Your website is the face of your company, but if it’s been a few years since your last redesign, many of your competitors will have a significant advantage over you.

Their advantages comes in several forms, including increased organic search traffic, as well as visitors perceiving their products and/or services to be higher-quality/value and their company to be more trustworthy.

Do any of these sound like advantages that, in the eyes of customers, your competitors seem to have over you? I’ll explain how to shift these advantages to your favor in detail later in this post.

What makes effective web design?

Despite what many people think, great web design is not subjective. Well, to be more clear, effective web design is not subjective.

There are numerous scientifically proven design fundamentals that play a huge role in converting visitors into customers, and if your website gets them wrong, it doesn’t matter how much you like it. The only thing that matters is how well it converts visitors into customers because that means revenue that keeps your company alive and growing.

Design trends move fast, so what looked advanced and professional just a few years ago looks like amateur hour today. And many design tactics used to convert visitors into buyers quickly lose effectiveness as competitors adopt them, so these need to be adjusted even more often. (Based on testing and data, of course, not just some designer’s whim.)

A client of mine who is a very talented and knowledgeable architect was recently given a powerful lesson on this. I feel the need to point out here that he specifically encouraged me to share this story, and he has even shared it himself on several occasions at the local networking events we attend together with other Tampa businesses.

Now back to the story…

His business had struggled financially for the last couple of years, but he was sure his website wasn’t the issue because he liked it and had never received any complaints about it. He found out how incorrect his assumption was shortly after we had published his new website. He met with a potential client who ended up signing a contract that day for a $26,000 project, and specifically told him they chose to work with his firm because his website made them feel like he was the most qualified and trustworthy architect for the job. He closed several more new clients that week under the same circumstances.

It goes far beyond appearance though, because technology is continually advancing at a rapid pace.

For example, in the not so distant past, web designers only had to ensure that our websites would fit within a certain screen size, but today we need to accommodate a virtually infinite range of screen sizes because mobile traffic has now surpassed desktop traffic in all industries. There are many similar examples of changes in technology dramatically altering how we do business online.

This means that if you aren’t redesigning your website every few years, you’re going to be pushed out by competitors who are.

That’s why I’m going to share with the three biggest reasons you need to redesign your website this year. If you’ve already recognized these problems in your website and want to fix them to stop losing business to competitors, get in touch with us for an initial consultation.

Here we go…

Page speed (AKA PageSpeed)

A majority of web traffic today comes from mobile devices, which means that most of your visitors are viewing your website from a slower internet connection, on a device with less processing power than a typical desktop or laptop. This makes it more important than ever for your web pages to load as quickly as possible.

But page speed doesn’t only matter to visitors—it matters equally, or maybe even more, to search engines. (Which drive visitors to your website.)

Google has recently placed a huge emphasis on how quickly a webpage loads, and while they claim it’s not yet a direct ranking factor, page speed does have a significant impact on user experience, which they have confirmed is a direct ranking factor.

In other words, websites that load more quickly will tend to rank higher than comparable websites that load more slowly.

Page speed is also a significant factor in how frequently and thoroughly search engine spiders will crawl your website. They tend to crawl fast-loading websites more frequently and more thoroughly compared to slower websites, which usually means they will identify changes and/or new content in your website more quickly the faster your web pages load.

Right now you’re probably thinking one of the two following things. Either:

I’m sure my website loads super fast!

or

I wonder how fast my website loads?

I can tell you from first hand experience that unless you use a tool to accurately measure the speed of your website, then you’re only guessing and you’ll probably be very disappointed by the actual results.

Google’s PageSpeed Insights is a good place to start, but don’t stop there. While it’s a great starting point, it only provides limited data, so I recommend GTmetrix to collect more granular and actionable data. This will enable you to identify, prioritize, and fix every factor impacting your page speed, which has an adverse and significant impact on ranking .

