The Productivity Cost of a Bad Website (And How to Fix It)

In this day and age, a bad website can be more than just a minor issue. In fact, it could ultimately stagnate your business and have a significant drain on company resources. It can increase market costs and cause a lot of employee time to be wasted.

Fixing a bad website is better than just continuing with workflows and processes that aren’t working. In this guide, we’ll look at the productivity costs of a bad website and how to fix the website so it performs better this year and beyond.

The Productivity Costs of a Bad Website

When it comes to the productivity costs of a bad website, there’s a lot of internal time wasted by your employees. A slow or broken site will reduce efficiency and equate to over 2,000 hours of lost productivity annually.

If you’re constantly fighting with inefficient tools, then you or your efforts to improve the site will be exhausting. It can also decrease staff morale and increase stress levels.

Employees will spend a lot of their valuable time acting as IT support in order to navigate around crashing systems and broken links. That can reduce the time they spend on high-value tasks that require their attention.

A confusing website will directly increase customer service volume. That puts a lot of pressure on your teams that manage customer support. If a website is slow or difficult to navigate, then visitors will leave, and that results in a higher bounce rate, wasting money spent on advertising that brought them there in the first place.

Poorly built websites will often break, and so relying on emergency fixes can cost 3-5 times more than the scheduled routine maintenance you’d have in place typically.

How to Fix a Bad Website

So how would you best fix a bad website that’s underperforming? Here are a few easy steps to take in order to better your site for future traffic.

1.   Optimize page speed

Both the website design and its functionality must work well together. So with that in mind, you should compress down images that are large, as they’re the primary cause for a slow-loading page or website in general.

Try to minify your code and remove unnecessary spaces. A CDN is also helpful for delivering content faster by using servers that are closest to the user.

2.   Simplify user experience

You’ll want to simplify the user experience to help with its effectiveness on your customers, both old and new.

Firstly, consider a mobile-first design, ensuring the site is fully functional on mobile devices, as that can often alienate users who are using their mobiles as a main form of browsing online.

Make sure to streamline navigation and present clear calls to action to tell users exactly what to do next to prevent them from leaving.

3.   Regular audits and maintenance

Regular audits and maintenance will help keep the website in good standing. It’s worth conducting a performance audit, using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to identify where the bottlenecks lie.

Try to actively fix broken links and redirects, as broken links will ruin credibility. Keep any outdated plugin updates, as these pose security risks and often cause technical issues on the site, too.

4.   Invest in reliable hosting

It’s always good to invest in reliable hosting. If it’s cheap, shared hosting, then this often leads to slow speed and increased frequency of downtime, too.

Focusing on user-centered design, ensuring consistent maintenance, and speeding up load times will all help improve the performance of your website this year.

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