A bad website with its poor design and maintenance can potentially hurt your reputation and drive your business straight to your competitors. Since your website is your brand’s most visible asset, you pay a great price due to the negative effect it has on your business. 75% of consumers who searches for solutions online, admit that they judge a business’s credibility by its website. Instead of giving your visitors, confidence, and trust in you, a poor website creates doubt, uncertainty, and uneasiness about your business. 

Here are some ways by which your website is stifling your business growth.

1. Lost leads

Nothing hurts more than a lost customer to the competitor and nothing drives them away more quickly than a poor website. An outdated website sends out a negative message to your customer that you just don’t care about their needs. A visitor uses your website to judge your products and services before deciding whether or not to do business with you. A neglected website will shape a negative perception of the value and quality you offer.

Site deficiencies like lack of call to action, difficult navigations, crowded and glittery page design, non-interactive web design, and inwardly-focused content can typically cause a prospect to abandon the site. Performance issues like slow-loading pages, non-compatibility with mobile, and other bugs can also prove to be anything from annoying, to downright damaging to your website and business.

2. Reduced Traffic

People will never know that the company exists if their website lacks visibility for the organic search. If the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is outdated or poorly done, it impacts the ability of the search engines to index your content, ultimately lowering your rankings on Google and Bing searches. Most common on-site SEO issues like duplicate content, broken internal images, duplicate or no title tags, duplicate meta descriptions and broken internal and external links result in decreased visibility which leads to reduced organic traffic to the website.

3. Diminishes the Image of your business

Even if you have the most qualified, most experienced, and most efficient team in the area of your expertise, a poorly designed and maintained website can cause your credibility to take a nose-dive. If your company’s website is light on content, displays outdated information, or filled with errors, the perceived competence of your brand will suffer. 

Unreliable: When a website misses factual information, authenticity like leadership goes unmentioned, and has confusing navigation, the reliability of your brand is under suspicion.

Inefficient: The bugs and errors that occur frequently on the website along with poor content and layout make your business look inefficient.

Unresponsive: Absence of customization, which includes delivering different experiences to different devices can be a major threat to your business as the future of the internet is mobile.

Non-friendly to Social Media: Absence or misplacement of social media share buttons that bans the viewers from spreading the word about your website and business.

4. The sales team gets affected

Since your sales team needs valuable marketing resources to back up their sales and marketing campaigns and strategies, a well-maintained website which provides a wealth of content through blogs, webinars, strong portfolios, and testimonials is a stronghold to follow up with the prospects. A bad website will surely cripple your sales team without powerful content.

5. Makes your competitor looks better

If a visitor who lands on your website, does not find your content trustworthy and website credible, they naturally go looking for your competitors online. If their website provides the user with accurate information in a cleaner and easy-to-use format, you just gave a potential customer to your competitor. A bad website can tear your business apart and make your competitor look smarter.