While there are a lot of tactics you can use to improve page speed, an easy one that will provide a significant impact is upgrading your web hosting. Most small business owners look at web hosting as a commodity and purchase based solely on price, which limits them to shared hosting. A few clever web hosts have recently started calling this “cloud hosting” but that’s just a bullshit name for the exact same thing. The end result is that your website gets crammed onto a server with hundreds or even thousands of other websites, and predictably, speed suffers dramatically.

So which web host is right for you?

Well, I’ve worked with dozens of different hosting companies over the years, and after a recommendation from a trusted friend, I researched WP Engine, and then switched our own website over to them shortly after that. For now, I’ll just say that they specialize in providing lightning fast WordPress hosting and I highly recommend them, but I do plan to write a detailed article soon explaining exactly why they rock!

Responsive design

Since most web traffic today comes from mobile devices, responsive design is no longer a luxury, or even optional—today it’s mandatory.

While the primary reason for responsive design is to create a positive user experience no matter what device or screen size a visitor is using, it’s not the only reason. Just a few years ago, Google started telling us to design our websites to be mobile friendly, and shortly after that, they made it a ranking factor for searches from mobile devices. More recently, they began to display their mobile index for all searches, and now call it their mobile first index.

This means websites that are mobile friendly will usually outrank websites that aren’t. That’s a pretty important reason to ensure your website is responsive.

So what exactly is responsive design?

Responsive design utilizes HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to design a website that will transform based on the screen size of the device it’s viewed on. This may be as simple as a showing or hiding certain elements, or as complex as completely changing the layout and serving different media based on the screen size. For example, a website might serve smaller images or even omit video entirely on mobile devices because of smaller screen size, reduced bandwidth, and potential data charges to visitors.

It’s important to point out that this doesn’t mean simply redirecting visitors on mobile devices to a separate, stripped down version of your existing website. That approach is antiquated, unreliable, and Google specifically recommends against it for a variety of reasons.

A truly responsive website must be built from the ground up in order to present your content effectively to all devices and screen sizes, and to load as quickly as possible.

Outdated web design

Your website is often the first significant impression customers will have of your company, so it’s critical that it makes a good impression.

Web design trends change quickly, and many business owners feel like they’re too busy running  their business to keep up, so they simply stop trying.

Does that sound familiar?

Here’s the problem—customers will usually compare several companies before making a buying decision. If your website looks outdated, they’ll get the wrong impression of your company, often leading them to choose one of your competitors who made a better impression instead.

It may sound silly at first, but think about it like this—if you were interviewing several candidates for an open position at your company, which of the two candidates would you not even consider? Be honest!

It’s human nature. Appearance matters—especially when it comes to a first impression. And often, that may be the only chance you get.

Visitors don’t necessarily expect you to be on the cutting edge of web design, but they do expect your website to look current by today’s standards. In most industries, that means a complete redesign every few years, or more frequently in high tech industries.

Before redesigning you website, it’s essential to determine your objectives, develop a strategy, and account for new and/or deprecated technology.

So now what?

If you’re website doesn’t meet today’s standards, you know you’re losing business to competitors. I think it’s pretty safe to assume you want to change that, so you need to have your website redesigned to emphasize a up to date appearance, responsive design, and pages that load quickly.

If you’re already working with a web design agency, and you’re happy with them, get in touch with them and make sure your website meets today’s standards. If you aren’t currently working with a web design agency, or if you are, but you aren’t happy with them, feel free to reach out to Spartan Media for a consultation.

Your website is a critical part of your business, but it’s also the part that most home builders get wrong, because while you’re a master of construction, HTML and CSS are not your area of expertise.

81% of your clients will research your company online before deciding whether they want to do business with you, and if they don’t see a clear value right away, they’ll either demand a lower price or simply move on to another home builder. This ends up costing you a lot of money, both in terms of sales volume and profit margins. Can you afford that loss?

The good news is these mistakes are easy to avoid with the right knowledge, hard work, and planning, and I’m going to help you with that by sharing 5 of the mistakes I commonly see on home builder’s websites.

