29 TikTok Stats to Know in 2021

If you feel like the app TikTok came out of nowhere, you're not wrong.

Since launching in early 2018, TikTok's been covered by seemingly every major news publication and racked up millions of downloads globally.

Despite TikTok's major early success, the app still feels like a bit of a mystery, especially to marketers. In fact, until recently, its parent company, ByteDance, hasn't disclosed many metrics at all.

In TikTok's first year, all we really knew was that an odd-ball video app was going viral, topping global app store charts, and gaining a huge fanbase from Gen-Z.

 

But now, shortly after TikTok's first birthday, we know a lot more about it as sites like Digiday, AdWeek, and our own Marketing Blog regularly cover it.

Even if you still aren't quite sure what TikTok is, you've probably seen a video meme on social media that was created and published in the app first. Here's one for example of a TikTok post which went viral on Twitter:

Now THIS is a tiktok I could watch all day pic.twitter.com/u1dBkH2OAa

— 🌸 Alexandra Daniels 🌸 (@alexdanielsxo) July 11, 2019

When making decisions about your social strategy, you're probably more interested in numbers than virality as proof of an app's staying power.

As someone who's gotten sucked into the app, blogged multiple times about it, hearted hundreds of posts, and even made a few embarrassingly mature videos of my own, I'm fairly certain that this platform will stick around for quite some time. But, luckily, with mounting data on TikTok, you don't just have to take my word for it.

To help you make informed decisions about your strategy and whether TikTok is right for your brand, I've compiled a list of 28 interesting stats and facts to know before venturing on to the app.

29 TikTok Stats to Know in 2021

Userbase, Downloads, and Growth

Within TikTok's first year, it reportedly reached 500 million monthly active users. Wondering if this was just a fluke or a viral trend that will simmer down? Think again. According to TikTok and its company heads, the audience might be larger and more promising than we think.

• In September 2021, TikTok celebrated reaching 1 billion monthly active users. (TikTok)
• Musical.ly, a lip-syncing app which ByteDance purchased and merged with TikTok, reportedly had 100 million monthly active users when it was purchased by TikTok in 2018. (The Verge)
• Douyin, TikTok's original standalone app in China, had 300 million users at the time Musical.ly merged with TikTok. (The Verge)
• In 2020, TikTok was the most downloaded app globally (850 million downloads), followed by WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram. (Apptopia)
• TikTok is the Top Free App in the Entertainment section of the Apple App Store. (Apple App Store)

Demographics

While TikTok's user base is dominated by Gen-Z in the United States, many millennials have adopted it around the world.

And, although it might feel like TikTok is huge in the U.S., the app's biggest audience actually comes from China, where the platform is called Douyin.

Here's a breakdown of TikTok's major demographic stats.

• 35% of TikTok's global audience is between the ages of 19 and 29, and 28% is under 18. (Business of Apps)
• As of December 2020, TikTok has 69.5 million monthly active users in the United States. (Statista)
• As of April 2021, 48% of U.S. adults between 18-29 use TikTok, compared to 20% of adults between 30-49 and 14% among 50-64 year olds. (Pew Research Center)
• One-quarter of Americans between 12 and 34 have used TikTok compared to 3% of adults aged 35+. (MarketingCharts)
• 51% of global TikTok users are male and 49% are female. (Hootsuite)
• TikTok is now available in more than 200 countries. (Oberlo)
• Over 22.2 million of TikTok's monthly active users are in Indonesia. (Statista)

User Behavior

TikTok is a fast-paced app. The second you log in, you see a video at the top of a feed that's algorithmically curated around your interests. If you enjoy the video you're watching, you can follow, comment, and like the content directly from the video post. If you're not loving what you see, you can keep swiping in an upward motion to immediately see more odd videos.

From my own experience, I've found that TikTok can easily cause you to spend more time than expected watching an endless stream of often comedic videos. Since these videos are usually between 15 seconds and one minute, it makes the app ideal for people who need quick entertainment on their morning commute or when they're bored at home.

