Website issues are the hidden roadblocks that can slow down performance, frustrate users, and ultimately drive traffic away. From slow loading times to poor mobile optimization, these problems can quietly undermine your site’s success.
Let’s explore eight common website issues that could be affecting your traffic and overall performance and provide practical solutions to help you fix them.
Table of Contents
8 Website Issues That Are Affecting Your Website’s Performance & How To Fix Them
The website issues that follow are the most common culprits of any site’s poor performance.
Along with the description of each issue, we also provide several actionable tips on how to solve them.
- Your website is too slow
- You have poor mobile optimization
- You have a bad server/hosting plan
- Your website has too many widgets and plugins
- Your website suffers from subpar coding and resulting glitches
- Security vulnerabilities
- Inconsistent design
- Ineffective Call-to-Action (CTA)
1. Your Website Is Too Slow
Poor page load speed can cause a visitor to abandon a website that takes too long to load. In fact, a study by Portent found that a load time between 0-4 seconds is ideal for optimum conversion rates. Anything longer risks losing potential customers, as users today are accustomed to fast-paced online experiences and won’t stick around for slow-loading pages.
Poor page loading speed can have SEO repercussions, too, and fast load time is arguably the most important UX-centric SEO factor.
There are numerous factors that could lead to website pages loading slowly, including:
- Massive, unoptimized images
- Too many visuals like videos
- Add-ins and plugins
- Excessive bits of code
- JavaScript (JS) website issues
Here are our top tips on how to perform website speed optimization:
- Optimize your images: Check the file size of your images before uploading them to the website. You can use file compression and image optimization tools that many programs, like Adobe Photoshop, have to keep your image sizes in check.
- Reduce the use of multimedia to a bare minimum: Even though elements like videos can add value to visitor engagement, try to use them as little as possible. Additionally, embedding existing video code instead of uploading a video directly to your server helps speed up the website.
- Minify your code: Try to reduce the number of PHP and CSS files your pages use. Minifying the CSS and JavaScript files will limit the number of files users will have to download in order to load your website.
- Use gZIP compression: This handy tool wraps up all your web objects such as images, CSS, and JS files in a single container that is sent to a requesting browser, which reduces the website size significantly.
2. You Have Poor Mobile Optimization
Almost 57% of the total daily time spent online by internet users is via mobile devices, including smartphones and feature phones.
A website that is well-optimized for mobile devices is a positive signal for Google to rank the website better.
A website that responds to the size of a browser is essential for good website performance. Without this feature, you risk poor website performance and negative user experience.
Here’s how you can fix it:
- Make your website mobile-friendly: The best way to make your website mobile-friendly is to use responsive design when creating it. However, if you already have a website that isn’t responsive, you can optimize the existing website for smartphone use in the following ways:
- Adopt modern web technologies
- Optimize button sizes
- Use larger font sizes
- Enhance information accessibility
- Compress images and CSS
- Create a mobile-first website: Designing a mobile-first website has become increasingly important as it ensures the website is fully optimized for mobile devices and, for that reason, its desktop loading speed is much faster too.
3. You Have a Bad Server/Hosting Plan
A bad hosting service can compromise the performance and security of your website.
Hosting servers can have weaknesses like any other computer: they may have poor defense systems, low memory, and storage capacities or they may be unreliable.
The hosting provider and plan you choose can majorly impact your website’s performance. If you opt for a shared server, your site could be housed alongside numerous other websites, which comes with risks. Not only could your files be exposed to malware from poorly maintained sites, but you may also face limited server space and reduced performance.
Keep in mind that a website with a particularly large database, like an eCommerce site, will not perform well on these shared servers.
Here’s how you can fix it:
- When possible, choose a dedicated server for your website: This means you are not sharing it with any other website — it is all dedicated to you. It comes with the benefit of being able to configure this server exactly to your website’s architectural needs, without the need to compromise.
- Choose a plan that matches your needs: Most hosting servers have several tiers or pricing plans for different kinds of hosting. They differ in how many websites can share each server, the capacity/size of the server and whether backup and security services are included. While choosing a plan that provides more server space and numerous other hosting services is pricier, it may give you peace of mind.
- Know the three key performance factors of your server: When choosing your hosting partner and plan, consider these performance factors:
- Server response time: Look for independent data on time to first byte (TTFB), which is the measure of how long it takes the server to respond to a request.
- Equipment: Solid state drives (SSDs) are much faster than mechanical drives.
- Accounts per server: If it’s shared hosting, an overcrowded server can reduce performance.
