Four Common Website Problems That Could Be Costing You Customers
I've seen all four of these types of websites, and a recent article from Koto really captured some of the biggest ways a website can quietly work against a business. Koto, a branding agency, described four common website pitfalls as "The Ghost Town," "The Maze," "The Identity Crisis," and "The Mobile Afterthought." I thought the list was worth expanding on because these aren't simply design problems. Each one can affect how trustworthy your business appears, how easily people find the information they're looking for, and whether they ultimately decide to contact you or buy from you.
A website doesn't have to be complicated to be effective, but it does need to accomplish a few basic things well. It should accurately represent your business, make important information easy to find, look and sound like the brand people encountered elsewhere, and provide a good experience regardless of what device they're using. When those things start to break down, you can lose potential customers without ever realizing your website was part of the reason.
Four Common Website Problems
The Ghost Town: Your Website Looks Abandoned
The first problem Koto identifies is what they call "The Ghost Town," and this is probably one of the easiest problems for a business owner to overlook. A website might have been completely professional when it was launched, but over time, small pieces of outdated information begin to accumulate. A blog still has its last article from 2022, a "Meet the Team" page contains photos of employees who left years ago, or a banner advertises a promotion that expired months ago. None of these things necessarily mean the business is inactive, but that's not necessarily what a visitor sees.
When someone encounters outdated information, they have to make a judgment about what they can trust. If a promotion is expired, should they assume the other information is current? If the team page is several years old, is the company still operating the way the website says it is? If there hasn't been any visible activity since 2022, is this a business that's actively serving customers or one that's slowly winding down? Visitors generally won't stop to investigate those questions. They'll simply form an impression and move on.
That can be particularly damaging for small and local businesses because your website is often part of the process someone uses to decide whether you're worth contacting. A potential customer may find you through Google, check your website, and use the information there to decide whether you're legitimate and active. If the site gives them reasons to doubt either of those things, you have introduced uncertainty into a decision that didn't need to be difficult in the first place.
There is also an SEO consideration, although it is worth being precise about it. An old blog post isn't inherently bad for SEO simply because it is old, and Google isn't going to penalize your website because you haven't published an article recently. However, outdated information can make your site less useful to searchers, particularly when you're discussing things that change over time. Keeping important information current helps ensure that both search engines and visitors are seeing an accurate representation of your business.
The solution isn't to turn your website into a news publication that requires constant updates. In fact, a business that doesn't have anything meaningful to publish every week is better off not forcing a weekly blog. The more important task is periodically reviewing the information that already exists. Make sure your services are current, your team information is accurate, your hours and contact information are correct, and temporary promotions don't linger indefinitely. Your website doesn't need to look constantly active; it needs to look cared for.
The Maze: Your Information Is There, But Nobody Can Find It
"The Maze" is a different kind of problem because the website may actually contain everything a customer needs. The issue is that the customer can't figure out where it is. I've seen websites with excellent service descriptions, detailed FAQs, strong portfolios, and useful information that still create a frustrating experience because the navigation and structure make visitors work too hard to find any of it.
This is where information architecture becomes important. Your website should make sense to someone who has never seen it before, not just to the person who built it or the business owner who has been looking at the same pages for years. Visitors shouldn't have to understand your internal organization in order to understand your website. They should be able to quickly determine what you do, whether you're a good fit for them, how your services work, and what they should do next.
This becomes especially important for service businesses. If someone is searching for a particular service and can't find it in your navigation, they aren't necessarily going to explore every page until they discover it. They may simply assume you don't offer it. The same thing happens when important information is buried several clicks deep or when calls to action are inconsistent. If you're asking someone to request a quote, schedule an appointment, make a purchase, or contact you, the path to doing that should be obvious.
Good website navigation isn't about giving visitors as many options as possible. In many cases, it means making fewer options clearer. Your navigation should reflect the questions your customers actually have rather than simply reproducing the way your business is organized internally. Someone doesn't necessarily care which department handles a particular service; they care whether you offer it and how they can get started.
This also matters for SEO because a well-structured website helps search engines understand the relationships between your pages. Internal links, clear page hierarchies, descriptive navigation, and logical content organization all contribute to making a site easier for search engines to crawl and understand. More importantly, the same structure that helps search engines understand your site usually makes it easier for actual people to use.
A website should not require someone to learn how it works before they can use it. If visitors have to hunt for basic information, the problem isn't that they aren't looking hard enough. The website needs to make the information easier to find.