Because of TikTok's quick pace and entertainment factor, the stats below aren't that surprising:

• The average user spends 89 minutes per day on the app, according to a leaked deck from TikTok. (Music Business Worldwide)
• As of September 2021, there are 14.43 million daily active users using the TikTok Android App and the average user spends 12.3 hours per month using it. (Statista, HootSuite)
• TikTok is one of the most downloaded apps in the Google Play Store. (Statista)
• Younger users aged 4-15 spend an average of 80 minutes per day on the app. (Qustodio)
• According to a leaked TikTok deck, the average user opens the app 19 times per day. (Music Business Worldwide)
• There are 30.8 million global DAU on the TikTok iOS app as of September 2021. (Statista)
• TikTok users on Android now spend more time watching content on the app than they do on YouTube. (App Annie)

Viral Trends and Influencers on TikTok

Like YouTube, Vine, Instagram, as well as other past and present video apps, TikTok has opened doors for influencers, comedians, meme creators, and even some brands. While it's still a bit too early to see how successful its influencers and trends will be in the long run, here are a few interesting tidbits:

• The most followed creator on TikTok is dancer Charli D’amelio with 123.5 million followers. Following close behind is Khabane Lame with 115 million. (Wikipedia)
• One of the earliest branded hashtag challenges was Guess' #InMyDenim challenge. According to TikTok, videos marked with this hashtag have received a grand total of 38.8 million views. (TikTok)
• Rapper Lil Nas X credits the success of his song "Old Town Road" to TikTok. The song was propelled to #1 on the Billboard Top 100 in 2019 after the artist uploaded it to TikTok. (BuzzFeed News)

Here's a compilation of TikTok's #CowboyChallenge where people wearing normal clothing cut to themselves in cowboy costumes to the song "Old Town Road."

Business, Revenue, and Competition

The launch of TikTok not only put its parent company, ByteDance, on the map, but it also resulted in competition from apps like Facebook, which launched a very similar app called Lasso shortly after TikTok went viral. While TikTok and ByteDance are less transparent about revenue and other major details, here's what we know:

• TikTok now offers five advertising tiers aimed at big brands. One of which, a branded hashtag challenge, reportedly costs $150,000 per day. (TikTok Pitch Deck Notes First Reported by Digiday)
• TikTok generated an estimated 1.9 billion in revenue in 2020. (Business of Apps)
• In October 2020, TikTok made $115 million on in-app purchases from users. (Sensor Tower)
• TikTok has a 4.9-star rating in the Apple App Store and 4.4 in the Google Play Store. (Apple App Store, Google Play Store)
• Bytedance, TikTok's parent company is valued at $75 million, making it the world's most valuable startup. (CBInsights)

The Mysteries of TikTok

Although TikTok is a top social platform and is ramping up its options for advertisers, it's still rather new. When a company or startup is new, it's not uncommon for leadership to hide early numbers, even when a brand is successful. In fact, we've seen this with other major companies like Snapchat and Netflix.

Despite the launch of TikTok For Business in mid 2020, there’s still a lot more to learn as TikTok’s global teams and ByteDance continue to remain hush-hush about major metrics. In the coming years, as TikTok continues to draw in more advertisers, it wouldn’t be surprising if we started to see more transparent information about the app and its user base. 

Where to Find TikTok Stats

In the meantime, If you want to learn more about TikTok, you can read up on its short history and early success in this post, or click here to find a how-to guide for using the app. In addition, you can discover important TikTok facts app on various websites: 

• Statista
• Business of Apps
• Global Web Index
• Pew Research Center
• eMarketer

Want to see what other businesses are doing on TikTok? Check out this roundup of brands on TikTok.

from Marketing https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/tiktok-stats

If you feel like the app TikTok came out of nowhere, you're not wrong.

Since launching in early 2018, TikTok's been covered by seemingly every major news publication and racked up millions of downloads globally.

Despite TikTok's major early success, the app still feels like a bit of a mystery, especially to marketers. In fact, until recently, its parent company, ByteDance, hasn't disclosed many metrics at all.

