You like your website, right? You enjoy the way it looks, appreciate all the distinct design details and all, but this doesn’t change the fact that your site can still suck.
How come?
Well, basically, websites are not that much about looks … they are more about goals, and proper content presentation. Check out the following list to find out what I’m on about.
It does not convert
The fact that your website does not convert is the first and the most important indication that something bad is indeed going on.
First of all, what’s a conversion? Basically, it’s when a visitor does exactly what you want them to do – a specific predefined action.
Such action can be signing up to your newsletter, buying your product, clicking your affiliate link, or whatever else.
Now a bit more important question: What’s a bad conversion rate? This all depends on your market, site, and audience, so you’ll have to use your own judgment. I just want to draw your attention towards this issue.
However, if you’re experiencing conversion rates in the range of 0.1% then there’s much room for improvement.
HTML errors
HTML errors can be tricky. Sometimes you don’t even know that your site has those. This all comes down to the quality of your site’s design and structure. If you’re using one of many great premium WordPress themes then you probably have good structure already built in.
However, if you’ve got your theme from other sources then your mileage may vary.
The problem here is that Google might find it hard to crawl and index your site if it has many HTML errors. And this means only trouble for your SEO.
You can do a basic error check with the Firefox extension – HTML Validator.
Google Webmaster Tools errors
Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) is a great package of software for many different web management purposes. It can really help you to structure your site in a way Google actually enjoys and appreciates.
After you sign up and add your site you can go to Health > Crawl Errors (the left sidebar):
[gwt-errors]
You can also go to Health > Malware to check if there’s anything else suspicious going on.
In the end, GWT is your way of speaking with Google, take advantage of it.
It’s slow
If your site is slow, Google won’t give you high rankings. Website speed is as important to Google as any other ranking factor.
How to check if your site loads fast?
Start with Pingdom Tools. You can check the loading time of any domain. If it’s more than 4 seconds, you’re in trouble.
What to do in such a case? Start with your hosting account … maybe it’s time to get a better one? If that’s not the case then the problem lies somewhere within your site. Try installing a tool like YSlow and doing a more in-depth analysis.
WordPress not updated
This is actually pretty fundamental, but people still forget to update their sites on a regular basis.
There’s a reason why WordPress gets updated so often. The internet and the technology behind it is constantly evolving, and every web management platform needs to follow the trend.
If you decide that you don’t want to update anything, soon enough you will have a slow, un-optimized, and malware-prone site. In a word … you’ll have a site that sucks.
Do you know of any other factors indicating that a website sucks? Feel free to share.
Karol K. is a blogger, writer, web design and dev enthusiast. He shares various WordPress tips at ThemeFuse.com – also a great place to go for quality premium WordPress themes.