Based on Statista.com, Google has dominated the search engine market, maintaining a 92.47 percent market share as of June 2021. 94% of people who search for a product or service on Google, never look past the first page.
Considering the above statistics, it is clear that in today’s business environment, a website is a necessity – but that’s not enough. The question you need to ask yourself is: Is my website properly up-to-date and optimized so that it can be found and not penalized by Google? Can your prospect find you through Google?
Even if you have a website, due to the constant ever-changing parameters and updates that Google establishes, more than likely, your website it’s not actually properly optimized. In some cases, we also found that some may have a Google penalty due to some new rule or Terms of Services.
With the above in mind, here are five good reasons why you may want to get a new custom made WordPress Website:
1. How fast is Your Website?
Your website will be penalized by Google if it loads slowly. No one has the patience to wait for a website to load for several minutes, which is the cause of this. Instead, they’ll just hit the return button and visit a competing website, which will probably load faster. If you want to know how your website performs, go to Google’s Page Speed Insight, enter your web page URL and click “Analyze.” Google will give you a free diagnostic performance of your website and any issues.
2. HTTP vs HTTPS Website –
You may have a website that was made a few years ago and it seems all ok, however if your website web address starts with HTTP://____ you want to pay attention. On the World Wide Web, there is a need to be a way to communicate in a secure manner over a computer network. HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. This is how the data is transferred. You may ask yourself, “This is all gibberish to me – why is this important to me? This is important to anyone that has a website because, in February 2018, Google announced that from July 2018, every website that is not running HTTPS will be labeled unsecure and will be labeled as such and penalized.
We have often found that any website that was built before 2018, was never updated and is still listed as an HTTP website. Maybe this is not your case but any HTTP Website = Google Penalty. Something to keep in mind.
3. Is your Website Mobile Optimized?
Google cares more about the user than your website; the user is their first priority. You risk being penalized for not having a mobile-friendly website because many searches are now being conducted on mobile devices rather than laptops. Google uses mobile-first indexing, which implies that both the mobile and desktop versions of a website are considered when indexing it. Google promotes mobile-friendly websites and penalizes non-mobile-friendly ones by lowering their traffic. If your website is not responsive to mobile devices, your rankings may suffer, which may decrease the number of hits to your site. The easiest way to check if a site is mobile-friendly is to use the Google Mobile-Friendly Test. All you need to do is: Open Mobile-Friendly Test and enter your website URL then click TEST URL.
4. Broken Links
Google will make sure that your site material is current in order to consistently deliver relevant stuff to your audience. In other words, they’ll make sure there are no broken links. Google thoroughly examines every link you use on your website to look for any hidden problems. Google can easily discover a 404 error or broken link. If your website contains any broken links, Google will assume that you don’t update as frequently as you should or that you don’t care about your visitors. You can avoid needless Google penalties by checking your website for broken links and resolving them.
How can you check for broken links on your website? Simple – go to https://ahrefs.com/broken-link-checker
Enter your website’s domain or URL to instantly see how many links are broken (if any).
5. How can images negatively impact your website performance?
Sites that use too many images, or have images that are too large, have longer loading times. This can slow down your entire page, irritating visitors and actually hurting your site’s ranking in online search results. We may say that images are worth a thousand words, but if you don’t plan for fast loading times, they actually won’t be worth very much at all. If readers can’t see your fully-loaded pages in eight seconds or less, they may become impatient and navigate away from your site. When it comes to keeping readers interested, every second counts!
Luckily, a custom made WordPress Website takes care of this behind the scenes by creating various sizes of your original uploaded image without affecting the quality. When you choose an image from your Media Gallery, you can pick a size that best fits within the content area — and loads less data. Possibly all the above is not new news that you wanted to have, because you now may have realized that you need to get a new website and spend money that was not planned for it.
The truth is that if any of the above scenarios apply to your practice, you are losing potential clients and visibility because Google will make your competitor website rank higher than yours or worse push your website on Page 2 or 3 on relevant keywords.
In summary, we have cost-effective solutions to design a custom WordPress website that is optimized to all the latest Google guidelines – which ultimately translates into more visitors and ultimately more business.
Go here and request a free website audit on us!