Designing for themselves instead of home buyers

It’s easy to get caught up in all the things you want to share with your visitors. You probably want to show them all the industry awards you’ve received, tell them about your recent accomplishments, and make it clear how awesome you are, right?

The problem is that besides you, no one else really cares about any of that yet, and they never will unless you can hook them emotionally first. Moving visitors through the buying process requires you to show them how your homes will make them feel and help them envision the new memories they’ll build in their new home.

Does this connect on an emotional level? Does it inspire you to contact them? Nope. I’m sure Mike is a great guy, but his website is killing him!

You can only connect with potential home buyers once you’ve invested the time to truly understand them.

What I would do is call 20 or 30 recent clients to find out:

• what they think you’ve done well
• what they think you could have done better
• why they chose you

Next, do the same with 20 or 30 previous prospects who had chosen one of your competitors over you. You’ll probably have to sweeten the pot for this group—you could try throwing in a $100 gift card to their favorite restaurant, but the information you collect will be well worth the investment!

Here are a few questions you might ask:

• What about our homes do you like most/least?
• What about our service do you like/dislike?
• What do you think we do better than competitors?
• If you could ask us to do anything differently, what would it be?
• What products/services could we add to become more valuable to you?
• What products/services could we eliminate to become more focused for you?
• What do you think our competitors do better?

The more information you can collect, the more effectively your can tailor your website to appeal to the emotions of potential home buyers. That means you’ll be able to sell more homes, faster, with a smaller marketing investment.

Using low-quality media

You’re selling a highly-visual product that is chosen based largely on emotion, so you need to engage with visitors using high-quality media.

Sorry, but a few quick photos you snapped on your iPhone won’t cut it. That means large images and video, shot and edited by a professional.

Professional photographers and videographers have the equipment, software, and training to produce far better results much faster and more efficiently than you can. Believe it or not, there is a lot more to it than just a pretty picture. A professional who does this for a living knows exactly how to present your homes in a way that triggers the kind of emotions necessary to move your prospects through the buying process more quickly and efficiently.

Not updating their website regularly

There’s a common misconception that your website is complete once it’s been published. In reality, that’s only the beginning.

Today’s digital world is noisy and competitive, so you need to continually produce new content to engage with your audience. That includes:

• blog posts
• videos
• infographics
• podcasts

This is essential to earning new business because it:

• improves your organic search ranking and traffic,
• creates more exposure through all digital marketing channels,
• helps potential clients get a better feel for your values, quality, and experience,
• and creates more exposure by giving people something useful to share on social media and/or link to from their website.

Every piece of content you produce should add value, build expertise, authority, and trust, and display authenticity.

Value

You need to produce content that is valuable to your visitors. This means skip the self serving “10 Reasons Why We’re the Best Home Builder for You” type of content. No cares about that garbage. Instead, create content that:

• Explains industry-specific terminology in a way outsiders can understand.
• Prepares them for the home building process. (Choosing a builder, planning, documents, financing, etc.)
• Teaches them how to perform home maintenance/improvement tasks.
• Shares design trends, inspiration, and resources.
• Identifies common home building mistakes to avoid.
• Teaches them how to save money in the home building process.

Here are a few examples of different types of content. These weren’t all produced by home builders, but they are all exactly the type of content that will work for them.

Video

Infographics

Blog posts

• 4 Simple Tips to Keeping Your Wood Floor Looking Brand New
• Common Terms New Home Buyers Should Know
• The Top 7 Mistakes To Avoid When Building A Custom Home

EAT (Expertise, Authority, and Trust)

Each piece of content you produce gives you the opportunity to demonstrate your expertise, which over time, helps you to earn authority and trust. This is essential for:

• conveying your value
• converting visitors into buyers
• earning mentions by the media

Authenticity

If you’re a small contractor who places a huge priority on your relationships with clients, then you need to own that, because it’s exactly what separates you from the huge impersonal home builders. Don’t try to pretend you’re something you’re not because you’ll attract the wrong kind of prospects and will have a tough time building rapport with clients.

