After 16 years and over 100 websites, I’ve stopped being surprised by what I find when a new client sends me their current site. The same problems show up over and over — on sites built by agencies, by freelancers, by the business owner themselves, and sometimes by designers who really should have known better. None of these mistakes are catastrophic on their own. But they compound. A site with all five has a serious problem: it’s slow, hard to navigate, invisible to search engines, and written for the wrong audience. That combination is why businesses lose clients they never knew they had. Here’s what I actually find, and what I do about it.
Mistake 1: The Logo Is Too Big and the Nav Has Too Many Links
I’m combining these because they almost always show up together, and they come from the same root cause: the business owner designed the site with themselves in mind instead of their visitor. I hear “make the logo bigger” on nearly every project. I understand the instinct — it’s your brand, you’re proud of it, you want it prominent. But visitors don’t come to your website to admire your logo. They come to figure out if you can solve their problem. A logo that dominates the header is taking up real estate that should be doing something useful. Your logo should be identifiable, not dominant. The header exists to orient the visitor and give them somewhere to go — not to display your brand assets. The navigation problem is related. I regularly see primary navs with eight, ten, sometimes twelve links across the top — every page the business has ever created given equal weight. When everything is a priority, nothing is. Visitors scan the nav to decide if they’re in the right place. A cluttered nav sends the signal that the site was organized for the business’s convenience, not theirs. The fix: primary navigation should have five to seven items maximum. Anything beyond that gets organized into a dropdown or mega menu. Services with multiple sub-pages, for example, belong under a single “Services” parent with a clean dropdown — not seven separate top-level links competing for the same attention.
Mistake 2: The Content Is Written About the Business, Not for the Visitor
This is the most common content problem I see, and it’s also the hardest to get clients to fix because it requires them to think about their business from the outside in. Most website copy reads like a company history. “We were founded in 2003 with a vision to deliver excellence…” “Our team of dedicated professionals is committed to…” “With over 20 years of industry experience…” None of that answers the question a visitor actually has when they land on your site: “Can you solve my specific problem?” Search engines have the same question. Google is trying to match your page to a search query. If your homepage is a narrative about your company’s history and values, Google doesn’t know who to send there. If your homepage clearly states what you do, who you do it for, and what problem you solve, Google can match it to the people searching for exactly that. The fix is a reframe. Instead of “We are a full-service law firm with 30 years of experience,” the page leads with what the client needs: “You need a lawyer who understands your industry and returns calls. Here’s how we work.” Same facts, different orientation. One is about the firm, one is about the client’s situation. It’s a subtle shift that changes everything about how a page performs — both with visitors and with search engines.
Mistake 3: The Images Are 4MB Files Straight Off a Camera
This one is simple and fixable in an afternoon, but I still find it on a significant percentage of sites I audit. Someone took great photos, exported them directly from their camera or phone, and uploaded them to the website. A single hero image at full resolution can be 6, 8, even 12MB. A page with five of those images is asking every visitor to download 40MB of data before they can see anything. The result shows up clearly in PageSpeed scores: First Contentful Paint over 5 seconds, Largest Contentful Paint pushing 10 seconds on mobile. That’s not a minor inconvenience — Google’s research consistently shows that over half of mobile visitors leave a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load. The fix: every image on a professional website should be exported at the appropriate display size, compressed to a modern format like WebP, and served at the resolution it actually renders at — not the resolution it was photographed at. A hero image that displays at 1400px wide doesn’t need to be a 4000px file. Properly optimized, that same image can go from 8MB to under 200KB with no visible quality loss. I use Imagify on every site I build. It handles compression automatically on upload and converts to WebP where supported. It’s one of the highest-impact, lowest-effort performance fixes available.
Mistake 4: The Mobile Experience Was an Afterthought
Over 60% of web traffic is now mobile. That number has been climbing for a decade. And yet I regularly inherit sites where it’s obvious the designer built for a 1440px desktop screen and then glanced at mobile at the end to make sure it didn’t completely fall apart. The result is a mobile experience that technically “works” — nothing is broken — but was clearly not designed. Text that’s too small to read without pinching. Buttons positioned where thumbs can’t reach them. Sections with five-column grids that collapse into an unreadable stack. Hero sections with desktop-sized headlines that run off the screen. The underlying problem is design philosophy. A site designed desktop-first requires the designer to then go back and figure out how each section degrades at smaller sizes. A site designed with mobile in mind from the start doesn’t have that problem — the mobile experience is intentional, not remediated. The fix isn’t just making things smaller. It’s rethinking what each section needs to communicate at mobile size and making deliberate decisions about what stays, what collapses, and what gets reorganized. Navigation that works fine at desktop with seven items across needs a hamburger menu on mobile with a clean, accessible dropdown. A three-column services grid becomes a single-column list. The content hierarchy is the same; the presentation adapts. I design and test on mobile throughout the build, not at the end. It takes more time upfront and saves significant rework later.
