Date First Published: 1st August 2023
Topic: Web Design & Development
Subtopic: Web Development
Article Type: Computer Questions & Answers
Difficulty: EasyDifficulty Level: 3/10
Learn about the 20 most common mistakes people make when developing websites in this article.
When developing websites, there are some very common mistakes that so many people make over and over again, often without realising it. These mistakes are harmful to the usability, accessibility, security, and the overall user experience of websites. By understanding these 20 most common mistakes, you can avoid irritating your visitors and improve visitor retention, which will be beneficial for the success of your website in the long run. Below are the top 20 most common mistakes people make when developing websites and how to avoid them.
Out of the 20 mistakes on this list, this is the most common mistake. A 404 page is displayed to visitors when they have arrived at a page that cannot be found. The default 404 page that most web servers use is often vague and doesn't describe the error in much detail, inconsistent with the design of the website, and creates a dead-end, forcing your visitors to hit the back button on their web browser.
Instead, you should create a custom 404 page that is consistent with the design of your website and explains the error in detail. The page should include links to other pages and not create a dead-end. Also, you should prevent it from being indexed by search engines using the "noindex" tag as error pages should not come up in search engines.
When having a signup form to create an account or a form to enter an email address to subscribe to a newsletter, a common mistake that some sites will make, especially spammy sites, is only allowing you to use an email address from a well-known provider, like Gmail or Outlook. This means that any custom email addresses that are created from domain names (e.g. [email protected]) and temporary email addresses will be blocked. This is highly controversial and we believe that users have a right to use whatever email address they want.
This will also make visitors curious and make them want to know why. It is like you are assuming that anyone who doesn't use an email address from a well-known provider is only creating an account for spam or malicious purposes. Using a custom or temporary email address does not always mean that users are just signing up for spam or malicious purposes. Not all users have email accounts from major providers and some may not be comfortable sharing their real email address.
Some websites use aggressive tactics to force users to disable their adblockers. They may run anti-adblocking scripts that have functionality that can detect whether any ads were loaded or detect well-known adblockers. After detection, they may completely freeze the page and display an overlay that completely covers the content, or restricts access to certain features until the user disables their adblocker, which is extreme.
Most websites are funded by ads, but forcing users to disable their adblockers is highly controversial and is more likely to cause your visitors to leave your website and go to a competitor than get them to disable it. A website that forces users to disable their adblocker suggests that they don't care about their users and that the website is made for ads (MFA). We believe that it is a user's right to choose to block ads from displaying on websites and a website that forces users to disable adblockers is very likely to push people away. That would backfire and make you lose advertising revenue from the lost visitors.
However, if you know that most of your visitors are using an adblocker, then you can consider displaying a short notice, like "We know ads can be annoying, but they are how our website is funded. If you like our site, then consider whitelisting us in your adblocker." This could be at the top of the page. Don't restrict access to features, display constant popups, or block them from viewing the page as this will cause disagreements that can get ugly very quickly, especially if it is a large and popular website.
If you sell products or services on your website, avoid displaying ads for competitors' products and services on that page. This is because your visitors could click on the ads and decide to buy from that competitor instead of buying from you, which will cause you to lose conversions and sales. If you use an advertising network, like Google AdSense, then consider disabling ads related to those products on your site or completely turning off ads on your product pages.
Although links between related sites are better, since lots of links to unrelated sites can make a website look spammy and less professional, avoid linking to direct competitors that use the same keywords and keyphrases as you. Links to other sites are a major factor that search engines use to determine the order the pages are listed and all links to external sites will boost their search engine ranking.
Before linking to an external site, always confirm that the linked site is not a direct competitor. There is a chance that the link will only help to boost their ranking and lower your ranking. Linking to direct competitors does not guarantee a link back. It also doesn't guarantee that they will keep that link on their site.
