3 Common Web Development & Design mistakes that will hurt your SEO
What good is your stunning website if users cannot even find it across the web because of Google crawling issues?
You’ll have to develop your website in a way that search engines are able to crawl it, while making it as easy as possible for them to crawl and rank accordingly. Even if your website is crawlable by search engines, you might have made these 3 common web development mistakes on your website that is hurting it’s search engine rankings. Keep in mind, the common web development and web design mistakes we are about to tell you are based on the latest algorithmic changes done by Google themselves and are direct ranking factors that you absolutely need to take care of to climb up the SERP’s. So, let’s dive right in - Not having a mobile-friendly website Since, the whole web is going mobile-first, Google jumped on the bandwagon as well by tweaking their algorithms to index mobile websites first and rank them accordingly. They called the algorithm ‘Mobilegeddon’ and after it’s implementation, the websites that weren't mobile-friendly were pushed down the SERP’s. Having a mobile website became a priority after this Google update and you should get one too to stay in the good books of Google. If you don’t have a mobile website yet, implement responsive-design on your website and you’ll automatically surpass websites on the SERP’s that still don’t provide that experience to mobile searchers. Going for a responsive website that works on both desktop and mobile is adviced by Google over getting a separate mobile website altogether because it is easier and saves webmasters from getting into a lot of additional trouble. If you’re looking to get a functional mobile responsive website, we can help!
Having a slow-loading website
Google cares about the user experience your website provides to their searchers. The better user experience your website provides, higher will be it’s search engine rankings.
Based on their own research, Google found out that bad website performance was the most prominent factor that led to a bad experience for users.
So, in July 2018, Google rolled out the ‘Speed Update’ globally that would downrank websites providing the slowest of web experiences.
To excel under this update, it became imperative for websites to perform optimally or they’ll be pushed down the SERP ladder.
To optimize the overall performance of your website you could remove heavy images and other elements that take a lot of time to load, minimize HTTP requests, minify or combine files, enable asynchronous loading for CSS and Javascript files, optimize server response time and what not.
For a more in-depth analysis, you could head over to Google’s own PageSpeed Insights to gain more clarity about what you should exactly do to opyimize your website performance.
Displaying interstitials on your website
No one likes to get startled with popus when they visit a website and are busy reading the content on it, Google is no different.
On their quest to provide the best browsing experience to all their users, Google clearly instructed webmasters to not display intrusive popups or interstitials that cover a large portion of the content on their website or they will experience unfavourable changes in their search engine rankings.
So, if you have hardcoded various popups or are using a 3rd party tool to display popups on your website, now would be a good time to stop and remove them altogether to provide a better browsing experience to your website visitors and increase your rankings. All the above mentioned factors are direct ranking factors for Google and are an integral part of their algorithms. Ignore them and you may as well forget about ever getting on the first page of Google, that’s how important these factors are for them. Strive to provide the best experience to all your users by having a website that is friendly to mobile searchers, loads fast for them and doesn't bombard them with popups as soon as they arrive and see your website move up the SERP ladder. Oh, and did we tell you we take care of all these elements in all our web development & design services we provide. Do give it a look before you go.