Not designing for mobile

Do you know what percentage of visitors are viewing your website on a mobile device? I guarantee it’s a lot higher than you think.

I was talking with a local home builder here in Tampa a few weeks ago who insisted that none of his visitors were on mobile devices so he didn’t need to worry about a mobile responsive website. “That mobile stuff is just for kids on Facebook.”

Wow.

I knew he got far more traffic from people on mobile devices that he thought, and fortunately, I was able to prove it by simply having him log into his Google Analytics account.

He was more than a little bit surprised to learn that over 65% of his website traffic was coming from mobile.

Responsive design isn’t just another digital fad that’s going to die in a few months. It’s the direct result of the explosive growth of mobile technology, including both smart phones and tablets. Today, there are more mobile devices than people, more Google searches take place on mobile devices, and mobile traffic even exceeds desktop traffic in general.

It’s not just a matter of determining whether you currently get enough visits from mobile devices to justify the time, money and effort needed to create a responsive website though, because it’s already a huge factor in Google’s algorithm. In fact, they recently announced that they are transitioning their search index to mobile-first.

So what does that mean?

It means that if your website does not utilize responsive design, Google will rank other websites that do above it, resulting in lower ranking, less exposure, and reduced revenue for you.

Responsive design is no longer just a convenience—it’s a necessity. Without it, Google will stop sending you organic traffic, your PPC costs will climb, and the few visitors you do manage to draw in will leave, frustrated by your outdated website.

Not properly qualifying leads

Most people know that the fewer questions you ask on your contact forms, the more leads you’ll get. Since we all want more leads, the obvious solution is to ask fewer questions, right?

Well, not quite.

More leads is usually good, as long as they’re qualified, but opening the floodgates for a deluge of unqualified leads just wastes valuable time—time that your sales team could more effectively spend closing qualified leads.

Some of the qualifying questions you may want to ask could include:

• When do they plan to purchase?
• When do they need their home completed?
• Have they arranged financing?
• What is their budget?
• What inspired them to contact you?

While it’s important to ask a few qualifying questions to screen out the tire kickers, it’s equally important not to go overboard because then you risk turning legitimate prospects away. 2-5 qualifying questions is plenty in most cases.

I knew that even in 2016, some static HTML websites still existed, but I hadn’t encountered one in so long that I assumed any serious entrepreneurs had already made the switch to WordPress a long time ago.

I was recently proven wrong when I met a local entrepreneur here in Tampa who simply hadn’t bothered to update her website in years. Since she hadn’t done any digital marketing, it never seemed like a priority to her.

While I understood her reasoning, I also knew that she was missing out on the tremendous leverage that a website built on WordPress can provide, because it is:

• easy to add/edit content
• easy for visitor to share content on social media
• infinitely scalable as your business grows
• simple to add new functionality
• generally very search engine friendly
• opensource, so you have full control

It’s no surprise that WordPress controls 59% of the content management system market today and powers 39% of all websites online today, because it allows ordinary business owners to quickly and easily update their website on their own, and it provides powerful functionality that less than a decade would have cost tens of thousands of dollars in custom development.

If you’re one of those people who still has a static website and wants to migrate to WordPress to get more out of it, this post is for you, because I’m going to share everything you’ll need to know. And if you’re too busy running your business to do it yourself and/or you need a new web design that turns visitors into customers, reach out to us. That’s what we’re here for!

Compile a list of your URLs

WordPress runs using PHP to pull data from a MySQL database, so your new website won’t have physical HTML files for each page. That doesn’t mean you should just delete them though, because that will almost certainly cause you to lose traffic and organic search ranking.

Instead, you’ll need to set up redirects to make sure any visitors or search engines attempting to access your old pages are redirected to the new, most relevant pages.

Compile your list of URLs using Screaming Frog, which will crawl all of the pages on your web server, and can be exported as a CSV file that can be opened in Excel or Google Sheets. You’ll need to enter your FTP credentials to identity pages that are not linked from within your own website. This might include landing pages used for paid traffic like Google AdWords or Facebook.

