Have you ever been on a blind-date and found the individual to be nice, easy going, and all-around polite–but you just can’t help but think, “MAN! THEY’RE UGLY!!” Of course, mama always taught it’s what is inside that counts. Well, we found some recent research by 1and1 hosting (article at Expand2Web & another at 1and1) that shows beauty and design are important when it comes to small business websites. They give some pretty eye-opening stats based on their survey of US consumers:
- 35% of consumers decide not to purchase, if a website is poor quality
- 45% of consumers believe that a bad small business website is worse than having no website at all
- 30% of consumers surveyed believe small business websites often lack essential features
- 28% found that the small business websites they use are “unimpressive”
- 29% report frequently finding errors such as typos or broken URLs
![FiddlerStudios-bad-websites-infographic[1]](https://wpxpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/FiddlerStudios-bad-websites-infographic1.png)
This has been a tough concept to explain to potential customers. It’s easy to talk about how their search engine optimization is terrible or the shopping cart doesn’t work effectively. But to come right out and tell them their website is ugly, we sometimes feel like we are kicking their dog. Many small-businesses that have been around for 30+ years, finally bit the bullet 10+ years ago and invested in a website. Now Fiddler Online comes along and tells them not only is it not bringing in traffic—but the traffic that does land on the site runs straight to their competitor, because it’s a website designed in the 90’s.
The above data is important because each business really does need to revamp their website every 3-6 years or else you will continue to lose credibility from the design of your website. The reality is, each small-business really does need a strong web consultant (can you guess who?). The internet is changing too rapidly to just let your nephew do an update every 10 years whenever he has a break from his video games.
To really discover how effective your website is, let wpXPRESS do a website analysis for FREE. Because it’s important that you know just how ugly your business may be to those potential customers.
“45% of consumers believe that a bad small business website is worse than having no website at all” Couldn’t agree more! There are so many times where I try and search for a local business and land on their site and it’s an absolute disaster. There are some people that try hard to update content and all that. You can tell they actually care, but then there are people who just bought an exact match domain and threw up on the keyboard when they made their site. … I hate those.