The 10 Most Common Mistakes on Websites

As a digital agency, we’re exposed to hundreds, if not thousands, of websites of every kind – client sites, brand sites we promote, prospective clients’ sites, competitor sites, and random sites we stumble across during research. Almost every time, we run into the same mistakes, over and over. So here you go: the 10 most common mistakes, the ones we’re honestly a little tired of seeing again and again – and maybe this article will help.

Run a thorough audit of your own site and there’s a good chance you’ll spot at least one of the issues below. Go ahead and check!

1. Enough with the flags! This is a website, not the UN.

One of the most common mistakes brands of every size make is putting a flag on the language switcher. First, a flag is a symbol loaded with meaning, sentiment, and associations you often don’t want to stir up in visitors. Used the UK flag? You’ve just annoyed the US, a country of over 330 million people, some of whom are now mildly offended. Used the US flag? You’ve annoyed plenty of Brits who feel they own the English language, and so on. Second, you want to avoid piling on extra colors and shapes that break the site’s visual consistency and clutter the design. Your site should speak to your brand – not stir up national sentiment of any kind.

Our recommendation: the language menu should spell out the language name in text. A small globe icon can help signal to visitors that this is the language menu, even if they don’t read the site’s default language.

2. Homepage disorientation. Where on earth am I?

An important rule for websites: within two seconds, max, a visitor needs to understand where they’ve landed. The homepage – and that first scroll – need to make clear to the visitor where they are and create a sense of belonging. In short: we’re not trying to confuse visitors. Quite the opposite – we want to focus them. Plenty of sites fill that first scroll with generic lines like “leaders in excellence.” We’ve yet to meet a business whose motto is “striving for mediocrity,” so generic statements don’t help us understand who you are, what you do, or why we’re here. Those are hugely important questions for a visitor. That’s why it’s worth loading that first scroll with genuinely meaningful content. On top of that, a homepage that’s just one image is a problem for visitors and search engines alike. It’s almost always best to combine both text and visuals in that first scroll.

3. A homepage that takes too long to load, or a preloader

Back in the early days of the internet, every site had a preloader – a cute little loading animation. Today, unless you’re a massive app with hundreds of thousands of users, there’s no justification for a preloader. Visitors have no patience, and they won’t wait for you. What’s more – there’s no excuse for a slow site hosted on infrastructure that can’t keep up with your visitors’ needs. A slow site drives up your bounce rate and costs you inquiries and visitors. Your site should load within a second, two at most. Visitors don’t have time for anything slower.

4. Periodic “contact us” testing

We regularly run “contact us” tests on our sites. Lead delivery is a technical, complex process that can break or get disrupted in all kinds of ways. So checking that a lead actually arrives correctly can rule out a whole range of failures – issues on the receiving email’s end, messages landing in spam, and other incidents that keep leads from reaching their destination. We recommend running organized tests regularly, including from mobile phones, across every form, and confirming everything arrives properly. Plenty of brands were 200% certain all their forms were working – but after a thorough check across desktop, mobile, and various site pages, we’ve often found a broken form or an email that never reaches its destination.

5. “We don’t need a lead management system!”

Plenty of site owners insist they don’t need a lead management system. In our view, any site getting more than 30 inquiries a month absolutely needs one, and any site getting more than one lead a year should strongly consider having one. We won’t detail every reason here, but in short: emails and spreadsheets aren’t a reliable way to back up and manage inquiries. The value of a single inquiry can be enormous, and you don’t want to depend on your inbox behaving itself at every given moment, or on human attention. So a lead management system is a must.

6. And what about mobile?

Even today, with mobile long past the 50% mark of browsing volume and creeping toward 60% on average, we notice the customer experience on mobile is usually worse than on desktop – mobile tends to get less time, less thought, less QA, and less design attention. Go browse your own site on mobile and ask yourself a few questions: Is it easy to find your way around? Can you navigate comfortably with just one thumb? Does everything look great? And where are the gaps compared to the desktop version?

7. A website with no terms (and no policies)

Plenty of sites don’t have terms of use, and that’s a shame – a site without terms isn’t just exposed to problems, it’s also unprotected by copyright and vulnerable to duplication and copycats. So you need basic terms of use, and your digital team needs to give you the tools to create them. Publicly traded companies and higher-risk businesses need terms drafted by their legal department, but everyone else can get by with generic terms. Even working with giant companies, we’ve run into the total absence of terms of use more times than we can count. Terms of use are a basic safeguard that protects your copyright and need to appear on your site. (Important note: never copy terms from another site, and it’s always worth consulting a professional.)

8. A little accessibility

Sites targeting the Israeli market fall under accessibility law. Even a brand that chooses not to invest in accessibility can’t simply ignore it. So some investment is mandatory, even a minimal plugin-level one. And of course, it’s highly recommended to build an accessibility page reviewing your site’s accessibility level, with contact details for whoever is responsible for accessibility at your organization, including a personal email and phone number.

9. Who backs up the backup?

Studies show 80% of backups worldwide can’t actually be restored. If you have a backup, that’s a good start. But not every backup is restorable, and on the day you actually need it, yours might not work. That’s why we strongly recommend offsite backups – keeping a backup somewhere separate – and running tests to confirm the backup is intact and deployable, so you can actually use it when the time comes.

10. Missing contact information

About 90% of people who land on your site want to know where you’re located – we found this by analyzing data across hundreds of sites. Yes, the “Contact Us” page is usually the second most-viewed page on a site, and not just to leave you a lead – often simply to find out your address. So it’s important to list your full address on the Contact Us page, including zip code, floor, and so on, so visitors recognize you as a real, credible company and can easily find you in the physical world. Floor number is a critical detail too – don’t skip it. On top of that, always include both an email address and a phone number – give visitors the maximum number of ways to reach you, in whatever way is convenient for them.

Hope this was useful. Worth noting: this article only scratches the surface of website health – it doesn’t touch on SEO, security, CRO, ecommerce-specific adjustments, and plenty of other aspects that matter when measuring a site’s health and effectiveness.

If you liked the article, share it – for the health of the internet, and of websites everywhere.

And if you’d like feedback on your own website, feel free to reach out – we’d love to share insights, notes, and recommendations.