Pitfalls to avoid DIY web design?

[tito1990]

Hi r/business!

TL;DR

What mistakes have you made when building trying to build a good website for your business? What advice would you give to help others avoid the same mistake?

I joined this sub pretty recently. I'm a web designer/dev with over 10 years of experience helping hundreds of clients, and I’ve finally decided to take the leap into owning my own agency.

That said, I've seen a lot of DIY websites that could be improved. So I’ve written a blog post about the most common mistakes I’ve seen in DIY website design.

I’ve seen some really noble DIY attempts. But they always fall short in some ways. I’m hoping to make my article really thorough so it can help small businesses better leverage their online presence.

Here’s my list so far.

1. Not using a responsive design
   
2. Too much stock imagery
   
3. Not optimizing images
   
4. Using too much text
   
5. No call to action
   
6. Not building for Accessibility
   
7. Getting stuck in a plugin subscription trap
   
8. Not using analytics
   
9. Extremely bloated templates
   
10. Dead links everywhere
    
11. Content Plagiarism
    
12. No SEO
    
13. Poor Hosting Providers (Shared Hosting)
    
14. Not Keeping up with Security
    
15. No-Code can't solve everything
    
16. Choosing plugins, themes, software that is later abandoned and eventually getting stuck with a broken website
    
17. Extremely slow website builders
    
18. No Security Certificate
    
19. Text on images
    
20. No Backups
    
21. Breaking image copyright laws
    
22. Stuffing Keywords in your Domain
    
23. Exit Modals
    
24. Hotlinking Images from other Websites
    
25. Not using PageSpeed Insights and Core Web Vitals Reports

If you’ve built your own website, what mistakes do you wish someone had warned you about? I’m sure I missed some, but I’m not sure what they are.

 

[fernando1999]

@tito1990

Poor Hosting Providers (Shared Hosting)

Yeah, I'm going to have to contest you on this. Shared hosting is suitable for like 95% of the websites out there, most websites don't need to be fancy, I've found many only need to be a single page or a few pages. The issue lies in people not understanding the limits of Shared Hosting. If you decide to run a WordPress site with Elementor and 50 plugins and non-optimized resources, your website is going to be slow as hell. We're talking the DIY sites that install a plugin for Google Analytics and a plugin to create a slider, etc. then proceed to upload massive images and now the TTFB is like 40 seconds on mobile because the browser is trying to download an 8k by 8k pixel PNG. There are some hosting providers to avoid though, namely any company owned by EIG.

 

[tito1990]

@fernando1999 I go into more details in the post.

Sure. Shared hosts will always be able to handle a single static html file.

The issue isn't just in the shared hosting they provide.

It is going to be slower (especially if they've fooled you into using one of their subpar website builders instead of one of the better ones).

They often end up costing just as much or more than better hosting after the first year.

The level of control is often locked down in some way. This might not be a problem. But it's a time sink when it is.

Support is the worst you'll get for hosting.

Hopefully if the user reads the other items they'll realize that plugins and non-optimized resources can also be an issue.