Key Risks and Top 10 Ways to Manage Your Website Effectively Once Launched

If you’re an entrepreneur, there will probably come a time when you’ll need to set up your website to establish a presence on the market. This will be more important for you if you’re selling some sort of service; according to the eCommerce Foundation, almost 90% of customers first search for a product on the internet before going to a physical store. Things have also changed with the COVID-19 pandemic, where even people who were proponents of traditional shopping now prefer to do everything online.

If you haven’t had experience running a website before, there’s a good chance you’ll make some mistakes….

Atlanta-based web design company enhances the product design departments of the most forward-thinking eCommerce startups and established businesses. They offer continuing UI/UX design, remote staff augmentation, and continuous design iteration for your business and website.

And we’ve prepared this article to help you prevent some of them! We’ll cover the ten most common mistakes and risks when managing a website and give you our solutions for all of them.

1. Malfunctioning mobile version

We do everything on smartphones, from business to private life to entertainment. According to statistics provided by outboxerdesign, about 80% of all smartphone users have made some purchase in the last six months via their mobile device. That said, your mobile website simply MUST work!

• Our solution — Use solutions that will make the user experience on iOS and Android as good as on the full version of the site. Moreover, consider creating a mobile app with additional benefits for your customers.

2. Data loss

Data loss, in extreme cases, can force you to start your website (and maybe even your entire business) from scratch. Because of one shortcoming, you can lose a lot of time and money — for what?

• Our solution — Backup your site from time to time using sites such as iDrive. These will be additional costs but think of the losses you will incur if you lose the data needed to handle, for example, tax matters.

3. Inactive links

Every so often, we ignore certain parts of the site that seem unimportant to us. Meanwhile, our customer might want to use them, and if he isn’t able to, we might just lose him in a second.

• Our solution — Have someone review the content on your site on an ongoing basis. This is especially useful if you sell third-party products where you have no control over their actions. As an entrepreneur, you can’t be up-to-date with everything, so have someone do it for you.

4. Poor content

One prominent mistake entrepreneurs make when creating websites for their businesses is trying to create content themselves. All it takes is for your market competitors to hire professionals to create content such as graphics and articles, and you are already on the losing end… We’re even talking about things like spelling errors or punctuation; one misplaced comma can affect the credibility of your services, for real.

• Our solution — Hire content professionals. If you’re afraid about the costs of hiring a full-time employee, use freelancers!

5. Long website loading time

People no longer tolerate sites that take too long to load, not in a world where everything happens instantly. If your website doesn’t open immediately, you need to change that as soon as possible. 

• Our solution — Factors such as the size of the graphics on the page or cluttered source files can cause the page to load too long.  To check how fast your website opens, you can use a free tool from Google called Pagespeed Insights.

6. Outdated plugins

One non-functioning plugin can disrupt the functionality of the entire site. Sometimes even after an update, one extension might stop working with another, resulting in unnecessary site bugs and potential customer loss.

• Our solution — Regularly make sure that all plugins and extensions on the site are updated and work well together all the time. Before launching your website, you might want to try out our software testing services.

7. Not considering SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) aspect is essential when launching a website. In short, the better optimized a website is in terms of SEO, the higher it will appear in Google results.

• Our solution — Work with an SEO specialist and Copywriter for written content. SEO consultation prices may seem tremendous, but the better the SEO, the better the chance for new clients.

8. Bad meta description

Your meta description is the first thing a customer will see after searching for your business in a browser. And as we all know — you can only make a first impression once.

• Our solution — Prepare a good meta description and see how it will look by using tools like Meta Tags. Typically, the meta description should be between 60 and 140 characters.

9. Vulnerability to cyberattacks

These days, hacking attacks and DDos are the order of the day. According to statistics provided by SafeAtLast, the healthcare industry lost over $25billion due to cyberattacks in 2019. 

• Our solution — Backup your site, and work with two-three different website hosting companies. That way, whenever your website goes down to cyberattack, you can always pull it up through some other host.

10. Pop-up advertisements

Pop-up ads are an easy way to discourage your potential client from browsing further. Not only do they obscure the content on your site, but they are also annoying like nothing else (especially for mobile users). Furthermore, it is confirmed that use pop-up ads rank lower in Google searches.

• Our solution — We understand that pop-up ads are supposed to monetize your website, but there are much better alternatives for that. One of the most efficient and least annoying forms of advertising are in-text hyperlinks and banners.

Conclusion

As you can see, running a website comes with various risks, and it’s not as simple as it may seem. Setting up a top-functioning site requires a lot of experience, and it just so happens that an experienced IT team has it!

 So don’t be afraid to entrust us with the task of taking care of your website and look into web development services mentioned here mlsdev.com/services/web-development.

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Author’s bio: Anastasiia Lastovetska is a technology writer at MLSDev, a software development company that builds web & mobile app solutions from scratch. She researches the area of technology to create great content about app development, UX/UI design, tech & business consulting.