In TikTok's first year, all we really knew was that an odd-ball video app was going viral, topping global app store charts, and gaining a huge fanbase from Gen-Z.

 

But now, shortly after TikTok's first birthday, we know a lot more about it as sites like Digiday, AdWeek, and our own Marketing Blog regularly cover it.

Even if you still aren't quite sure what TikTok is, you've probably seen a video meme on social media that was created and published in the app first. Here's one for example of a TikTok post which went viral on Twitter:

Now THIS is a tiktok I could watch all day pic.twitter.com/u1dBkH2OAa

— 🌸 Alexandra Daniels 🌸 (@alexdanielsxo) July 11, 2019

When making decisions about your social strategy, you're probably more interested in numbers than virality as proof of an app's staying power.

As someone who's gotten sucked into the app, blogged multiple times about it, hearted hundreds of posts, and even made a few embarrassingly mature videos of my own, I'm fairly certain that this platform will stick around for quite some time. But, luckily, with mounting data on TikTok, you don't just have to take my word for it.

To help you make informed decisions about your strategy and whether TikTok is right for your brand, I've compiled a list of 28 interesting stats and facts to know before venturing on to the app.

29 TikTok Stats to Know in 2021

Userbase, Downloads, and Growth

Within TikTok's first year, it reportedly reached 500 million monthly active users. Wondering if this was just a fluke or a viral trend that will simmer down? Think again. According to TikTok and its company heads, the audience might be larger and more promising than we think.

• In September 2021, TikTok celebrated reaching 1 billion monthly active users. (TikTok)
• Musical.ly, a lip-syncing app which ByteDance purchased and merged with TikTok, reportedly had 100 million monthly active users when it was purchased by TikTok in 2018. (The Verge)
• Douyin, TikTok's original standalone app in China, had 300 million users at the time Musical.ly merged with TikTok. (The Verge)
• In 2020, TikTok was the most downloaded app globally (850 million downloads), followed by WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram. (Apptopia)
• TikTok is the Top Free App in the Entertainment section of the Apple App Store. (Apple App Store)

Demographics

While TikTok's user base is dominated by Gen-Z in the United States, many millennials have adopted it around the world.

And, although it might feel like TikTok is huge in the U.S., the app's biggest audience actually comes from China, where the platform is called Douyin.

Here's a breakdown of TikTok's major demographic stats.

• 35% of TikTok's global audience is between the ages of 19 and 29, and 28% is under 18. (Business of Apps)
• As of December 2020, TikTok has 69.5 million monthly active users in the United States. (Statista)
• As of April 2021, 48% of U.S. adults between 18-29 use TikTok, compared to 20% of adults between 30-49 and 14% among 50-64 year olds. (Pew Research Center)
• One-quarter of Americans between 12 and 34 have used TikTok compared to 3% of adults aged 35+. (MarketingCharts)
• 51% of global TikTok users are male and 49% are female. (Hootsuite)
• TikTok is now available in more than 200 countries. (Oberlo)
• Over 22.2 million of TikTok's monthly active users are in Indonesia. (Statista)

User Behavior

TikTok is a fast-paced app. The second you log in, you see a video at the top of a feed that's algorithmically curated around your interests. If you enjoy the video you're watching, you can follow, comment, and like the content directly from the video post. If you're not loving what you see, you can keep swiping in an upward motion to immediately see more odd videos.

From my own experience, I've found that TikTok can easily cause you to spend more time than expected watching an endless stream of often comedic videos. Since these videos are usually between 15 seconds and one minute, it makes the app ideal for people who need quick entertainment on their morning commute or when they're bored at home.

