The 5 Worst Things You Can Do With Your WordPress Website

You want any WordPress site of yours to grab people’s attention and entice them to stay. This can be done in so many ways, but it’s best if you avoid some of the tackier ways—think playing music when people enter your website.

It’s also a good practice to make your website as accessible as possible. To avoid making your user struggle or rush to exit your WordPress site, it’s best to avoid these 5 things that web designers in Orlando know to stay away from:

The 5 Worst Things You Can Do on Your WordPress Website

As a web development agency, we know a lot about web design from our years of experience. We know how to attract visitors and on the flip side, we also understand what elements will unfortunately scare them away.

Don’t Have Slow Page Speed

It’s great to have a lot of information on your WordPress site, but having too much going on will mean that your site speed will suffer. Your WordPress users will be put off having to wait for pages to load and they’ll ultimately stop visiting your website out of pure annoyance, impatience, or just inconvenience.

The average user tends to wait for about two seconds for a page to load before they click away to one of your competitors.

Actually, about half of the people who visit webpages will click away after those two seconds, which is why you want to streamline your website as much as possible. This might mean sacrificing some extra bells and whistles, but it will all be worth it when you have more users sticking around.

Besides a simpler factor like optimizing your images, you might also want to measure your website’s speed performance or page load time so that you can see what else you need to change or improve.

Don’t Ignore Navigation

When people visit a website, they want to be able to navigate around easily to find what they need. Tabs need to be easy to find, both on a computer and on a mobile phone, and this means that you should have a responsive, mobile-friendly version of your website too.

Make the tabs easy to understand and organize your information in a way that clearly states what’s on the page after your user clicks through. If someone can’t find something, they’ll likely click away to find a website that makes the information easier to find.

Don’t Overload Your WordPress Site

It’s okay to have white space on your website. Contrary to popular belief, it’s actually a good thing to have some white space so it won’t be difficult for your users to take in all of your information.

This doesn’t mean that color is a bad thing, but it does mean that you shouldn’t overload any web page with too much color, images or design elements. Stick to a few main colors that cohesive with your brand and let the rest of the page simply be white.

Think about the type of emotions you want to evoke in your visitors and what colors and color combinations can help with that. Too many colors will just make your page feel cluttered and hard to navigate.

Don’t Forget Your Content

In your haste to design your webpage to look just right, don’t forget about your actual content. In fact, you need to make your mission and the purpose of your own website clear right away.

Make sure your content is adequately informative and that your message comes across clearly. Ensure that your value proposition comes across strongly and be confident in how you can serve your customers.

Sometimes, your website visitor might have unintentionally clicked through and have no idea what your business is about. Show and explain immediately and clearly what your business does and how you can help them. At the end of the day, it is the right content and powerful use of words that will create leads and conversions for your business.

Don’t Show Pop Ups Right Away

Often, many WordPress sites show these popups immediately and they certainly are well-meaning. Usually, they offer a kind of coupon or something that your potential customer can see right off the bat. The only problem with these types of popups is that they make it more difficult for people to actually access your website.

They have to click something to close it or figure out a way around the ad just so that they can get to the actual content they’re after.

Don’t make people perform this extra work. Most people will simply be annoyed and will instead exit your website to find one that’s easier to get in to. If someone wants to learn more about what you’re doing, let them learn. Having popups too early not only means that people might click away, but that people probably won’t even read them since they don’t yet care about your website yet.

It’s better to time your popups then to at least give your users some time to get to know your business and have a look around the website first.

Other Things To Avoid

Here are more factors to take note of and if your website is already committing these mistakes, it’s time to make the changes:

Unclear Fonts: If you want to get adventurous with your choice of fonts or typography, go ahead but just make sure it displays clearly. There’s nothing more frustrating than a font that’s much too fancy to read.

Long Chunks of Text: When it comes to websites, it’s important to make your content easy to scan through and quick to digest. Avoid long walls of copy that no one will read and use headings to split up the text.

Not Checking for Errors: Typos, dead links that lead to nowhere or a 404 error and images that don’t load are big No-Nos for your WordPress website.

Not Testing Your Design: You may be pleased with your design and your own concepts. However, if you don’t get actual feedback from your users, you’re simply assuming how good the design is. Get real feedback from users and encourage them to share their opinions with you.

Just Focusing on Selling: No one likes to be blasted with endless promotional content the minute they click on to your website. Make sure your website is genuinely informative and not just full of ads or content that’s peddling your products.

Having Music Play in the Background: Having background music is simply not the best idea for websites. Many WordPress users won’t expect sudden music; perhaps they’re at work or even in bed. Either way, there’s rarely any good reason to incorporate music on a website if it doesn’t really serve any purpose.

Conclusion

We’ve learned a lot about web design in the past years. Instead of going for that old model of playing music on your page or forgetting about making pages smartphone friendly, you’ll want to design your website with the user in mind. Don’t fall into the common traps we’ve outlined above, and make sure your website is optimized to make people more likely to stay on your website and to visit again in the future.