5 common hazards to avoid on your Magento site
5 common mistakes that can be hazardous to your Magento website
My articles have recently been focused on how to improve your Magento site involving many aspects such as giving your users a better experience, picking the best theme and so on and so forth. However, this week the focus will be on avoiding disasters. Perhaps the biggest disaster you could suffer from is your website getting hacked and all your visitors being “rick rolled”. But if that doesn’t happen, here are my 5 common hazards to avoid on your Magento site:
Slow site due to no caching:
Browser caching is used by so many businesses now, and it’s easy to understand why. Most websites have unique static components; these include things like html files, stylesheets, images and other multi-media content. When these components are cached it helps speed up the website for when visitors. Lower page load time means more people are staying on your site and if I’ve emphasised one thing a lot it’s that high page speed really does matter!
Hiding contact information:
Consumers always want to know who they’re dealing with. It only makes sense, because who wants to enter their credit card information to someone they don’t know is legitimate? Would you? No? Well of course you wouldn’t. This may be extremely obvious; however you’d be surprised at some of the people who are allowed on the internet. DO NOT hide your contact information. It may not even be the case of hiding your information, just make sure it is in a spot which is reasonably visible to the average visitor.
Poor contact options:
It’s good to have an e-mail and phone number displayed on your website, but you can make it even easier for customers to contact you. If you haven’t already, get a contact form. Your customers may not always feel like ringing in or leaving the webpage to e-mail you. This is why having a contact page right in front of your users is great. You can even customise it allowing you to choose the fields you think are necessary.
This is a contact form we have on our website. As soon as you land on that page, you can see the contact form sticks out, encouraging people to at least take notice of it with an offer to further convince people to fill in the form. Our form only has 3 fields however; you can have as many as you want. Personally, I wouldn’t put more than 5 fields. This is because having too many fields can discourage people to fill it out, thus losing out on potential business. If you’d like to see the actual web-page to get a better look, you can check it out here!
Having too many 301 redirects:
Redirects can be a useful tool in many situations, however sometimes people tend to use them too much. A 301 redirect is permanent and passes between 90-99% of link juice to the redirected page meaning you lose a lot of link juice. As well as keeping 301 redirects to a minimum, you also want to make sure you DO NOT try and link a redirect to another redirect. For example, if you’ve already had Page A redirecting to Page B. Then Page C is introduced and you have Page B going to Page C (so Page A -> Page B -> Page C), this is known as chain redirecting and is a REALLY BAD solution. Doing so will make you lose page authority.
Confusing navigation:
It is your duty to make sure your site structure is crystal clear to users. People should know exactly what part of your website they are browsing at all times. If you’re an ecommerce site you should be using categories to differentiate parts of your website so customers can also find what they’re looking for a lot faster. As well as this, having a search bar can allow users to skip many steps of having to find what they’re looking for and thus, making it more likely to secure a sale.
If you’re currently doing any of these, you should either consider fixing these mistakes or get in touch with a Magento expert to implement these. At Wow-Zone we have plenty of Magento experts to improve all aspects of your site. Ring us on 0121 285 1100 or we can go for a nice coffee, the choice is yours!
