As a business, your website should never be caught sleeping: it should always be up, it should be handling your clients and customers left and right, it should be making you money hand over fist – non-stop.

(This is of course assuming that you have products and services worth buying.)

Now, if you have moved heaven and earth to ensure that everything is smooth and your online sales are still plummeting, you may have to look at your website and see if you have any of these problems with it:

1. Not Enough Pictures

In case you haven’t noticed, no one wants to read anything they don’t have to anymore. Website visitors take in everything in the first few seconds. They don’t read; they scan the website looking for anything that will stand out and grab their attention.

And how do you most effectively grab their attention? You post images: pictures, photos, infographics that show what you are all about using a minimal number of words.

2. You Have Forgotten Mobile Users

If you assume that just posting a webpage for laptop and desktop users and while ignoring mobile device users to “deal” with it, you are making a big mistake. A little research will show you that over half of the internet users in the world go online using mobile devices – you should actually be focusing on them and pampering them.

A simple test should show you whether or not you are ready for the small-screen people: get on a mobile device (it could be your smart phone or palmtop) and go through your site page by page. Put yourself in your visitors’ shoes and try to make a purchase and see if the process goes through smoothly end-to-end, for example.

3. Wrong Advertisement Choices

Ads on your pages – apart from being aesthetically pleasant – can be a secondary source of income. But that is only if you are doing it right: when everything is in its place and doesn’t intrude with your visitors’ user experience (UX).

If every time they land on one of your pages and a series (or even one for that matter) of pop-up ads keep jumping in their face, they will be annoyed (first) and then assume that you aren’t serious about UX (as would be the case in a site that has been designed by an amateur) and decide to not take you seriously either.

This is doubly true if they are using mobile devices – everyone that has experienced it knows how everyone hates closing ads on a small screen.

4. Wrong Marketing Strategy

If you want play with the Big Boys you will have to play like them: have you noticed that they always have their product sales aimed directly at a certain demographic or clientele? In the summer, winter clothes go on sale; when it is winter in the northern hemisphere, travel agencies focus on selling you tickets to Tahiti, Fiji, Hawaii and Southeast Asia, not England or Scandinavia.

All that content-writing, blogging and social media sharing will mean nothing if you are speaking to deaf ears. Your website should address a specific part of the society and sell it to them hard. You can’t make everyone happy, so make those that matter delirious with joy.

5. Visitors Are Confused

If you think having a lot of pages on your website is critical, think again. If you think having lots of content on your page is essential, think again.

Unless you are a news website that covers the whole world, you have no excuse putting everything on a single page and then expecting your visitors to wade through it all. You can’t have links and buttons going every which way and expect your visitors to find their way through your mess.

No visitors will take it – not for long, at least.

The information on your pages should be clear-cut and direct. Visitors should know where to enter and where they can exit while going through your processes (purchasing, registering, signing up, etc.). If you r site can do without something, get rid of it. Always move forward with “the select few.”

6. You Haven’t Heard Of Secure Transactions

There are some very, very bad people out there that will do anything to get their hands on your clients’ information and/or money. Online consumers are becoming increasingly security-conscious as they are exposed to all the headlines announcing hacks and server attacks that occur way too often.

So, your visitors will notice if your website doesn’t have a URL that starts with https:// to indicate you are a security conscious business, don’t apply SSL certificates and don’t use reliable ecommerce solutions like PayPal for online transactions – and you will soon see them run in the other direction.

7. Your Hosting Sucks

If your hosting provider has a bad uptime record or is located somewhere where the internet bandwidth is still in the Stone Age (well, you know what we mean) then even the best of websites will be worth nothing. No one will find you when they need you, and even when they do, the connection and transaction will be murderously slow.

Whenever you can, choose a hosting provider that has a proven track record – even if it costs a little extra; it will all be worth it in the end.