4. Your Website Has Too Many Widgets and Plugins
Websites that run on CMS platforms like WordPress or Joomla and some eCommerce websites that use software like Shopify or Magento often have many widgets and plugins installed.
While these plugins provide additional capabilities to websites, they can also compromise their performance by slowing them down and even creating severe code collisions that may lead to some website functions not working properly.
Here’s how you can fix it:
- Use only the plugins you really need: Sometimes it can be too enticing to try out plugins that promise to give your website another dimension. However, try to fight the urge to install them unless they are absolutely necessary for the functioning of your website.
- Keep your plugins updated: It is important to regularly download updates for the plugins you use. If you don’t update them, they become prone to security issues and hacker attacks.
- Download plugins only from official and reliable sources: There are plenty of third-party plugin providers but not all of them are genuine. Download plugins only from reliable, official sources that are endorsed by your website’s platform and have good user reviews.
5. Your Website Suffers From Subpar Coding and Resulting Glitches
Huge blocks of code don’t necessarily mean a website will perform well. Robust code may only perform disproportionately minor functions.
Poorly coded websites load slowly and could have glitches such as slow buffering, non-loading elements, and “shaky” text or images.
If your website is using a third-party theme or template, the universal code within may not be adjusted to your website’s specific needs and may need tweaking to optimize it for the best performance.
Here’s how you can fix it:
- Have an experienced programmer or developer remove unnecessary elements from your code: Getting rid of line breaks, extra spaces, and other formatting data not required for the functioning of the website can significantly boost your website experience.
- Use tools that refine the code: To clean up and streamline your website’s code, you can use web design tools like Prettier, CSSNano, UnCSS, PurgeCSS, HTMLHint, and Stylelint.
6. Security Vulnerabilities
A website's security ensures the integrity and confidentiality of user data. Security vulnerabilities pose a significant threat to your site's reputation and can lead to:
- Loss of trust among users
- Potential data breaches
- Legal repercussions
Examples of such vulnerabilities include:
- SQL injection
- Cross-site scripting
- Cross-site request forgery
All this puts your online reputation at risk as people won’t feel comfortable browsing a website that threatens their personal data. To avoid these security risks, you can:
- Keep all your website software, including content management systems and plugins, up to date.
- Regularly conduct security audits and vulnerability scans to identify and fix potential threats before they can be exploited.
- Implement a web application firewall (WAF) to shield your site from common attacks and suspicious activities.
- Invest in a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate to encrypt the data transferred between your site and users, mitigating the risk of data theft.
- A secure website is not only beneficial for your users but also boosts your SEO ranking as search engines favor websites that prioritize user security.
7. Inconsistent Design
Inconsistent web design can be detrimental to the user experience, leaving visitors feeling confused and making your website seem unprofessional. A recent study found that 49% of consumers have abandoned a brand due to poor user experience.
Inconsistent design elements — such as varying color schemes, typography, and layouts — can disrupt the user’s journey and lead to increased bounce rates.
A coherent design not only enhances the aesthetic appeal of your website but also improves usability, contributing to a seamless and engaging user experience. To keep inconsistencies to a minimum, consider the following strategies:
- Create a style guide: Outline the visual elements of your website, such as color palettes, typography, and imagery in a brand book. This will serve as a reference point for all design-related decisions, ensuring consistency across all web pages.
- Ensure consistent layout across all pages: Maintain uniformity in the placement of the navigation menus, logos, headers, and footers. A consistent layout helps visitors know what to expect, enhancing the overall experience.
- Use uniform typography: Consistent typography improves readability and maintains a professional look and feel. Stick to a select few typefaces and use them consistently across all web pages.
- Maintain a consistent color scheme: Your color scheme should reflect your brand identity and remain uniform throughout your website.
By addressing and fixing design inconsistencies, you can enhance user experience, reduce bounce rates, and increase visitor engagement.
8. Ineffective Call-to-Action (CTA)
Ineffective CTAs can severely impact your website's conversion rates. The CTA button serves as a guide, directing your visitors towards the intended action, such as subscribing to a newsletter, purchasing a product, or filling out a form.
However, if your CTA is unclear, poorly designed, or obscured, visitors may not understand what to do next, leading to missed conversion opportunities and lower user engagement.
Several factors contribute to an ineffective CTA, for instance:
- Vague message
- Weak design that doesn't stand out
- Poorly chosen placement that visitors overlook easily
To fix these issues, you can:
- Make your CTAs clear, direct, and compelling
- Use strong, action-oriented words
- Ensure the CTA stands out visually
Place your CTAs strategically throughout your website (ideally above the fold and at the end of key sections or content pieces) and perform an A/B test to determine the most effective design, placement, and wording.
