Common mistakes when building a website yourself (and how to avoid them)

Nowadays, there are countless tools that allow you to easily build a website yourself. That seems attractive: fast, cheap, and you have everything in your own hands. Yet I often see that entrepreneurs are shortchanging themselves. After all, a website is more than just a few pretty pictures and some text. It must represent your company, convince customers, and be easily found in Google.

Below I discuss the most common mistakes and how to avoid them.

1. Too much focus on design, too little on content

A sleek layout is nice, but ultimately visitors come for the content. If your texts are vague or unclear, they will drop out.
👉 Tip: Make sure your message is clear: who are you, what do you do, and how do you help your customer?

2. No mobile-friendly design

More than half of all website visits today come via mobile phones. A site that looks good on desktop but is awkward to use on mobile will cost you customers.
👉 Tip: Always test your site on different screen sizes and choose a responsive theme.

3. Slow loading time

Self-built websites are often slow because too many large images or unnecessary plugins are used. Google penalizes this in the ranking and visitors click away faster.
👉 Tip: Optimize your images, use as few heavy plugins as possible, and choose good hosting.

4. No clear call-to-action

A visitor needs to know what the next step is: contact you, buy a product, request a quote. Without clear buttons or directions, your site is a maze.
👉 Tip: Put a clear call-to-action on every page that matches your goal.

5. SEO forgotten

Many entrepreneurs simply fill in some text without thinking about keywords or structure. Result: you are hardly found in Google.
👉 Tip: Do keyword research and use them cleverly in your texts, headings and meta descriptions.

Conclusion

Building a website seems simple, but there is much more to it if you want it to really deliver results. By paying attention to content, user-friendliness, speed and SEO, you prevent your site from being a beautiful business card that no one visits.

Do you want to be sure that your website is professionally built and easily found? Then it is smarter to outsource this (partially) to a professional. That saves time, frustration and ultimately yields you much more.