Store this in a safe place for now. We’ll need it later.

Collect any necessary scripts

While most scripts from your old website won’t be necessary in your new one, some probably will. For example:

• Google analytics
• Retargeting scripts
• Ad scripts
• Social media scripts

Be sure to collect them all for inclusion in your new website.

Collect all media

Most of your images will probably be located in a single folder on your web server, but you need to confirm this using Screaming Frog.

You’ll need to copy them all to a single location for review. Since your website is still static HTML, it was likely designed a long time ago, which means that many of the images are probably pretty small by today’s standards. For example, when I first stared designing websites, the typical screen resolution was 640px X 480px, but today, 1920px X 1080px is standard on desktops and most laptops—that’s 3 times larger!

An image proportioned to fit the available space perfectly in your current web site may look tiny and out of place in your new website. There’s also a pretty good chance that your existing images look outdated anyway, so this may be a good time to replace them with larger, more current images.

Dreamstime and Adobe Stock are great sources for stock photos. Just be sure to size your new images properly.

Install and configure WordPress in a development environment

You’ll want to minimize downtime, so you need to set up a development environment on your web server where you can build and test your new WordPress website before going live.

The way I do that is to install WordPress in its own subfolder.

You’ll also want to tell search engines to stay out since it is a duplicate of your current website copy. We don’t want to cause any duplicate content issues.

Add the following to your robots.txt file (in your root directory) and replace “your-subfolder-name” with the name of the folder where you’ve created your development environment.

User-agent: * Disallow: /your-subfolder-name/

There are a lot of WordPress settings, but most will depend on your circumstances. The two that matter most at this point are permalinks and categories.

Permalinks

Most static web sites use a flat URL structure, which isn’t ideal because it treats all pages as having equal value, rather than prioritizing your most important pages. This is the perfect opportunity to optimize your URL structure.

I usually identify 6-12 of the most important pages, then create a set of corresponding blog categories with the same name and slug.

Categories

Think of categories like general buckets to organize your posts, based on your most important topics.

In conjunction with a proper permalink structure, they will support your most important pages. This helps Google to understand which pages on your website are most important, because all blog posts will appear as subpages to them.

Plugins

I also recommend installing a few specific plugins:

• WordPress SEO (There are a lot of settings, so check out this tutorial.)
• SEO Smart Links
• UpdraftPremium

Publish your content

This part will be tedious grunt work. If you have a lot of pages, you’ll probably bounce frequently between boredom, frustration, and rage before it’s all complete.

Text content

Unfortunately, I don’t have a handy tool to make this any faster or easier. You’re stuck with good old fashion copy and paste. Now, I could probably go into a rant about how “you kids have it easy today” but I’ll let the task speak for itself.

There are a few ways to approach this:

1. Copy and paste all the text into the visual editor, then switch to the text view to delete and unnecessary code, like inline CSS or HTML tags. This is usually not my preferred method because it’s a lot of work and it’s easy to miss something that you’ll have to track down and fix later, but it may be necessary if there are a lot of HTML tags that you want to keep.

1. Copy all of the text, then paste it into the visual editor as plain text. You’ll have to reapply any links and formatting like bold, italic, ordered and unordered lists.This is usually the best way to go because it’s the fastest and most certain way to eliminate everything you don’t need.

Images

You can’t copy and paste images into WordPress, but as we covered earlier, you’ll probably want to replace a lot of them with new, larger images anyway.

Including your images into your pages/posts is as simple as using the media uploader, then clicking the “add to post” button. WordPress will automatically include the image dimensions, alt attribute, image title, a link, if applicable, and limited formatting as long as the appropriate information is available.

Set up redirects

Remember that spreadsheet we created of all your URLs? Here’s where we’ll use it to set up 301 redirects using your .htaccess file. WordPress will have automatically created this file for you during installation, so you’ll just need to edit it with the FTP program of your choice.