Although opening a link in a new tab will allow your visitors to click on it without leaving your page and help them stay on your website for longer, opening every link in a new tab is going to irritate your visitors. This is accomplished by adding the target="_blank" to every link. This means that every time your visitors click on a hyperlink on your site, a new tab or window will open. By the time your visitors have browsed through a decent number of pages, they could have far too many open tabs, which will slow down their web browsers and their computers. It also makes a website look unprofessional.
Ideally, your links should only open in a new tab or window when the user needs additional information to complete a task from a separate page or when adding external links to a website.
Some websites disable right-clicking using JavaScript or WordPress plugins. Right-clicking on the mouse will do nothing when visiting websites that have disabled this option. This causes serious usability issues and does nothing more than irritate your users. Most users use the right-click menu for legitimate reasons, like translating and printing the page and can become irritated if this option is not available. This will also make a website look unprofessional and is completely unnecessary. For example, it is unlikely that someone would sign up for an account on a website that disables right-clicking and displays a notice that says 'Copy protected' every time you right-click.
Overall, disabling right-click does nothing to prevent any website content from being copied. Users can access the source code by adding "view-source:" before the page URL in the address bar, disabling JavaScript to disable the code that disables right-clicking, and using the keyboard shortcut 'Ctrl + S' to save the webpage and all of its files in local storage.
The internet has made it very easy for website owners to accidentally reveal their personal information on their website. For your safety, you should never reveal any of your personal information on your website, such as your physical address, bank details, passwords, school, or workplace.
Since most websites are publicly viewable, this information will be accessible to anyone at any time and could be misused by others to steal your identity. For example, other people could sign up for unwanted services and subscriptions in your name that will charge you fees or send you spam or open credit card and bank accounts in your name.
Even posting your email address publicly on your website is not recommended. This will leave you exposed to unsolicited email messages from salespeople (spam). You will also be exposed to phishing emails and viruses that spread through email attachments from malicious users and bots.
Spambots often regularly crawl the internet for email addresses and automatically send spam emails to a large number of email addresses at once. Spambots can capture email addresses by detecting the '@' symbol. Once your email address has been captured by a spambot and added to the spam mail list, it can be difficult to block the sender as some spambots use fake email addresses that vary with every message, so you might find that spam email messages continue even after blocking the sender. Instead, you should set up a contact form on your website. For more information about whether it is safe to post your email address publicly, see this article.
Some websites have background music that automatically plays as soon as the page has fully loaded. This is widely considered bad practice and can be very disruptive to your users, especially if they have their volume turned up high. Instead, you should only play audio after the user interacts with the page or have it muted when the page first loads. For example, Google Chrome changed its autoplay policy in December 2018 and now requires users to interact with a browser item before autoplay starts.
Responsive web design is a technique that automatically adapts webpages to the visitor’s screen size and width without user interaction. This ensures that all the content of webpages displays properly on any device with a single design, including mobile devices, tablets, and computers.
The opposite of responsive design is non-responsive web design. These types of websites use a fixed page layout of around 1000 px that displays well on desktop computers, but has unreadable content that is too large to fit within the viewport display width of a smartphone, forcing mobile users to zoom in to view different elements. Non-responsive design is common with older websites.
Designing websites with a non-responsive design is widely considered bad practice and could lead to visitors that use mobile devices leaving your website, which will result in a loss of website traffic and exclude visitors from using a website. Therefore, always make sure that the design of your website is responsive before publishing it.
Overloading the page by displaying too much text, images, videos, or other content will increase the loading time and is bad for the user experience. The more resources a page needs to load, the slower it will load as it will force the web browser to work harder to download all of that large content. If a page is very overloaded, it will keep loading and loading and could even cause web browsers to freeze, become unresponsive, and crash. This will cause your visitors to eventually get bored of waiting and leave the website.
To avoid this issue, don't place too much content on one page. Although there is no official limit on the number of resources you can put on one page, avoid adding too many large resources at once and don't make blog posts longer than 5000 words. This won't only make the page load slower. It might also cause visitors to get a bit overwhelmed with pages that long, get impatient and stop reading. Therefore, if you have any overloaded pages, you can remove any resources or content you don't need or split them up into multiple pages.
