordPress, it’s as simple as enabling it within the theme settings or installing a plugin to add the social icons to your website.

Suppose your website is powered by Squarespace or another content management system. In that case, it will be as simple as using a service like ‘Add this’ and embedding the code into your website for the social icons to function.

Out-of-date software

You risk getting your website hacked and data compromised if you are using out-of-date software and scripts. If, like us, you use WordPress, then making sure you are on the latest version, along with updating themes and plugins, is vital.

Using a service like Squarespace will help if you are not particularly technical and want a service maintained by the website builder. WordPress gives you more control of your website, but that comes with the need to learn new skills to keep everything up to date.

Does your website use scripts to perform certain functions like contact forms and social sharing icons? Make sure the scripts are kept up to date.

A website with no SSL certificate

Browsers like Chrome, Edge and Safari introduced new security protocols. If your website does not have a security certificate, then a warning is included in the browser to inform users that your site is not secure.

Most hosting companies allow you to add a security certificate to your domain, but some don’t. It can be pretty complicated to set up if your host does not offer this functionality, but services like Cloudflare and Let’s Encrypt will assist you in getting your domain name secured.

No backup process

At Creator Trail, we have lost count of the times we have heard that content creators have lost a year’s worth of content due to not backing up their website. Do not rely on your hosting company to do regular backups.

Most hosting companies use cPanel, and you can create CRON jobs to ensure that your website is backed up regularly. If you publish new content or make regular changes, we recommend backing up daily, but for most content creators, a weekly backup will be fine.

No Search Console or Analytics

Not a website mistake as such, but essential to have set up.

If you want to track the performance of your website, then Google Search Console is a must. Not only can you run tools to check how fast your site is loading, but you can see how well it is performing in the Google search results.

Alongside, we recommend using Google Analytics to track visitors to your website. Find out where they are visiting from, what search terms they entered into Google to find your content and a ton more vital statistics.

Both services are free and can be easily installed on WordPress using the Google Site Kit plugin.

Hopefully, this list of 7 top website mistakes content creators to need to fix will help you ensure your website functions while growing your audience.