Because of TikTok's quick pace and entertainment factor, the stats below aren't that surprising:

• The average user spends 89 minutes per day on the app, according to a leaked deck from TikTok. (Music Business Worldwide)
• As of September 2021, there are 14.43 million daily active users using the TikTok Android App and the average user spends 12.3 hours per month using it. (Statista, HootSuite)
• TikTok is one of the most downloaded apps in the Google Play Store. (Statista)
• Younger users aged 4-15 spend an average of 80 minutes per day on the app. (Qustodio)
• According to a leaked TikTok deck, the average user opens the app 19 times per day. (Music Business Worldwide)
• There are 30.8 million global DAU on the TikTok iOS app as of September 2021. (Statista)
• TikTok users on Android now spend more time watching content on the app than they do on YouTube. (App Annie)

Viral Trends and Influencers on TikTok

Like YouTube, Vine, Instagram, as well as other past and present video apps, TikTok has opened doors for influencers, comedians, meme creators, and even some brands. While it's still a bit too early to see how successful its influencers and trends will be in the long run, here are a few interesting tidbits:

• The most followed creator on TikTok is dancer Charli D’amelio with 123.5 million followers. Following close behind is Khabane Lame with 115 million. (Wikipedia)
• One of the earliest branded hashtag challenges was Guess' #InMyDenim challenge. According to TikTok, videos marked with this hashtag have received a grand total of 38.8 million views. (TikTok)
• Rapper Lil Nas X credits the success of his song "Old Town Road" to TikTok. The song was propelled to #1 on the Billboard Top 100 in 2019 after the artist uploaded it to TikTok. (BuzzFeed News)

Here's a compilation of TikTok's #CowboyChallenge where people wearing normal clothing cut to themselves in cowboy costumes to the song "Old Town Road."

Business, Revenue, and Competition

The launch of TikTok not only put its parent company, ByteDance, on the map, but it also resulted in competition from apps like Facebook, which launched a very similar app called Lasso shortly after TikTok went viral. While TikTok and ByteDance are less transparent about revenue and other major details, here's what we know:

• TikTok now offers five advertising tiers aimed at big brands. One of which, a branded hashtag challenge, reportedly costs $150,000 per day. (TikTok Pitch Deck Notes First Reported by Digiday)
• TikTok generated an estimated 1.9 billion in revenue in 2020. (Business of Apps)
• In October 2020, TikTok made $115 million on in-app purchases from users. (Sensor Tower)
• TikTok has a 4.9-star rating in the Apple App Store and 4.4 in the Google Play Store. (Apple App Store, Google Play Store)
• Bytedance, TikTok's parent company is valued at $75 million, making it the world's most valuable startup. (CBInsights)

The Mysteries of TikTok

Although TikTok is a top social platform and is ramping up its options for advertisers, it's still rather new. When a company or startup is new, it's not uncommon for leadership to hide early numbers, even when a brand is successful. In fact, we've seen this with other major companies like Snapchat and Netflix.

Despite the launch of TikTok For Business in mid 2020, there’s still a lot more to learn as TikTok’s global teams and ByteDance continue to remain hush-hush about major metrics. In the coming years, as TikTok continues to draw in more advertisers, it wouldn’t be surprising if we started to see more transparent information about the app and its user base. 

Where to Find TikTok Stats

In the meantime, If you want to learn more about TikTok, you can read up on its short history and early success in this post, or click here to find a how-to guide for using the app. In addition, you can discover important TikTok facts app on various websites: 

• Statista
• Business of Apps
• Global Web Index
• Pew Research Center
• eMarketer

Want to see what other businesses are doing on TikTok? Check out this roundup of brands on TikTok.

via Perfecte news Non connection

What Is a CMS and Why Should You Care?

There are a lot of acronyms in the business world to keep straight. SEO, CRM, SERP, CDN, and CMS are just a few important ones.

CMS is particularly important, considering that more than 68 million websites are built with one. So what is it?

CMS stands for content management system. It also may be the solution you're looking for to quickly make a website with limited technical knowledge and resources.

In this post, we'll define what a CMS is and how it works. Then we'll look at how you can use a CMS to handle the infrastructure of your site so you can focus on creating exciting, delightful content that results in more conversions and leads.

We'll wrap up by looking at some of the most popular CMS platforms on the market. Let's get started.

With a CMS, you can create, manage, modify, and publish content in a user-friendly interface. You can customize the design and functionality of your site by downloading or purchasing templates and extensions, rather than coding. You can have multiple users working in the back-end of the same tool — and much more.

