4 Mistakes Site Owners Need to Stop Making in 2020

November 15, 2019 by Staff Writer

As a website owner, some of the mistakes that you make are negligible, while there are those than can wreck your business inside out.

From these very mistakes, you could lose thousands of sales, destroy your brand image, or, perhaps, you might even experience legal problems.

You don’t want any of these to happen, don’t you?

With how damaging these mistakes are, you might never recover at all.

In this guide, we’re going to talk about some of the mistakes site owners are most likely already making, so they avoid doing them this 2020.

Let’s hop right in.

1. Downplay the importance of having a reliable hosting provider.

Here’s a thought pattern that learned website owners would easily subscribe to.

Regardless of what your purpose is for having a website, having high bounce rates and low conversion rates can pretty much hinder you from achieving the goals you set out to accomplish.

That’s why partnering with a reliable hosting provider isn’t something you can afford to ignore. To help you find the ideal hosting provider for your website, you can check out the web hosting reviews that we put together for our readers.

With a high-performing hosting provider, you can avoid needless website downtimes, your pages will load faster, and your online assets are going to be more secure, and then some.

These are crucial for running a website now — let alone in the year 2020, where people are going to be more critical of your site’s load speed and security.

2. Ignorance of ADA compliance.

Website accessibility lawsuits skyrocketed by about 183% from 2017 - 2018. And yet, you probably have no idea what website accessibility is all about, do you?

I don’t blame you.

Despite how notorious and damaging this issue is, not many website owners are familiar with it. (Until they get sued for not being compliant, that is.)

To avoid the accessibility lawsuits, your website needs to be accessible to people with disabilities, and your way of doing that is to adhere to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1.

Here’s the bad news...

Complying with the regulation isn’t exactly easy and cheap.

If you go with companies who offer manual accessibility solutions, you’ll spend over $20,000 for the first project — and this doesn’t even include maintenance.

What’s worse, when your website updates (and we all know how often these updates happen in a single month), accessibility gaps often occur.

That means, despite you paying the manual accessibility service provider thousands of dollars, your website can easily become non-compliant the moment your website updates.

Website owners also can’t conform to the regulations by themselves because it requires technical knowledge. And even if they did manage to comply with all the regulations, as soon as their website updates (just like when working with manual accessibility providers), compliance gaps often appear.

That’s how frustrating this issue is for website owners.

At this point, the best solution for website owners to adhere to the WCAG 2.1 is to work with automatic web accessibility solutions like accessiBe.

There are a lot of things that set accessiBe apart from other accessibility solutions.

For one thing, accessiBe is AI-powered. It automatically scans your website every 24 hours to make sure it remains compliant.

Even if you have website updates, your website will still remain compliant since accessiBe scans and “corrects” your website for ADA compliance every 24 hours.

Its website accessibility interface is also intuitive.

The Accessibility Adjustment icon is going to be visible on your website. Upon clicking the icon, your visitors will immediately see the list of features.

Also, website owners can get accessiBe for as low as $490 annually.

When you consider how the manual accessibility solutions charge about $10,000 for the first project alone, the comparison becomes a no-brainer.

What’s more, you only have to install accessiBe’s single line of JS code — which you can do in less than 5 minutes — and you’re pretty much set. In comparison, manual accessibility solutions would often take 6 - 12 months to make your website fully compliant.

3. Publishing Brand-Centric Copy.

A common mistake that website owners make is they focus on telling their audience about how great their services are or how their products have exhaustive features.

I get it.

You’re trying to send across the message that you are awesome, therefore, your audience can trust you with their money.

By doing that, however, you should know that you’re going to sound like that one ~~annoying~~ relative during family reunions that doesn’t stop blabbering about how great and awesome they are.

You know, the one that everyone wants to avoid.

You don’t want your audience to feel that way about you, don’t you?

If you answered with a “yes,” then you need to stop talking about yourself and start publishing customer-centric copy.

Talk about your readers’ pain points.

Talk about the burning questions that they keep asking about.

When you talk about your customers, they will talk about you, too.

And so the question becomes, how on earth are you supposed to figure out what your audiences’ are interested in?

There are several ways to do this, but for starters, you can use Buzzsumo to uncover what articles or posts are highly popular in your industry.

The thought pattern is, the more an article is shared and engaged to, the more people are interested in it — they wouldn’t be engaging otherwise.

Supposing you’re in the digital marketing niche, you can type in the keyword “Digital marketing” in Buzzsumo to see what the tool will come up with.

As you can see from the screenshot above, the article about digital marketing jobs garnered quite a lot of shares.

That’s the kind of validation you need to determine if the content you’re thinking of publishing will resonate with your audience.

By publishing an article about digital marketing jobs yourself, you will pique the interest of your audience.

4. Focusing too much on design and aesthetics.

Make no mistake, your website’s design and aesthetics are important — very important, actually.

If your website doesn’t look good, you’ll find it doubly hard to win the trust of your audience.

That bit is important, of course, because if you want your audience to buy your products, they need to trust you (to some extent).

Without trust, it becomes almost impossible for them to purchase from you.

Even having said all of these, however, it’s worth pointing out that your website design and aesthetics can only take you so far.

When it comes to ranking your website pages in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) and compelling your audience to take out their wallets and buy your products, you’re going to need more than just a good-looking site.

You need compelling content — one that’s customer-centric, of course.

You also need elements that can induce the confidence and trust of your audience; things like trust badges and review counts.

You can also show the review left by your previous customers to make the testimony even more believable.

As you add these elements to your website, it becomes easier for you to win your audiences’ trust, and to influence them to take action on your offers.

Remember, your website aesthetics is important. However, don’t just ignore everything else to improve your site’s looks.

Take the time to add elements that can make it easier for your audience to trust you.

What’s next?

What are some of the deadly mistakes that webmasters are making right now, that they shouldn’t be making the year to come?

If you have ideas and points that you’d like to share about the matter, then please share them in the comments section below. Cheers!