The Identity Crisis: Your Website Doesn't Look Like Your Business
The third problem is what Koto calls "The Identity Crisis," and this is where website design and branding become particularly important. A business can have a strong brand in one place and then completely lose it somewhere else. Maybe the company's Instagram is friendly, colorful, and full of personality while the website is filled with stiff corporate language. Maybe the physical location has a carefully developed visual identity while the website looks like a generic template from 2015. Or perhaps the logo, colors, photography, typography, and writing style all seem to come from different businesses.
None of those individual problems necessarily make a website unusable, but together they create a disconnect. People should feel like they're interacting with the same business whether they find you through Google, Instagram, a business card, a physical storefront, or your website. When those experiences don't match, the brand can feel less established and less authentic than it actually is.
This is one reason branding is much more than creating a logo. A logo is an important part of your identity, but it doesn't carry the entire personality of a business. Typography, colors, photography, layout, writing style, and even the way information is organized contribute to how people perceive the brand. Your website is one of the places where all of those elements have to work together.
This is particularly important for small businesses because your website may be one of the first substantial interactions someone has with your brand. Someone might discover your business through a social media post that feels personable and approachable, click through to your website, and suddenly encounter a completely different voice. That disconnect can make the business feel less trustworthy, even if the actual products or services are excellent.
Fixing an identity crisis doesn't necessarily mean starting over with a complete rebrand. Sometimes the brand is already working; the website simply hasn't caught up. Bringing the typography, colors, photography, messaging, and overall visual style into alignment can make the entire business feel more consistent without changing what already makes it recognizable.
Your website should feel like a natural extension of your brand rather than a separate place where your brand happens to exist.
The Mobile Afterthought: Your Website Works, But Not on a Phone
The fourth problem is treating mobile as an afterthought. For many businesses, this is particularly easy to do because websites are often designed and reviewed on a desktop computer. The business owner approves the design on a large monitor, the website looks good, and the project is considered finished. Meanwhile, a significant portion of the people actually visiting the website are experiencing it on a screen that is a fraction of the size.
A mobile-friendly website needs to be more than technically responsive. It needs to be comfortable to use on a phone. Text should be readable without zooming, buttons should be large enough to tap easily, navigation should be understandable, forms should work properly, and important information shouldn't become buried under unnecessary scrolling. A website can technically resize itself to fit a phone and still provide a frustrating experience.
This matters especially for local businesses. Someone searching for a restaurant, contractor, photographer, church, or other service provider may be doing so from their phone while they're already out and about. They might be trying to find your phone number, check your hours, look at your services, get directions, or submit a contact form. If the website makes those tasks difficult, there is very little reason for them to fight through the experience.
Mobile performance also matters because phones are often operating on less reliable connections and less powerful hardware than a desktop computer. Large images, unnecessary scripts, complicated animations, and poorly optimized pages can make a site feel dramatically slower on a phone than it does on the computer where it was built.
The best way to think about this is to stop treating mobile as a smaller version of the desktop website. It is its own experience. The information and functionality may be the same, but the way people interact with it is different. Designing for that experience from the beginning is much more effective than building the desktop site first and trying to make it work afterward.
A poor mobile experience is a little like having a storefront with a door that's difficult to open. Someone might eventually get inside, but you've created an unnecessary obstacle between them and your business.
What These Problems Are Really Costing Your Business
What I like about Koto's four examples is that none of them require a website to be completely broken. A website can technically function perfectly and still be doing a poor job for the business behind it. It can be neglected without being offline, confusing without being broken, disconnected from the brand without having an obvious design error, and frustrating on mobile while looking completely fine on a desktop computer.
That's what makes these problems easy to overlook. Businesses tend to think about their website when they're building it, launching it, or redesigning it, while customers experience it as one small part of a much larger decision. Someone finds you through Google, visits your website, looks at your services, tries to determine whether you're a good fit, and decides whether they trust you enough to take the next step.
Every bit of unnecessary friction makes that decision harder.
The goal isn't to create the most technically impressive website possible. It is to create one that gives people confidence in your business, helps them find the information they need, accurately represents who you are, and makes it easy to move forward.
That's why I think these four questions are worth asking about any business website: Is everything current? Can people find what they need? Does the website actually look and sound like our brand? And does it work well on a phone?
If the answer to any of those questions is no, you may have found a problem that is costing you more customers than you realize.
