So, you opened your doors to the public and your website went online. You made your first sale, and later that night you celebrated over wine with your loved ones. It’s official. You now own and operate a business. Good for you! Exciting times!

Except, here’s the thing: two weeks later, you’ve seen hardly a soul in your shop, and sales, well, let’s just say you haven’t been raking it in. What gives? Before you panic about that well-thought out business plan of yours and second guess the whole enterprise, take a moment to consider your business’s web presence. It’s more important now than ever before. In fact, problems with your website can reverberate across your entire business. So, with that in mind, read on to learn about common website disasters you might face and how to avoid them.

Drowning in words. Consumers today are a busy and overscheduled lot. They value efficiency anywhere they can find it, and their patience for time-wasting messes is at an all-time low. Don’t let your website be one of those messes. Accomplish this by avoiding long blokes of text that might overwhelming visitors to your site. Instead, you want to use precise and succinct language to describe your products or services. Couple this with carefully chosen images and the right plugins and you’ll find you can accurately communicate relevant information without testing the attention spans of today’s consumers.

No mobile support. Sit down in a coffee shop on any given day and tell us what you see. Sure, you’ll see a few people working on laptops, but guess what, right next to those laptops you’ll find smartphones. And all those people not on their laptops? They have smartphones in their hands. An estimated 60% of web traffic now takes place on mobile devices. Not only is it ill-advised today to drag your feet on supporting mobile, it is business suicide. There are no excuses anymore. Make your website mobile-friendly now.

Slow load times. Seriously, who doesn’t hate this? Research suggests you have 3-5 seconds to get something meaningful to load on your pages before consumers move on. That’s not a whole lot of time, so you better make sure you take the necessary steps to ensure success. How? Avoid overly large image sizes. Eliminate unnecessary animations.  Don’t embed music or videos, and especially not on autoplay. Ultimately, do your best to keep the total file size of a given page under 30 kilobytes.

Pop-ups. We all hate them. Yes, it’s one way your site makes money, and we get that. However, if you have to use them, you need to be strategic. Don’t allow pop-ups to arise as soon as your webpage loads. That’s a surefire way to annoy and deter visitors before they’ve had a chance to make any judgments about your business. Rather, give visitors a minute before a pop-up pops up, or wait until they have scrolled down a bit. This allows them to become invested in your site and its content, and therefore, less likely to leave once pop-ups hit them.

Web security. Malware, hacking, DDoS attacks: these things are all too common in today’s world. The consequences of these unfortunate online realities can range from a slow site to an offline site to stolen user information like credit card numbers and addresses. None of this makes for happy customers. In fact, it’s a recipe for lost business. Why wouldn’t consumers take their money to companies they trust to protect their information and provide a reliable online user experience? In other words, make sure you invest in a quality software solution like SiteLock that will protect your site and your business from hacks, malware, and DDoS attacks.

There you have it. If your business is struggling, look to your web presence before you give up hope. Following the five steps above will help you boost web traffic, spread the word about what your business offers, and ultimately bring in more business.