You might be wondering how one piece of software does all of this. To answer that question, let's take a closer look at how a CMS works.

How a CMS Works

To understand how a CMS works, you first have to understand what it's like to build a site from scratch.

You'd start with HTML to add text, images, navigation bars, and other building blocks of a site. Then you'd add CSS to style those elements to match the unique look and feel of your brand.

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You'd finish up by writing some JavaScript to add more advanced functionality to your site, like slide-in CTAs. Then you'd have to upload this HTML file to your server to be filed away in your database.

Whenever you want to make changes — even simple ones like updating content — you have to download files from the server, open them, and change the HTML code by hand. Then you'll have to make sure you didn't break any links or something else before uploading the files back to the server.

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Sounds complicated, yes? For developers and other advanced users with experience in website development, building a site from scratch might be ideal. But for those who don't have the coding skills or time and resources to build a site from scratch and maintain it, they can use a CMS. Let's talk about how.

How to Use a CMS

A CMS is made up of two core parts: a content management application (CMA) and content delivery application (CDA). Combined, these applications essentially handle all the code, database queries, and infrastructure in the back end so you can focus on the front end of your site.

Rather than start with a blank HTML page, for example, you'll open up the content editor and be able bold text, add links and CTAs, and insert images and tables by dragging and dropping some modules or clicking a few buttons rather than writing out HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. 

Here's a look at how easy it is to create a blog post using WordPress, for example.

To make other changes on your site, like changing the permalink structure or installing extensions, just navigate to the appropriate section in your admin panel. This is the CMA in action: all these changes are made in an intuitive interface that hides the code from you, the end user.

When you're done making changes, the CDA will take the content you entered into the CMA, assemble the code, display it to your front-end visitors, and store it. That means when you want to publish a new blog post, for example, you just have to hit the Publish button instead of manually uploading a page to your server.

Now that we understand what a CMS is, how it works, and how to use it, let's explore the benefits of using one over building a site from scratch or using another website building tool.

Why Use a CMS?

We've already alluded to some benefits of using a CMS, but let's look at some specific ways it can impact your set-up process, team's productivity, and visibility online.

1. No Coding Knowledge Required

By enabling non-developers and other users to build websites without coding, CMS systems have helped revolutionize web design. Gone are the days of relying on web developers and designers to establish an online presence for your business.

You can create and manage content, customize the design of your site, and install extensions to add functionality to your site — all without coding. (It's important to note that most platforms do allow you to add custom code for more granular control over your site, too.)

As a result, users with limited technical resources and time can still build a powerful website for their business.

2. Easy Collaboration

Multiple users can access and work in the back end of a CMS at the same time. That means on any given day, your marketers can be producing content, your IT professionals implementing security protocols, and your developers adding custom code to your theme. In fact, they could all be working on the same landing page.

In short, a CMS can help improve workflows and productivity across your team.

3. User Roles and Permissions

A CMS allows you to collaborate in the most efficient and safe way possible thanks to built-in (and often customizable) user roles and permissions. That means content writers, for example, can have all the permissions they need to write, publish, and manage content — but won't be able to delete plugins or otherwise significantly alter the site's functionality. 

Here's a look at the User Role Editor in WordPress. 

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Without a CMS, you’d have to code some pretty complicated conditions and checks to create user roles and permissions in JavaScript.

4. SEO Features and Extensions

CMS platforms offer built-in features as well as add-ons to help you optimize your site for search engines.

Using built-in or third party tools, you can:

• Customize page titles and meta descriptions
• Choose SEO-friendly URL structures
• Create XML sitemaps
• Add image alt text
• Create 301 Redirects
• Include breadcrumb navigation
• Optimize page load times

Implementing these best practices will help improve your chances of ranking on Google and other major search engines.

5. Security Features and Extensions

CMS platforms also offer built-in features and add-ons to help you secure your site. Some even offer a dedicated security team. CMS Hub, for example, provides a dedicated 24/7 security team, an enterprise-class web application firewall, SSL, custom CDN, SSO memberships, and and other out-of-the-box features.

