Top 9 website problems (and how to fix them)

This article addresses nine common-yet-critical website issues you may encounter and offers solutions on how to fix them.

You'll walk away understanding how these problems arise, ways to solve them, and tools to proactively improve your website—leading to higher conversion rates, more customer satisfaction, and fortified trust in your brand.

9 common website problems and how to solve them

Your website's functionality and presentation determine how long visitors stay to explore your product or service (also referred to as session duration), if they come back, convert, and share positive word-of-mouth with others. 

But toss in a 404 error page, a complicated user journey, slow loading times, and mobile incompatibility—and user satisfaction will plummet.

Knowing how to identify problems quickly, troubleshoot potential solutions, and implement preventative measures helps you win over new users, set your business apart from the competition, and improve overall satisfaction.

Let's dive into the most common website issues you may encounter, how they impact users, and ways to effectively fix them:

1. High exit rates

One of the most frequent website problems businesses experience is a high exit rate. A high exit rate can mean:

• Visitors find your website difficult to use 

• The website is poorly designed

• The content isn't relevant or valuable to the target audience

These factors lead to discouraging consequences like decreasing conversion rates, a low marketing ROI, inaccurate website data, and a poor user experience.

Because high exit rates stem from a myriad of problems at any point in the user journey, it's critical to identify where users are getting frustrated and why they're leaving without converting—before trying to execute a solution. Making too many assumptions too quickly can cost your business time and money—and may not actually fix the problem for the user.

How to improve high exit rates:

• Employ funnel analytics: use website funnel analysis to map the flow of website visitors, identify high-exit pages, and reroute traffic to pages with higher conversion rates

• Monitor your website: continuously review your website's overall performance, function, security, and usability with website monitoring to proactively identify problem pages

• Ask for user input: ask users for feedback through questionnaires and surveys while they’re on your website, engaging with the page content or features

• Observe user behavior: see how users interact with your website and identify opportunities for improvement with usability tests using heatmaps and recordings

• Collaborate with customer support: review service tickets to gather information about common issues that users report

2. Low search ranking

Search engine optimization (SEO) allows search engines to correctly identify your content, resulting in a higher search engine results page (SERP) ranking, increased web traffic, and higher-quality leads. 

Poor SEO, however, can lower your SERP ranking, making it difficult for users to find your website. For example, one study found that: 

1. The #1 position on Google SERPs gets 34% of all website traffic

2. Improving your page's SERP ranking from #2 to #1 will double website traffic

3. The #1 search result receives the same amount of user traffic as #2, #3, #4, and #5 combined

In other words: users aren't just going to come out of nowhere. SEO is crucial in attracting users to your website by ensuring it's visible in the top position on the SERP. 

How to troubleshoot SEO website issues:

• Maximize keywords: use tools like Semrush's keyword generator to optimize your text in content headers, meta tags, and URLs to improve search engine rankings and make it easy for new users to understand what your website’s about

• Ensure your website is indexed: check if your website has been indexed with a URL Inspection tool, as some new websites can take up to six months to appear on SERPs

• Increase content publication: regularly publishing high-quality, authoritative content helps you attract new users, expand organic website traffic, build brand trust, and increase referrals

3. Poor web design

UX, UI, web, and graphic design work together to shape the final design of a website. Although each field has distinct responsibilities, they each share the end-goal of providing users with an enjoyable and intuitive experience.

A good website design needs to be functional and aesthetically pleasing, prompting users to stick around for longer. A website's design also determines how a user interprets a brand's credibility and is key to generating a positive first impression.

But a bad website design causes user frustration, leading to high exit rates, lower conversions, and decreased brand credibility.

How to improve your web design:

• Conduct user research: identify user pain points, needs, and motivations by conducting user research through customer interviews or focus groups

• Use high-quality images: avoid pixelated images using tools like Canva, PhotoShop, or Kranken.io to adjust and compress images, without losing quality

• Streamline site navigation: guide visitors through your site and connect them to the most relevant pages by including easy-to-use navigation bars, search functions, and calls to action (CTAs) on every page

• Apply consistent style: choose consistent design styles, like color schemes, fonts, and button sizes, to reduce user distraction and curate an aesthetically pleasing experience

4. Security breaches

A breach in your website's security can cause several problems, including a PR nightmare that could irreversibly damage your users' trust in your brand. And don't assume that hackers only go after bigger businesses; in fact, the opposite is often true, as smaller businesses tend to de-prioritize website security. 

An unsafe website puts users at risk of having personal information stolen—their names, addresses, and credit card numbers could be used for identity theft and financial fraud. Security vulnerabilities could also allow hackers to infect user devices with malware or spam, causing device damage and compromising privacy.

How to prevent security breaches: 

• Monitor your website's security: utilize services like Cloudflare, SiteLock, or Sucuri to continuously scan your website for issues, identify threats, and quickly resolve breaches

• Keep your codebase up to date: regularly update all plug-ins, APIs, and scripts to the latest versions to prevent unauthorized access

• Implement HTTPS protocol: use HTTPS (not HTTP) to ensure that any data transferred between your site and users is encrypted. This is especially important if your website requests personal information from visitors, like shipping addresses, credit card numbers, or phone numbers.

