6 Common Website Mistakes We See — and How To Fix Them

Today, with the help of AI-powered coding assistants and starter templates from companies like Wix and WordPress, anyone can create a website and get it off the ground quickly. But having a website isn’t the same as having one that performs — to get there requires strategic thinking and processes that are often overlooked but pay major dividends in convenience, conversion and user experience.

Here, our team shares six of the most common website mistakes we encounter, along with suggestions for how to rectify each issue.

Mistake: Thinking in Terms of Pages, Not Systems

While creating content for websites one page at a time might work for smaller, brochure sites, it quickly falls apart when working as a team at scale. This leads to inconsistency and spiraling complexity over time.

The question isn’t, “What does this page need?” — it’s “What does this site need?” Make sure you hire an experienced agency that knows how to build not just websites but web systems that scale.

— Eric Corpus, Senior Editor

Mistake: Launching a Content Program Without a Taxonomy Framework

We’re all in favor of starting a content hub to share stories and insights related to your mission — but jumping in without planning your strategy is a waste of energy. If you don’t start with a category and tagging structure in place, it’ll make it harder to track which kinds of content are resonating with your audience down the road. It also makes the content less discoverable for users.

— Rebecca Au-Mullaney, Digital Project Manager

Mistake: Not Having 301 Redirects in Place at Launch

When redesigning a website, URLs often change with the new architecture, and it’s easy to lose track of how many links are pointing visitors to different parts of your website. If the updated site goes live before those intrasite connections are verified, links that once directed traffic to landing pages, donation sites and other essential content may suddenly lead to 404 errors, frustrating visitors and hindering conversions.

Do This Instead: Create a Redirect Plan and Implement at Go-Live. Create your 301 redirect plan long before launch and implement it at go-live. Crawl both your current site and the staging version of the new site, then compile a .csv file that contains two columns — source_url and target_url — and map each old URL to the most relevant new destination.

The structure should look like this:

This preserves any search authority your pages have built over time and prevents users from landing on 404s.

— Tina Kelly, Chief Digital Officer

Mistake: You’ve Confused a Beautiful Website With an Effective One

Aesthetics matter, but template platforms and AI-generated layouts have made “looks good” the baseline, not the differentiator. A site that earns compliments but buries its value proposition, lacks clear hierarchy or fails to guide a visitor toward any meaningful action is still a miss.

— Thomas Christiansen, Art Director

Mistake: Your Content Is Unstructured and Cumbersome

You have a visitor’s attention for only a small amount of time. If you’re producing lengthy paragraphs of content that are difficult to scan and not oriented around what users want to accomplish on your website, you’ll lose them.

— Colleen Ringer, Editorial Director

Mistake: Building a Site Without Accessibility in Mind

When you fail to account for accessibility fundamentals such as color contrast, semantic heading structure and link labels, you exclude visually impaired audiences from what you have to offer — and make it more difficult for search engines to index your content. — Max Ellinger, Director of Web Development

— Max Ellinger, Director of Web Development