6. Predesigned Templates

Most CMS platforms come with a selection of predesigned templates you can use to quickly customize the appearance of your site. They can also affect the behavior of your site.

Choosing a responsive template, for example, will ensure your site looks good on any device, without requiring you to write a bunch of code. Not only do templates save you design time before launching your site, they can also make a website redesign much faster and simpler down the road.

Webflow is just one CMS that offers hundreds of responsive templates. 

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7. Simple Updates

As discussed above, a CMS enables you to make changes on your site faster and easier — from major updates, like a website redesign, to minor updates, like changing the image on your home page. Rather than hiring a freelance developer or trying to edit the code yourself, you can go into the dashboard of your CMS to update and edit the content of your website. This allows you to keep your content dynamic and relevant.

8. Blogging Functionality

Blogging offers a range of benefits, particularly to businesses. It can help drive traffic to your website, convert traffic into leads, establish authority in a particular industry, generate backlinks, and achieve other long-term results. But building a blog from scratch is difficult, even for experienced developers.

A major advantage of using a CMS is that most provide built-in blogging functionality (or extensions) so it's easy to start creating and publishing blog content and reaping the benefits. 

9. Content Scheduling

Scheduling content is essential to any editorial strategy. When building a site from scratch, you can schedule content — but it will require a combination of coding and tools like GitHub.

With a CMS, scheduling content is as easy as clicking a button. Most platforms allow you to schedule more than just blog posts, too. With CMS Hub for example, you can schedule blog posts as well as website pages, landing pages, and emails.

Here's a look at the scheduling tab within HubSpot's blog editor.

10. Easy Access

With a CMS platform, you can access and edit your site on virtually any device with an internet connection. That's much easier than the alternative of building a site from scratch, which requires you to be on a device connected to the server or connect remotely.

Plus, most CMS systems have a single dashboard or control panel where you can access your site's content, theme, plugins, settings, and more — all in one place. 

If your site is growing, you may need to upgrade to a CMS to meet your needs. You can start your search by checking out a few of the best CMS systems below.

Let's unpack eight popular CMS platform examples to discover which might be the best fit for your website needs.

1. CMS Hub

Ideal for: Any-sized businesses

Price: $25 - $1,200 per month

Why Use CMS Hub: With CMS Hub, you can build websites that are secure, powerful, and optimized for search engines.

Using this all-on-one connected platform, you can create personalized content for visitors based on data from your HubSpot CRM, create custom templates and styles, run A/B tests on multi-language content, safely redesign and relaunch web pages, view performance analytics, and much more.

By combining ease of use and flexibility, this proprietary CMS is ideal for businesses with diverse teams of marketers, developers, and IT professionals that are looking to grow over time.

Learn more about CMS Hub’s customization options, multi-lingual support, reporting dashboards, and more.

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2. WordPress

Ideal for: Small businesses and freelancers

Price: Estimated between $30 to $3,000

Why Use WordPress: WordPress is a self-hosted platform that powers millions of sites. You can easily and quickly build a WordPress site using the Gutenberg editor and then customize it with any of the thousands of plugins and themes available in the official WordPress directory or other third-party sites.

Want to add forms and live chat to your site? Want a theme that comes with a built-in visual builder and split testing? Leveraging WordPress plugins and themes like these, you can create a unique experience specific to your brand.

3. Joomla

Ideal for: Global companies

Price: Estimated between $700 to $6,500

Why Use Joomla: Site owners looking for more functionality built right into the platform may try a WordPress alternative like Joomla.

Like WordPress, Joomla is an open-source CMS. What sets Joomla apart is its built-in multilingual support and advanced user and content management options, which make it ideal for membership, community, and social networking sites. UIDAI, for example, is a multilingual website powered by Joomla. 

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4. Drupal

Ideal for: Corporatations and government agencies

Price: Estimated between $5,000 to $20,000

Why Use Drupal: Drupal is a highly flexible CMS favored by large corporations and government agencies like NASA. While you will need web development experience to fully leverage the power of this platform, you won't have to start from scratch.