Avoid starting sentences on your webpages with "Research this". Visitors are already doing this on your website. They may have arrived at your website by performing a search on a search engine, which is researching. Asking people to research things suggests that you couldn't be bothered to research the information yourself.
Before publishing a page, always check it for spelling and grammatical errors. Spelling and grammatical errors, or awkward phrasing, can give visitors a bad impression of your website and make it look unprofessional. It will also make it look like you have rushed to publish it without properly proofreading your work.
A website without any images and only text would be quite boring. It is believed that an image is worth 1000 words. Instead of reading a huge chunk of text, visitors can look at images, which can be very engaging and get their attention for longer. This is why you should always include at least some images. Ideally, each page of your website should include at least one image.
Making this mistake can make your visitors wary of entering any sensitive or confidential information into your site. SSL/TLS is used to encrypt communications between two computers communicating over the internet and authenticate the identity of a website. This prevents data from being read by unauthorised users if intercepted. Anyone that sees the sent data will see a mix of random characters that are almost impossible to decrypt.
Without any SSL/TLS, information is sent in plaintext and could be read by someone if intercepted. It will also have a negative impact on SEO as SSL/TLS is confirmed to be a minor Google ranking factor. Most web browsers will make it clearer to visitors as it may show a 'not secure' warning in the address bar, so visitors will be able to easily tell if you secured your site with SSL/TLS. Almost all websites, even websites where users do not enter any information are secured with SSL/TLS.
Although popups are a useful way of getting people's attention and ensuring that they don't miss out on any important notices, too many popups can irritate visitors and delay them from completing the tasks they need to. Avoid popups that reappear after closing them, redirect to other popups, or have no closing button. This is a common mistake that can easily degrade the user experience and even cause visitors to become impatient and leave the website.
Text can be resized by web browsers, but it is best not to make the font size too small in the first place. Poorly designed webpages often have tiny text that is difficult for visitors to read without zooming in. If it is too small to read, visitors might skip through, which can also make a website professional. Therefore, always make sure that the text on your website is large enough to read, but also not too large as this can make your website harder to navigate.
When first starting a website, a common mistake that people make is not providing much detailed information about its purpose, how to use it, or providing any answers to some frequently asked questions. Not providing enough detailed information about a website can leave visitors confused and won't allow your visitors to get to know your website very well.
A directory is an area on a website that contains other files and keeps them organised. It is like a document folder. A common mistake that website owners will make is not organising the webpages, images, and other files into different directories and flooding the root directory (the top-level directory that contains the homepage) with all sorts of files. Instead, you should set up directories to make your webpages, images, and other files easier to find. If you don't do this, the webpages and other files will build up into the root directory and it will take much longer to organise all of those files into different directories than if you only had a few unorganised files.
Not getting a domain name when starting a website is a common thing that a lot of website owners regret. Website owners often use a free subdomain name from a web host, a free domain name with a rare extension, or don't use a domain name at all and just allow people to access a website by its IP address. Although it is possible to have a website without buying a domain name, it is not recommended for the long run or for anything serious.
The risk of using a free subdomain name or a free domain name is that you could lose it due to the free web host closing down or the free domain provider suspending the registration of your free domain name (which they can do at any time as you don't own the rights to the domain name). This will cause a permanent URL change without a redirect, causing all bookmarked links, external links, and indexed URLs to become broken.
There have been cases where website owners have delayed buying a domain name and found out that someone has registered it before them. This can be very frustrating, especially if they had a good idea for a domain name. Therefore, if you have an idea for a website and are sure of the URL you want people to see when they access it, you should register a domain name and reserve it for the future to prevent someone else from registering it before you. For more information about whether you can have a website without buying a domain name, see this article.
If so, it is important that you tell me as soon as possible on this page.
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