11 reasons your website sucks

Here is 11 factors that indicate your website may not be up to scratch, These 11 factors are the foundations to having a successful modern website. The more of these points your website relates to the more serious it is to turn it around ASAP.

No https

Having an unsecured and non SSL website is not a good look. SSL is a must when dealing with payments as it encrypts data and prevents easy data snooping, Google Chrome is going to start punishing non SSL websites and with free SSL certificates available there’s no excuse.

non ssl
A non SSL website

Slow response

Having your website hosted on a slow server can impact on traffic to your site. If your website is slow to load a visitor may leave before the main content is shown. Page Speed is something Google rates your page on too.

Too many requests

Having excess and heaps of individual requests to JS and CSS files helps the cause to slow down your website. Putting these files on a CDN can help but lots of calls is lots of calls. Combining files, avoiding excess plugins and using clean frameworks like Bootstrap can avoid this issue.

Not fully responsive

Having your website not scale down for mobile viewers can be disastrous especially if you have a lot of mobile user traffic. Mobile web browsing is huge and you want to be apart of it!

Large resources and media files

Having highly detailed images or gifs on your website can slow it down, even just a build up of excess images not only clutters your website it slows it and can make it frustrating for users.

Bad content

Content that has spelling mistakes, little details or isn’t factual is bad for you. Google will punish you, put in the time and your visitors will be back. Quality will always prevail over quantity especially in the blogging world.

Not SEO friendly

A lot of the factors listed here will help deliver bad SEO to your website. But in general being non wise to SEO is just bad practice for your website. Read guides like this one and here.

Badly designed

Faulty links, overlapping containers and hard to read text are just the beginning to making your website not enjoyable to visit.

bad websites
Fine example of a website that looks bad

Too many ads

Adblocker should quell this but having ads popping up and covering your important content is not a way to please your users and viewers. Relax on the ads and follow the recommended guidelines on ad positioning.

Auto playing videos

Annoying and hated. Please don’t follow “media” outlets and play your videos automatically especially if they have ads too. Its something a lot of web users dislike and can turn them away.

Your web host sucks

Downtime and being slow isn’t beneficial to your or your website users. In general i like to stay away from the “normie” providers like GoDaddy and HostGator. These guys are overpriced and oversold.

Not updated constantly

Keep your website up to date, especially if it’s a WordPress website. Keep the plugins updated and your website secure. Blog often and if you’re an online store it’s also a good idea to keep a blog or information area.