Mistake 5: No Heading Hierarchy and Missing Image Alt Text
Again combining two because they’re both SEO fundamentals that I almost never see done correctly on sites that weren’t professionally built with SEO in mind. Heading hierarchy first. Every page should have one H1 — the primary topic of the page, the thing Google uses to understand what this page is about. Below that, H2s organize the major sections. H3s break down subsections within those. Most sites I audit either have no H1 at all, have three or four H1s on the same page, or use headings purely for visual styling — making something an H2 because it looks bigger, not because it’s a structural section header. Google reads heading structure as an outline of your page’s content. A page with a clear H1, logical H2s, and appropriately nested H3s is telling Google exactly what it’s about and how it’s organized. A page with no heading structure, or with headings used randomly for visual effect, gives Google nothing useful to work with. Image alt text is the other consistent miss. Alt text serves two purposes: it tells screen readers what an image contains (accessibility), and it tells search engines what an image depicts (SEO). Most sites I audit have either no alt text at all, or alt text that’s just the image filename (“photo-1234.jpg”) or the business name repeated on every image. The fix is straightforward: every image gets a descriptive alt text that explains what’s in the image in plain language. A photo of a completed construction project becomes “custom home build completed in Greenville SC” rather than “image1.jpg.” That’s indexable, useful, and accessible. <These aren’t advanced SEO tactics. They’re the baseline. A site without them isn’t competing — it’s just invisible.
The Pattern Behind All Five
Looking at these five mistakes together, the common thread is the same: someone built the site for the wrong audience. The oversized logo is for the business owner, not the visitor. The company-story copy is for the business owner, not the prospect. The un-optimized images are the result of not thinking about the person downloading them on a phone. The desktop-only design ignores how most visitors actually arrive. The missing SEO structure means the page was built to look right in a browser, not to be understood by the systems that send people there. Good web design is the discipline of making those decisions from the visitor’s perspective first. It sounds obvious. It’s less common than it should be. If you’re reading this list and recognizing your own site, that’s useful information. Some of these are quick fixes you can make yourself. Others — a content rewrite, a mobile redesign, a proper SEO audit — are worth doing with someone who’s fixed them a hundred times before.
FAQ: Common Website Problems
What are the most common website mistakes small businesses make?
The most consistent problems I find are oversized logos and cluttered navigation, content written about the company rather than the client’s problem, unoptimized images slowing the site down, mobile layouts that were clearly afterthoughts, and missing SEO fundamentals like heading structure and image alt text. None of these are unusual — they show up on the majority of sites I audit, including sites built by professional designers who just didn’t prioritize the right things.
How do I know if my website has these problems?
Run your URL through Google PageSpeed Insights (free) for speed and mobile issues. Use a browser’s built-in developer tools to inspect your heading structure — there should be exactly one H1 per page. Check your images’ file sizes by right-clicking and viewing properties — anything over 300KB on a web page is worth compressing. For content and navigation, ask someone unfamiliar with your business to spend 30 seconds on your homepage and tell you what you do. If they can’t, the content isn’t working.
Can I fix these website mistakes myself?
Some of them, yes. Image optimization can be handled with a WordPress plugin like Imagify or Smush — run it on your existing images and set it to compress automatically on upload going forward. Alt text can be added through your media library. Navigation cleanup is a settings change in your CMS. Content rewrites and mobile design issues are harder to do yourself because they require stepping outside how you see your own business — which is genuinely difficult when you’re inside it every day.
How much does it cost to fix a website that has these problems?
It depends on how many problems exist and how deep they go. Surface-level fixes — image optimization, alt text, meta tags — can often be done in a few hours. A content rewrite and navigation restructure is a larger engagement. A full mobile redesign or site rebuild is a project in its own right. If your site has all five issues, a redesign is usually more efficient than patching them one by one — because the underlying architecture is often what’s producing the symptoms.
Is Your Site Making These Mistakes?
If you’re not sure, the fastest way to find out is a direct conversation. I’ll look at your site before we talk, tell you what I see, and give you an honest assessment of what’s worth fixing and what it would take. The discovery call is free. Book a Free Discovery Call →
Justin Merrell is the founder of Ghost Runner Creative Services, a web design and development practice based in Greenville, SC. He has 25 years of experience in marketing and advertising and has been building professional websites for 16 years — for professional services firms nationwide including law offices, medical practices, financial advisors, consultants, and construction companies. Every project is handled directly. No subcontractors, no account managers, no handoffs.
