Does your website hold up in the looks department, or is it a disorganized mess? Does it draw in an audience or is your site design, cluttered and difficult to navigate through When it comes to poor website design issues, it’s not so difficult to spot it, with confusing designs to ugly visuals. However, there are other fairly common web design mistakes and flaws, that aren’t so easy to spot. The reality is, for the most part, you can go without anyone ever telling you, so you may not even realize.

Below are 6 common website issues that you should look out for when designing or maintaining your website.

1. Non-Responsive Website

Over 40% of all website searches are conducted on a tablet or smartphone, it’s for this reason why you want to ensure that your website can be properly viewed on these platforms. The reality is that there are still millions of websites out there that lack a responsive design mistakes. Google did introduce an update, in hopes of coercing people into making their websites responsive, but there are still many sites that do not meet this requirement.

2. Slow Website

There is nothing more annoying than a website that appears to take forever to load up. The good thing about this is that Google will actually penalize a website for being slow, so many webmasters are incentivized to make their sites faster. Having many large images on your site tends to be a common cause for this issue. So you want to start by cutting your image size down, or possibly investing in a content management system that is capable of resizing site images, automatically.

3. Poor Use of Sidebar, Headers, and Footers

Many people make the mistakes of thinking that headings, footers, and sidebars are designed solely for adverts. However, such behavior can be very off-putting for the visitor, especially when the website is littered with ads; you always want to put most of your effort into content quality. These areas are much more advantageous for the visitor when used for navigation around the website.

How, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have any ads on your website at all, whether promoting a product or a service. All this means is that you should always consider balance when constructing your website.

4. Poor Quality Site Content

The most important criteria when ranking a site in the search engines is the quality of its content. There are many domain owners out there that spend a considerable amount of money, getting the best designed, sleek website, only to put very little effort into writing the content for it. This has a major impact on where the site will rank in the search engines, because of how much site content is prized by it.

To figure out whether the content of your website is of high quality, all you need to do is look at the click-through and bounce rate of visitors. This will help you discover whether people are visiting other pages on your website or simply, leaving after only a couple of seconds. When building your website, prioritizing content quality is something that you should always hold strong to.

5. Poor Site SEO

The vast majority of companies out there are familiar with search engine optimization, and its importance. However, when it comes to getting your site out there, there is a lot of competition for you to consider. If your website design mistakes lacks proper incorporation of keywords then it will suffer in the search listings. The best thing that you can do, is seeking the help of someone who is experienced with this kind of thing, that way you can ensure that you’re getting the most out of your site and its content.

6. Security and Certification Issues

When it comes to a business website, security is one aspect that is often overlooked, until something majorly wrong happens. Hackers are out there, and they are capable of giving just about anyone a headache, but the truth is, most of these companies only ever value good security after they’ve fallen prey to these hackers.

You want to ensure that your safety features are kept up-to-date on your website. A WordPress user will always want to ensure that they are using the latest versions of plugins on their site. Using an SSL certificate is another popular practice today, and something you’ll want to do. SSL encrypts data transmission, between the site and the visitor. Google has now started to reward people for having secure websites, so it’s definitely something you should look into.