5 Reasons Why Users Leave Your Website
Your website should be a revenue opportunity for your business. However, if it’s packed with design and coding mistakes, it can become a liability instead of a business asset.
Make sure you aren’t driving away your visitors, prospects and high-value leads by repeating these costly mistakes that corrupt user experience.
- Reason #1: Complicated user journey
- Reason #2: You’re targeting the wrong audience
- Reason #3: You lack fresh content
- Reason #4: Your navigation is too complicated
- Reason #5: You force registration & have pop-ups that load immediately
Reason #1: Complicated User Journey
21% of buyers abandon their purchases because of complex and lengthy checkouts. In fact, 77% of B2B buyers claim that their latest purchase was complex or difficult.
One of the main causes of the complicated user journey is the requirement to create an account in order to buy something.
Another factor is a non-optimized conversion funnel that doesn’t provide users with what they need at each stage of their journey.
Here’s how you can fix it:
- Map your user journey properly: This is too complex of a process to be covered here in its entirety but creating a successful mapping journey requires knowing your audience, which channels are you using besides your website and understanding how to create value propositions for your services and products.
- Do not require account creation: Allow guest logins and completion of the entire user journey without the need to create an account.
- Lose the excessive content: The following advice is especially valuable for eCommerce and B2B websites. Having excessive, needless content in the form of graphic elements and even superfluous copy can sidetrack the user from their original buying intent. To keep their focus and interest, keep this to a minimum and try to provide only what’s valuable to your users.
- Keep your design streamlined and minimal: In general, plenty of white space and clean design can help visitors focus on content that really matters to them. If they feel that they are overwhelmed by the layout of the website, they will likely leave.
Reason #2: You’re Targeting the Wrong Audience
If your visitors are turning away from your website as soon as they land on it and you keep experiencing very low conversion rates on top of that, it may be because the wrong audience is coming to your website.
Your website’s copy and content may be sending the wrong signals and hinting at content that is of no interest to your high-value prospects.
Or, alternatively, the high-value prospects may not be coming to your website at all because you are not providing enough evidence that what you offer is important to them.
Poor copy that doesn’t communicate your value propositions and unique identifiers will not reach the audience that is most interested in what you have to offer.
Here’s how you can fix it:
- Know your demographic: It goes without saying that before creating a website — and even before starting your own business — you need to establish who your target audience is through market and demographic research. Target audiences and their habits tend to change over time, so new research is needed every now and then in order to know who to communicate your offers to.
- Create your user persona: To take your understanding of your target audience a step further, create user or buyer personas. This is the fictitious presentation of an ideal customer composed of the most common traits, interests, pain points, and other qualities of your wider customer base.
- Segment your audience: Segmenting your audience into different groups according to their common traits such as interests, location, age or gender can help you streamline your advertising and adjust it to each specific segment.
- Align your content, meta descriptions, and title tags with your audience’s interests: Just like your advertising campaigns, your blog and copy content must be aligned with your audience’s interests and pain points. Write content, title tags, and meta descriptions that reflect their needs and precisely communicate that you have solutions for them on your website.
Reason #3: You Lack Fresh Content
While attractive design, fast loading, and mobile optimization are important factors for retaining your audience, it is your content that users come to your site for, first and foremost.
If your website isn’t updated with new and relevant content on a regular basis, you are pushing your visitors away. When they see there is nothing new for them to read, website visitors may start returning less often.
Here’s how you can fix it:
- Have a blog section and update it regularly: Blogging is a useful tool for achieving your business objective for various reasons, including:
- Blog articles give your business a sense of credibility and authority
- Relevant blog articles can help capture prospects and leads and educate your audience
- Blog section boosts audience engagement and improves your page dwell times
Reason #4: Your Navigation Is Too Complicated
Websites with poor and confusing navigation can intimidate visitors who expect to navigate the website intuitively and effortlessly.
If they cannot easily decipher their next step in a matter of a second or if they don’t know where they are on a website, they might be tempted to leave.
Good website navigation always provides a path to take the user directly to the information they’re looking for. This path should be quick, convenient and understandable. Visitors should be able to land on your site and quickly identify how to move around your website.
Here’s how you can fix it:
- Create a main menu with as few items as possible: Have one single navigation menu that is easy to access and clearly defined. Make sure your menu is responsive and provides desktop, mobile and tablet users alike with effortless navigation.
- Use breadcrumbs: Breadcrumbs are like little guideposts that tell visitors exactly where they are on a site. They are a very useful method of orientating.