• Get an SSL certificate: an SSL certificate validates your website's identity, enables a protected, encrypted connection to keep all user transactions safe, and improves website location on the SERP

5. Broken pages and redirects

There is little more frustrating (and confusing) for a user than clicking on a link or button that sends them to a 404 error page. 

In addition to increasing the probability of a user abandoning your website, Google and other search engine algorithms also penalize websites with too many broken pages, dysfunctional links, and redirects. This lowers your website's SERP ranking, resulting in fewer visitors.

How to troubleshoot broken pages and redirects:

• Crawl your website: use website monitoring tools to identify broken pages and website bugs, before too many users stumble upon them

• Continuously check for broken links: use tools like Dead Link Checker or Google Search Console to periodically check your website for dysfunctional links

• Optimize your 404 error pages: instead of the generic ‘page not found’ text, offer users problem-solving information, such as links to FAQs, similar content pages, or a website search bar

• Insert 301 redirects: if you move or delete a page, set up a 301 redirect link to a relevant, working page on your website. This ensures users avoid 404 error pages and still land on a page relevant to their original query.

6. Slow loading time

An estimated 40% of consumers leave a website if it doesn't load within three seconds. Losing visitors as a result of slow loading time also increases your website's bounce rate—which, similar to broken pages and redirects, hurts your search engine rankings. 

Slow loading time can also make your website appear unprofessional to users, leading to decreased brand credibility.

How to improve website loading time:

• Test your load time: use PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix to monitor your website's performance speed

• Reduce image size: use tools like TinyImage, Compressor.io, or Optimole to compress the images on your site, without losing quality

• Use a caching plug-in: plug-ins like W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache store a static version of your website, making it load faster for recurring users

• Use external files: compress critical CSS, HTML, and Javascript documents by setting up CSS and JavaScript in external files

• Use system fonts: avoid custom web fonts, which take up significant space on your website. Instead choose system fonts like Arial, Verdana, and Helvetica.

7. Lack of contact information

Clearly detailing contact information on your website legitimizes your business and builds brand trust by providing a transparent way for users to contact you with questions or feedback. 

While larger monolith businesses like Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft are notoriously bad at providing a direct route to human contact, small- and medium-sized businesses may lose important leads by not making it clear how to get in touch.

How to make contact information more accessible:

• Set up a contact page: create an easy-to-find page on your website that includes a contact form, your business phone number, and an email address

• Integrate a live chat: increase user convenience by offering answers to their questions in real-time with software tools like Intercom, Hubspot, and LiveChat, without them needing to wait on the phone or send an email

• Include social media links: link your social media accounts to your website to further legitimize your business and offer additional routes for users to connect with you

8. Mobile incompatibility

Figures show that in 2023, there are about 6.9 billion smartphone users worldwide, meaning 86% of the world’s population owns a smartphone. Additionally, experts believe that 72% of all internet users will be accessing web pages via a smartphone by 2025, meaning that a significant amount of your website traffic will be coming via mobile devices—either now or in the future.

That’s why you need to ensure your website works as smoothly on mobile as it does on desktop. In addition to being unfriendly to users, mobile incompatibility can lead to higher bounce rates, slow loading times, and low search rankings.

Imagine you're a UI designer for a product experience insights platform. Recently, the user research team finds that customers are having difficulty using the mobile version of your company's website, so you're now working with the UX and devs team to rework the website's format, layout, and visual aesthetics.

But how can you test your new design on all the different types of phones, while still ensuring it’s mobile-friendly on laptops, desktops, and tablets?

How to ensure your site is mobile-friendly:

• Use responsive website design: apply a responsive design framework when building and updating your site to ensure it adapts to any screen size or format from the start. Then, double-check your website's responsiveness with tools like Test Sigma, Lambda Test, or Responsinator.

• Test mobile friendliness: use tools like Google's Mobile-Friendly Test or Bing's Mobile Friendliness Test Tool to identify mobile incompatibility issues and troubleshoot solutions

• Review touchscreen navigation: review your website's UI design to ensure tap targets like buttons and links are large enough for users to find and easily click with their fingers

9. Clunky sign-up processes

Even a couple of extra steps in a registration form can quickly turn users away from your site. In fact, studies find that more than 85% of users feel bothered when they have to create a new account on a website. Those who do may go on to sign up forget their login credentials or fail to validate their email address. Adding social sign-up options on your website eliminates this issue. 

How to optimize the sign-up process: 

• Watch recordings: review user recordings first to confirm users are struggling with the sign-up process—and then to pinpoint the specific step causing difficulty

• Use a social media plug-in: add your website host's social media login plug-in for popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, or Google

• Use customer identity solution integrations: use social APIs like LoginRadius, OneLogin, and OneAll Social Login to integrate your website log-in with over 30 social networks and customize the user log-in journey

Prioritize users when evaluating website problems 

Identifying and fixing website problems can feel overwhelming, especially with the vast array of tools and solutions available. But it’s a manageable and effective process, as long as you continuously prioritize what really matters: the user. 

By keeping users at the center of your decision process, you ensure your website meets their needs and delivers a positive experience. This, in turn, drives engagement, loyalty, word-of-mouth, and conversions, allowing your business to grow and stay competitive.