You’ll need to create a redirect for every single old URL to the most relevant new URL.

redirect 301 /old-url-1.html /new-url-1/
redirect 301 /old-url-2.html /new-url-2/
redirect 301 /old-url-3.html /new-url-3/

Migration

This is the easy part.

I start by downloading a complete backup of all website files and saving them in a safe place, then deleting them from the server and installing WordPress.

Next, upload and activate the UpdraftPremium plugin, which should also already be active in the development environment. Now you’ll just need to generate a site key, and then go back to the development environment to migrate the site to your new WordPress installation. The Updraft team has already created a great tutorial on that, so I won’t reinvent the wheel.

So there you have it!

I hope this tutorial on migrating from your static website to WordPress was helpful.

If it seemed too technical, or it seemed like too much work, we can help. If you’d rather have someone create a WordPress website for you that will turn more of your visitors into customers, get in touch with us today. We’d love to work together!

I take my background in web design and digital marketing for granted, and that’s why I’m often surprised when I see smart people making dumb web design mistakes. I sometimes forget that all of this computer wizardry isn’t second nature to everyone. Or even most people.

Most people who have a website are either entrepreneurs or budding entrepreneurs, and they’re focused on building a business to serve their customers. Their only concern with their website is using it to help them accomplish their goals. And rightly so.

Maybe that describes you—a smart business owner who is too busy serving your customers to worry about the technical mumbo jumbo.

Well worry no more, my entrepreneurial friend, because I’m about to share 9 dumb web design mistakes I see smart people like you make all the time.

Designing for yourself instead of customers

It’s easy to get caught up in designing or redesigning a website. It’s a chance to create exactly what you want, fine tune everything, and present information exactly the way you know it needs to be presented.

There’s only one problem with that.

Everything.

You need to design for your customer, not for yourself—it doesn’t matter what you like. It’s all about them!

I was recently reminded of this while working with an outside consultant to refine my sales process. You see, I had become complacent in my sales process because a lot of our business came from referrals, so there was already a great deal of trust right from the beginning of most relationships. When I started to reach out to a new niche, I continued operating as if everything was the same. I would tell potential clients what they needed and why they needed it, and while I was correct, it was a mistake that killed sales.

I hadn’t taken the time to establish rapport and learn what mattered to them. It didn’t matter if I was right, they still wanted to feel heard, and I needed to know what they connected with on an emotional level in order to close deals.

Web design (and copywriting) needs to be about the customers, not about you. You can only design and write for them if you’ve invested the time to listen to and truly understand them.

What I would do is schedule a meeting with your top 10 customers to find out what you’re doing well and what they think you could do better. Next, try to do the same with 10 customers who left you for a competitor. You might have to sweeten the pot for this group, perhaps a gift card to their favorite restaurant, but it will be well worth it!

The more details you can get, the more precisely you’ll be able to meet their needs in the future.

Here are a few questions you might ask:

• What about our product/service do you like most/least?
• What do you think we do better than competitors?
• If you could ask us to do anything differently, what would it be?
• What products/services could we add to become more valuable to you?
• What products/services could we eliminate to become more focused for you?
• What do you think our competitors do better?

This will give you valuable insight into how they perceive your company. In some cases, they may simply misunderstand your products/services, which will tell you how to better organize and present information on your website. In other cases, you may have to add new information. Or perhaps you just need to do a better job conveying what you do, how you do it, and why they should care from their perspective.

Boring content

When I read the content on some websites, it almost feels like they’re trying to bore visitors into leaving.

Your website presents your first opportunity to engage with potential customers, and to do that, you need to let your personality shine through.

Drop the corporate speak, focus on the customer, and eliminate industry jargon. Make an emotional connection and give your visitors a reason to give a damn about you!

That goes for everything—blog posts,product descriptions, hell, even your “About Us” page.

Really, LEGO? This is the best you can come up with? You manufacture colorful plastic building blocks that children can use to build literally anything they can imagine, yet your own description of your company sounds as boring as the side effect warnings on a bottle of antidepressant medication.

Or how about this gem?

