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Last updated on April 18th, 2024 at 10:55 am
If you’re a website owner, you know how frustrating it can be when your site breaks. Whether it’s an error message or something more serious like a security breach. These website problems can be difficult to resolve without any technical knowledge. In this post, we’ll look at some common website problems and their solutions so that you’ll know exactly what to do if your site goes down!
Broken links
If you have broken links on your website, the problem is two-fold:
- Broken links can cause visitors to leave your site. If a visitor clicks on an internal link and gets an error message like “page not found” or “404 Error,” they may lose trust in your site or even leave entirely. This is especially true if it happens over and over again.
- Broken links can make it hard for visitors to find information on your website. Search engines such as Google use link signals as one way of determining how relevant certain pages are to a user’s search query (think about it this way: if all of the related topics are linked together properly, then Google knows that they’re all related). However, if there are broken links on the page (or throughout the website), then each individual page becomes less relevant because it doesn’t fit into its own ecosystem very well anymore—and this could impact its SEO performance negatively!
Contact your SEO or website dev and ask them to sort it out ASAP! If you prefer to do it yourself, scan your site for broken links with a tool such as Screaming Frog. Work on fixing the broken links by redirecting them, updating them or deleting them.
Pages that take too long to load
Site speed is a common problem that can be solved! A page that takes too long to load means a user has to wait for their browser to load the resources needed to display the content. If you have a lot of images or other multimedia elements on your website, this can slow down loading times significantly.
There are a few ways you can speed up your website’s loading times:
- Reduce the file size of images (by resizing and optimizing them)
- Use fewer plugins in WordPress (if possible)
- Move to a better hosting server
Mobile-unfriendly pages
Mobile-friendly websites are an important part of Google’s search algorithm, and they’re also a good way to improve your site’s user experience (UX). A website that’s not optimized for mobile can hurt your ranking and drive away visitors.
If your website is not mobile-friendly, I suggest you get it optimized as soon as possible! A big majority of web surfers are using their phones. If your website doesn’t work well on mobile devices, it looks bad for business.
- A mobile-friendly website helps you rank better. Mobile-friendly sites are more likely to show up in the top 10 results on Google searches than non-mobile-friendly ones. That means that if someone searches for something on their phones or tablets, it’s more likely that they’ll see your site if it’s mobile-friendly than if it isn’t.
Outdated plugins or theme
You may think that the WordPress plugins and themes you use on your website are keeping everything in working order, but they may actually be causing common website problems. If you’re using an outdated version of a plugin or theme, it can cause all kinds of issues for your site. These include security vulnerabilities, broken functionality, slow loading times and more!
The first step to solving this problem is checking for any outdated plugins or themes on your site by visiting the Plugins menu in WordPress. Here you can see all of the plugins installed on your website—if any have been abandoned by their developers (and therefore not updated with new features), there will be no option to update. You should check if there are any updates available for these plugins by clicking on Update.
If your plugins do need updating then follow these steps: First make a backup of your website. Next, make sure that the plugin is compatible with your version of WordPress. You can check by clicking the “View details” option to see when it was last updated.
Security issues
Security issues are important to think about not only for your business but also for the people who use your site. If you have security problems on your site, it can be dangerous for users and customers alike. Rather prevent a hacked website & malware by securing your site. Here are a few tips to keep your website secure:
- Make sure all of the software on your site is up-to-date and patched.
- Ensure you have an active SSL certificate
- Use strong passwords for all accounts that have access to the server (especially root). Don’t use words like ‘Admin’ or make them easy to guess by using numbers in place of letters as well as special characters; this will help prevent brute force attacks by hackers trying millions of combinations at once!
No SEO Optimization
Keep in mind that SEO is an ongoing process. You can’t just optimize your site, then forget about it and expect things to stay the same forever. If you want your content to rank higher and get more traffic, then you need to keep working on SEO optimization by adding new content, updating existing pages and making sure that Google indexes all links quickly.
Google updates its algorithms constantly, so there will always be something new for webmasters to learn about optimizing their sites for search engines.
Critical Errors and WordPress errors
There’s nothing worse than being emailed or phoned by a customer and being told, your website is broken! Over time, website plugins and themes receive regular updates. However, some people tend to forget that WordPress needs to stay updated too! If your website theme hasn’t been updated in years, and there’s a big WordPress update or changes on your hosting server, you may get the dreaded “There has been a critical error on your WordPress site” error.
Don’t panic! This can usually be solved by reverting any recent changes. This is why it’s so important to make backups of your site. Recently (October 2022), there was an automatic PHP 8.0 upgrade that rolled out on Xneelo servers which caused outdated websites to break. To fix this, you need to temporarily change to the old PHP version, and update your WordPress, website theme and all plugins.
Conclusion: How to Solve Common Website Problems
There are a few common website problems that can be solved without much hassle. These include things like slow loading times, broken links and errors which can cause your visitors to leave in droves or even worse, never return at all!
If you don’t fully understand how websites work and what you’re doing, it’s best you contact an expert. Reach out to us for all your website maintenance needs. And if we can’t help you, we will let you know! We won’t mess around and break things further. 😅