Developing a business website is full of dangers and pitfalls to people who are just getting started, but many professionals fall into dangerous web branding traps as well. There are a few common practices that seem like good ideas but which can cause you to lose a significant amount of business if you aren’t careful during the design process. User experience is extremely important and if you miss important elements your business could hurt. If your website is using one of the practices outlined below, you could be losing a significant amount of business without even realizing it.

Too Many Clicks

Any public section of your business website should be accessible to somebody searching for the material within a minimum of 2-3 clicks. After that three click threshold, a new user who is unfamiliar with your website layout is likely to become bored or frustrated, at which point they move on to something else. Your website can still have a wealth of information – in fact, it’s best if there’s a lot of useful information even for those who are not using your services – but you need to make sure that the amount of information doesn’t get overwhelming. Run tests on every page of your website and make sure that at no point is a visitor required to make more than three clicks to access what they want.

Poor Shopping Experience

If your company sells a tangible product but your business website doesn’t give customers a way to buy that product quickly and easily, you’re going to hurt your bottom line. An online storefront is one of the easiest ways to engage customers and guarantee that they buy from you instead of going through a third party. This cuts out the middleman and gets the public to see you as a trusted, useful online source that they should check in on more often. Your online storefront should not only be easy to navigate, but it should be accessible from any page on the site, usually through a clickable top or side button.

Difficult to Find Customer Service/FAQ

One of the most common reasons that anybody visits a business website is to deal with a problem that they are having with a company’s product or service. Because of this, and because top-level customer service is always an absolute must, you need to make sure that have an easily accessible and responsive customer service system. Moreover, adding frequently asked questions, or FAQs, to your page is an incredibly important step that can improve your impact with customers. The existence of a FAQ not only makes it very easy for customers to get answers, but it also boosts your page’s usefulness on algorithms used by search engines, thus driving more traffic to your site.

If your business website has any of the above issues going on, you will see a drop in efficiency and income. By making a few simple but effective tweaks to your site, you can make it more profitable and also provide your customers with better service, a happier experience, and the sense that your company is an organization that can be relied upon in the future.