- Use a progress bar on eCommerce websites: If a purchase process on your website takes several steps, it might be very helpful for your visitors to have a progress bar that tells them exactly how deep they are into the said process and how many steps remain until the purchase is complete.
- Use CTA to guide visitors through the site: CTA buttons can also be very helpful. Positioning them strategically all throughout the website can create a good flow for users who are interested in specific content or solutions.
Reason #5: You Force Registration & Have Pop-Ups That Load Immediately
Before asking your visitors to provide their information to you, you should provide them with something of value that can alleviate their pain points or give the solutions they seek. Don’t force them to sign up, register, or do any sort of action beforehand.
Also, it’s important to be very strategic about the way you use pop-ups, as they can frustrate readers and prompt them to leave.
Here’s how you can fix it:
- Don’t be pushy: Provide useful content and information to your visitors first. They will want to stay connected and sign up for your mailing list if they find value in your content. Offering value will grow your traffic and leads organically.
- Opt for exit-intent pop-ups: Not only are these much less irritating than those that appear as soon as visitors land on a page, but you can also use them to display special offers that may entice visitors to stay longer on your site and potentially convert.
How Solving Technical Website Issues Improves SEO
Updating and fixing the technical website issues that you have control over can have a direct or indirect impact on your site’s indexation and search rankings.
Solving website security issues, restructuring your navigation, improving your page load speed, optimizing for mobile devices, minifying your code and creating valuable content are all factors that can retain and grow your audience.
These factors can also send signals to Google that your website deserves a higher ranking, as many users visit and spend time on your website.
5 Bonus Tips on Reducing High Webpage Bounce Rates
High bounce rates for a web page suggest that visitors were unable to find what they were looking for or were not compelled to explore the website any further.
Here are several tips on how you can reduce bounce rates:
- Use videos to engage your audience: Research shows that 53% of consumers want to see more video content from a brand or business they support and that video marketers get 66% more qualified leads per year. This type of content is highly engaging and will grab your audience’s attention more than text does. Videos next to a CTA can educate your prospects and entice them to click and learn more about your solutions. Using videos has another positive side-effect: they effectively prolong the time the user spends on your website, known as the page dwell time.
- Place strategic calls-to-action on every page: Using CTAs abundantly, but also strategically, can lead to greater revenue generation as well as reduction of bounce rates. CTAs on a blog article page could be linked to other relevant pages on your websites. You don’t have to push visitors to convert right away — leading them to additional information is a great way to reduce bounce rates.
- Create gated content: Creating gated content such as in-depth reports and case studies can motivate your visitors to submit their email addresses and keep exploring your website. This places more content in front of them, keeps them engaged, and adds them to your subscriber list so you can continue to advertise to them.
- Show credibility: Showcase your client testimonials, positive reviews, awards, endorsements, quality scores, and affiliations to demonstrate your credibility right off the bat. Even before they assess your products or services or the quality of your content, many visitors look for evidence of your reliability and industry credibility.
- Always strive to provide excellent user experience: We have already covered numerous user experience touchpoints that need improving in order to retain your visitors. Think in terms of how easy and pleasing it is for a user to interact with your website. Observe how your users behave and what influences their decisions in order to shape the experience of your website.
Takeaways on Website Issues
Visitors are very likely to leave a website that has many problems or provides a poor user experience. Now that you’re familiar with the most common issues and have actionable tips on how to fix them, you can vastly improve both performance and visitor retention.
If you're still struggling and need help, reach out to a professional web designer who can optimize your site for a better user experience.
Website Issues FAQs
1. How do I find website issues?
To identify website issues:
- Conduct regular audits using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, or Lighthouse
- Check for broken links, slow page load times, and mobile responsiveness
- Monitor analytics for user behavior and review error logs
- Perform cross-browser testing to ensure compatibility
- Regularly check for outdated content and facilitate good SEO practices
2. What are the common website issues affecting performance and traffic?
Common issues include slow page load times, inconsistent design, poor mobile responsiveness, and inadequate security measures. Each of these problems can negatively impact user experience and SEO.
3. What is website troubleshooting?
Website troubleshooting is the process of identifying, analyzing, and resolving issues affecting the functionality, performance, or user experience of a website. It involves systematic problem-solving to find and fix issues such as errors, bugs, or malfunctions to ensure the smooth operation of the website.
4. What is an example of a website weakness?
A common example of a website weakness is poor page load speed, which can negatively impact user experience and SEO rankings.
5. How often should I perform a website audit to identify and fix issues?
Regular audits every three to six months are recommended to ensure your site remains in optimal condition. Frequent checks help identify and resolve issues before they impact performance and traffic.
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