In addition to its out-of-the-box features, you can choose among 47,000 modules available in its directory and thousands of free themes in its theme repository to build a complex site that handles large volumes of data and heavy traffic, like Rush University Medical Center's website. 

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5. Magento

Ideal for: Ecommerce businesses

Price: Estimated at $15,000 and up

Why Use Magento: The self-hosted version of Magento, known as Magento OpenSource, is like the Drupal of the ecommerce world. It's highly flexible and secure, but difficult to learn and take advantage of all its built-in functionality and extensions.

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With Magento, you can manage multiple stores, use several worldwide shipping providers, and transact in different countries, languages, and currencies — all within the same dashboard.

So, if you have the time and resources to invest in set-up and maintenance, you'll be able to build an online store with a huge product inventory and global reach.

6. Webflow

Ideal for: Web designers and agencies

Price: $15 - $235 per month

Why Use Webflow: Webflow is a “visual” content management system designed to fill a market gap for web designers who want to focus on creating and customizing sites without worrying about hosting, security, or performance.

With Webflow, you can start with one of the hundreds of pre-built templates or start from scratch using the Webflow Designer shown below.

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You can also extend the functionality of your site through third-party integrations or embedding HTML code. Since it requires at least some knowledge of HTML, CSS, and web design, Webflow is best suited for freelancer designers or agencies.

7. Ghost

Ideal for: Bloggers

Price: $9 - $2,400 per month

Why Use Ghost: If you're looking for a more simple and lightweight CMS dedicated to blogging, Ghost is a great option. Ghost is a headless CMS, which means that its body (the content repository) is separated from its head (the presentation layer).

Basically, this allows you to create and manage content and then deliver that content via their Node.js APIs (or another front-end tool you prefer) to any platform and channel, from smartwatches to virtuality reality headsets.

With an intuitive editor and built-in SEO tools, Ghost appeals to bloggers and beginners who want a basic site that’s simple to create and manage.

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8. Sitecore

Ideal for: Enterprise companies

Price: Must contact company for pricing info

Why Use Sitecore: Sitecore is an enterprise-level headless CMS that enables you to create and deliver personalized websites, emails, social media posts, and mobile experiences.

You can use its WYSIWYG editor with drag-and-drop functionality, session- and device-based personalization rules, and multilingual tools to scale your content creation and deliver content that’s optimized to your users’ interests, language, and device. And thanks to Sitecore’s headless architecture, you can provide these relevant customer experiences across multiple channels, including web, social, voice, point of sale, and more.

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This CMS powers more than 120,000 websites in industries ranging from sports to banking to travel and more. Some of its biggest brands are American Express, ASOS, L’Oréal, and Volvo Cars.

Use a CMS to Build Your Site 

Using a content management system to build and manage your site can help you grow over time. Not only will a CMS store all of your web content in one place, it will also support collaboration across teams, allow for quick and easy updates, and offer templates and extensions to customize your site.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in December 2010 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

from Marketing https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/7969/what-is-a-cms-and-why-should-you-care.aspx

There are a lot of acronyms in the business world to keep straight. SEO, CRM, SERP, CDN, and CMS are just a few important ones.

CMS is particularly important, considering that more than 68 million websites are built with one. So what is it?

CMS stands for content management system. It also may be the solution you're looking for to quickly make a website with limited technical knowledge and resources.

In this post, we'll define what a CMS is and how it works. Then we'll look at how you can use a CMS to handle the infrastructure of your site so you can focus on creating exciting, delightful content that results in more conversions and leads.

We'll wrap up by looking at some of the most popular CMS platforms on the market. Let's get started.

With a CMS, you can create, manage, modify, and publish content in a user-friendly interface. You can customize the design and functionality of your site by downloading or purchasing templates and extensions, rather than coding. You can have multiple users working in the back-end of the same tool — and much more.

You might be wondering how one piece of software does all of this. To answer that question, let's take a closer look at how a CMS works.

How a CMS Works

To understand how a CMS works, you first have to understand what it's like to build a site from scratch.

