10 Common Website Mistakes

Your hosting is so important when it comes to the success of your website. You must as a small business, invest at least a reasonable amount of money. I mean, how much is reasonable? $250, $300 a year at least. I had someone come to me recently, “Paul, can you give us a competitive quote on our website hosting?” I said, “Sure. Here’s what I charge for small business hosting for a website like yours that uses that amount of bandwidth.” He went, “Oh, my goodness. I can get that for 10 bucks a month over at blah blah blah.” Well I said, “Good for you.”

I know the problems that you come across with these shared hosting accounts. Many business owners who will never go back, know the problems that come up with these shared hosting accounts. And I’m not going to go in and list them all, but they are simply this. If you have a problem, you’re toast. That’s pretty much what it comes down to. Now, I know, from time to time, there are exceptions, but I’m going to quote and talk about a story of a good friend of mine recently whose primary website got hacked on one of these shared hosting accounts.

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Read the transcript of “Common Mistake #1: Not Spending Enough on Hosting”

Now mistake number two, really simply is this. Having a domain name that nobody can type and nobody can spell and nobody can remember. Oh my goodness, I know it might sound creative, I know you think it’s wonderful and beautiful and all of that, but who cares what you think when it comes to your domain name.

It’s all about your customer. Now I have a very simple rule, easy to type, easy to spell, easy to remember. They are the key essential elements for a good domain name. And yes, if you can have something related to your, what you do, your topic, your keywords, your location, great. But they’re not one, two, or three. They come into four and into five, keywords included, location included. Not so important as easy to type, easy to spell, easy to remember.

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Read the transcript of “Common Mistake #2: Poor Domain Name Choice”

Why would you build a website on a platform that you don’t own? I’m going to say this very clearly, one time and one time only. For a business website, you should be hosting it yourself. I don’t mean you having the server and owning, but you being in 100% control of the CMS that you use and where it’s hosted. These are your choices.

There are many website platforms out there, which build good-looking websites and can get results. But here is the determination of the yay or nay when it comes to the successful utilization of this concept. If you decide to move your website, can you take it with you to a new hosting provider? If the answer to that question is no, then you’re not getting it right. You do not have control, you do not own the rights to that website, despite the fact that you think you may.

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Read the transcript of “Common Mistake #3: Not owning your website”

So many people these days because it’s cheaper, because it’s, “I can get it for free,” they’re using Gmail in their business. They’re using Hotmail in their business. They’re using whatever else in their business and not a domain based email address. These days folks, even with your hosting, just using a basic port three or an iMac setup within your CPAL, so easy, it takes seconds to do.

I had a customer contact me recently saying, “Paul, I’d like to set up a new email address for this fellow we’ve just hired. His name@theirdomainname.com. Can you let me know how much it would cost to set it up?” I said, “Nothing, it’s a two-minute job.” Folks, if you’re not using an @yourdomainname.com email address, you’re making a major, major mistake.

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Read the transcript of “Common Mistake #4: Impersonal Emails”

Don’t give your visitors a slow load time experience. This is where it comes down to the technical. It’s a matter of getting that website to load as quickly as possible. While it’s a simple mistake easy to avoid, it takes some effort to do, and I’ve written, and I’ve recorded, I should say, other videos on this topic in more depth and more detail.

But a good question is, how long should it take for a website to load? And well obviously, that time, that speed depends on your consumer, your visitor’s browser. It depends on their location. It depends on their internet speed. Those things are outside of your control.

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Read the transcript of “Common Mistake #5: Slow Website Hosting”

Now hang on Paul, aren’t we all being told that we should have a mobile version of our website? Yes, yes you should, but not a mobile version, a completely separate part, a brand-new website separate to your main one. No, what we’re being told these days is that we must have a mobile responsive website, we must be thinking mobile first with how it loads.

And it simply works like this, this is the mistake. Old school thinking was, yeah correct, have a mobile website separate to your current one. But the problem with that too often was when people went searching for something and then they landed on page ABC on your website if they were on a mobile device it would just redirect them to the homepage of the mobile version.

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Read the transcript of “Common Mistake #6: Old School Mobile Redirects”

And in this particular one, number seven, I want to talk to you about that horrible message, that error that we never want to see when we’re looking for our website, or worse yet when a customer is. And that is the message that says, “This is site cannot be found,” Or worse yet in Google search results, “This site may be dangerous.” Oh my goodness.

Now I package these two together because they are easily avoidable simply by monitoring what is happening with your website. First things first, “This site could not be found.” Oh boy, could be a problem with your website, could be a problem with the hosting, could be who knows what.

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Read the transcript of “Common Mistake #7: 404 ERRORS”

We are now starting to offer, when people renew their hosting, it’s just included and we pay for it and we make sure it gets done. It is that important that we secure the data transfer between your website and your client’s browser. Now here’s the thing. That’s the easily avoidable part. You just need to get an SSL certificate. But if you’ve read any of the other content on my website or watched any of the other videos I’ve recorded, you’ve also got to choose the right SSL certificate and install it correctly as well.

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Read the transcript of “Common Mistake #8: Not Installing An SSL Certificate”

Now probably the reason why most people don’t do this is, number one, they don’t know how. Number two is because of the cost involved. So let’s look at those two different things. Firstly and foremostly, most people these days are using a CMS. Most people these days, when it comes to building a new website, are starting to use WordPress. It is essential, it is vital, it is beyond important that you must keep both the core of the CMS up-to-date, but also any plug-ins and tools that you use to manage your website up-to-date as well. If you don’t, you run the risk of not only the whole thing cracking itself, but also of you getting hacked, which would cause a whole graded nightmare of problems.

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Read the transcript of “Common Mistake #9: Not Staying Up To Date!”

So number 10, the last in this list, is really to do with that. With your hosting, and we talked about hosting a little bit earlier, but you don’t want to choose, I guess choose isn’t the right word. You don’t want to have hosting that punishes you for your success.

Here is the way it works, and I saw this a little while ago with a person who became a client for obvious reasons. Their business was growing, the products sales were flowing, people were coming and going, and all sorts of wonderful things were happening on their website. And then, their bandwidth limit was rigged. I think it was only something like 15,000 people in a particular day, bang, the website went down, the hosting provider said, “No, that isn’t going to happen on your current plan. I don’t think so.” You can go and click the button, you can upgrade, you can pay more money and you’re on a better plan, but why would you want to be with someone like that in the first place?

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Read the transcript of “Common Mistake #10: Not Using Business Hosting”