I’ll give Elvin a bit of a pass since he is just your typical hard-working blue-collar guy. I mean, it’s not like he manufactures colorful plastic building blocks that children can use to build literally anything they can imagine. (Are you listening, LEGO?) But still. This is not good.

Ahh…now here’s a good one from the folks over at Cultivated Wit. Granted, they are a group of comedians, so this kind of thing comes natural to them, but you can do it too. I believe in you!

Want some examples of powerful writing with personality? Well, ask and you shall receive…these are some of the brilliant people I sometimes look to for writing inspiration:

• Melissa Cassera
• Nikki Elledge Brown
• Ray Edwards
• Jeff Goins
• Violeta Nedkova
• Demian Farnworth
• Amy Lynn Andrews
• Ramsay Taplin

No clear calls to action (Or too many)

I’ll go out on a limb and assume you’ve invested a reasonable chunk of money and time into your website so you could present a professional image.

If you’ve gone to all the trouble and expense of creating a website that makes you look like you’re the leader in your industry, and you’ve written copy that would educate and persuade even your biggest skeptic, then it only makes sense to make it clear what you want visitors to do next.

Unfortunately, many people fail to do that.

Want someone to subscribe to your email list? Buy your product? Share your blog post?

Tell them!

Make it so clear that even Helen Keller would get it.

But don’t go overboard. I recommend focusing your calls to action on at most, two actions within roughly the area that would visible on a desktop monitor. For example, if you have a long landing page, it’s completely fine to include a “buy now” button several times throughout the copy, and if you can’t resist your urge to add another call to action, you might include a newsletter sign up form in your sidebar, but that’s it!

A landing page with one call to action, repeated as often as necessary, will always outperform a landing page with multiple calls to action. Too many will overwhelm visitors, and instead of picking one, they’ll simply leave.

Links to social media profiles right away

We all want droves of people to follow us on social media, right?

There’s nothing wrong with that. The more people who follow us, the more people we can engage with. The more people we can engage with, the more people we can serve. And the more people we serve, the more money we can make.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting a huge social media following, but the mistake I see so many people make is slapping links to all of their profiles on every social media platform right at the top of their website. It’s the first thing visitors see!

Silly rabbit. You don’t use your website to drive traffic to social media, you use social media to drive traffic to your website.

It’s OK to include links to your social media profiles, but they should be an afterthought, not the first thing a visitor sees. Instead of the top of your website, put them in your sidebar, or better yet, your footer.

Excessive social media widgets

There’s nothing wrong with social media widgets, but don’t make it look like your website is trying to compete in a NASCAR race. One is fine, two is stretching it, and three is too many.

Aside from reminding people of the kid we all knew in school who smelled like liverwurst and tried too hard to become popular, excessive social widgets will slow your website down dramatically, which hurts user experience and organic ranking.

They also create the same problem we had with links to social media profiles. Remember, we want to keep people on our website, not send them somewhere else.

Unoptimized media

Full screen video and hero images have become quite common because of their positive impact on visitors, but if not implemented properly, they can slow down page speed significantly.

You might believe it doesn’t matter since most people have powerful computers and broadband internet today, but that would be a dangerous mistake.

It matters a lot. Some might say hugely.

Computers and the internet are faster and less expensive than ever, but because of that, visitors today have less patience than ever. A difference of just a fraction of a second can have a dramatic impact on how long people stay on your website, how much revenue your site produces, and where Google ranks your pages.

A website that loads quickly is critical, but we don’t have to sacrifice aesthetics to achieve it. We simply need to optimize the media on our websites.

Video

• Choose the proper format. MP4 is best in most cases.
• Serve the optimal size (dimensions) based on visitors’ screen size.
• Eliminate the audio track when possible.
• Compress the video file. I use Adobe Premiere, but Handbrake is an open source alternative.
• Minimize the video length.

Images

• Choose the proper format. JPG is best for photographic images, GIF or PNG for images with large areas of solid color.
• Properly size images. There is no benefit to using a 1600px wide image if it’s only going to be displayed at 800px.
• Compress the image file. In addition to being the industry leading image editing program, Adobe Photoshop has powerful compression capabilities, and starts at $9.99/month.

Audio

• Choose the ideal format. MP3 is your best option.
• Reduce the bitrate to reach a compromise between audio quality and file size.
• Consider hosting audio files on a third-party hosting service like Lybsin, instead of your web host.

Relying on default WordPress security

Sorry folks, but just relying on your almost certainly inadequate password doesn’t cut it today.

WordPress is an amazing content management system that offers tremendous functionality. This is why it controls 69% of the  CMS market today, and the number of websites running on WordPress is exactly why it’s such an attractive target to hackers. It’s not any less secure than other systems, but it is more likely to be attacked because hacking is a numbers game.

You can make considerable improvements to your WordPress security by using a long, complex password, and by not using the default username, which is “admin” in most cases.

It’s relatively simple to shore up security even further by placing additional restrictions on logins, limiting plugins, and keeping WordPress core, themes, and plugins up to date.

Not using automated backups

I imagine that your website is extremely valuable to you. I know mine is to me. That’s why I’m not content to rely on hope that nothing bad will happen. 

Most web hosts don’t perform any backups at all, and those that do usually don’t go back much further than a few days, so if you don’t have some kind of automated backup in place, you’re taking a huge risk. Maybe it comes from my time in the Marine Corps, but I don’t like to leave anything to chance.

After evaluating several tools, I ended up choosing UpdraftPremium (the premium version of UpdraftPlus) for our automated backups because it has a more robust set of features than other tools.

The cost for the premium version is a bargain ($70-$145, then yearly renewals at a discounted rate) considering that you can have your website back up and running in a matter of minutes. It’s an even greater value when you add in all of the other features. I recommend the UpdraftPremium Developer licence because you can use it on an unlimited number of websites.

We configure it to back up our sites and our clients’ sites daily, and we store a full year of backups in the cloud using Dropbox.

Not tracking data

Google Analytics is a treasure trove of insight. With it, you can tell what content resonates most with your visitors, identify and resolve weaknesses, determine which marketing channels are performing best, and more. Despite all of its amazing capabilities, it’s 100% free!

Most WordPress websites rely on Contact Form 7 (over 1 million active installs) because it’s reliable and easy to use.

Lately, for a growing number of people, Contact Form 7 appears to function properly, but the form never actually delivers the email that it’s supposed to. The problem isn’t with the plugin, though. The problem is with how most people configure it.

I stumbled onto the problem a few months ago when a client called in a panic because they went from receiving several leads every day to zero. I tested their form, and on the front end, everything appeared to work properly, resulting in a success message and redirection to a thank you page. But the emails never appeared.

After a little bit of digging, I found that it was caused by how it’s configured to send emails.

Most people use the default settings, which would make the email generated by the form appear to have been sent directly from the person submitting it, making it easy to reply to them.

While allowed by many web hosts, this is a form of spoofing, which masks the true source of these emails. I don’t know what triggered the change, but suddenly, most web hosts stopped allowing this.

Predictably, a lot of people were pissed off, but their anger was incorrectly directed at the plugin’s author, Takayuki Miyoshi. It was web hosts’ policies that changed, not the plugin. The fact is, they shouldn’t have been pissed at anyone though, because email was never supposed to be sent this way in the first place. It was a pretty wide security hole that had to be patched.

If you log into your WordPress admin area, you might see the following message near the top:

If so, then your forms are configured incorrectly. Even if you are receiving emails now, there is no guarantee that it will continue.

The solution is simple. The email needs to be sent from an email address that exists on your server. I like to create a separate email address specifically for this. Next, configure your “From” field under the “Mail” tab of the appropriate form as such:

Finally, add the information below to the “Additional Headers” field. (Also under the “Mail” tab.) This adds information to the header of the email that says even though it was sent by forms@yourdomain.com, any replies should be directed to the email address that was entered in the “Email” filed of the form.