You'd start with HTML to add text, images, navigation bars, and other building blocks of a site. Then you'd add CSS to style those elements to match the unique look and feel of your brand.

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You'd finish up by writing some JavaScript to add more advanced functionality to your site, like slide-in CTAs. Then you'd have to upload this HTML file to your server to be filed away in your database.

Whenever you want to make changes — even simple ones like updating content — you have to download files from the server, open them, and change the HTML code by hand. Then you'll have to make sure you didn't break any links or something else before uploading the files back to the server.

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Sounds complicated, yes? For developers and other advanced users with experience in website development, building a site from scratch might be ideal. But for those who don't have the coding skills or time and resources to build a site from scratch and maintain it, they can use a CMS. Let's talk about how.

How to Use a CMS

A CMS is made up of two core parts: a content management application (CMA) and content delivery application (CDA). Combined, these applications essentially handle all the code, database queries, and infrastructure in the back end so you can focus on the front end of your site.

Rather than start with a blank HTML page, for example, you'll open up the content editor and be able bold text, add links and CTAs, and insert images and tables by dragging and dropping some modules or clicking a few buttons rather than writing out HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. 

Here's a look at how easy it is to create a blog post using WordPress, for example.

To make other changes on your site, like changing the permalink structure or installing extensions, just navigate to the appropriate section in your admin panel. This is the CMA in action: all these changes are made in an intuitive interface that hides the code from you, the end user.

When you're done making changes, the CDA will take the content you entered into the CMA, assemble the code, display it to your front-end visitors, and store it. That means when you want to publish a new blog post, for example, you just have to hit the Publish button instead of manually uploading a page to your server.

Now that we understand what a CMS is, how it works, and how to use it, let's explore the benefits of using one over building a site from scratch or using another website building tool.

Why Use a CMS?

We've already alluded to some benefits of using a CMS, but let's look at some specific ways it can impact your set-up process, team's productivity, and visibility online.

1. No Coding Knowledge Required

By enabling non-developers and other users to build websites without coding, CMS systems have helped revolutionize web design. Gone are the days of relying on web developers and designers to establish an online presence for your business.

You can create and manage content, customize the design of your site, and install extensions to add functionality to your site — all without coding. (It's important to note that most platforms do allow you to add custom code for more granular control over your site, too.)

As a result, users with limited technical resources and time can still build a powerful website for their business.

2. Easy Collaboration

Multiple users can access and work in the back end of a CMS at the same time. That means on any given day, your marketers can be producing content, your IT professionals implementing security protocols, and your developers adding custom code to your theme. In fact, they could all be working on the same landing page.

In short, a CMS can help improve workflows and productivity across your team.

3. User Roles and Permissions

A CMS allows you to collaborate in the most efficient and safe way possible thanks to built-in (and often customizable) user roles and permissions. That means content writers, for example, can have all the permissions they need to write, publish, and manage content — but won't be able to delete plugins or otherwise significantly alter the site's functionality. 

Here's a look at the User Role Editor in WordPress. 

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Without a CMS, you’d have to code some pretty complicated conditions and checks to create user roles and permissions in JavaScript.

4. SEO Features and Extensions

CMS platforms offer built-in features as well as add-ons to help you optimize your site for search engines.

Using built-in or third party tools, you can:

• Customize page titles and meta descriptions
• Choose SEO-friendly URL structures
• Create XML sitemaps
• Add image alt text
• Create 301 Redirects
• Include breadcrumb navigation
• Optimize page load times

Implementing these best practices will help improve your chances of ranking on Google and other major search engines.

5. Security Features and Extensions

CMS platforms also offer built-in features and add-ons to help you secure your site. Some even offer a dedicated security team. CMS Hub, for example, provides a dedicated 24/7 security team, an enterprise-class web application firewall, SSL, custom CDN, SSO memberships, and and other out-of-the-box features.

6. Predesigned Templates

Most CMS platforms come with a selection of predesigned templates you can use to quickly customize the appearance of your site. They can also affect the behavior of your site.

Choosing a responsive template, for example, will ensure your site looks good on any device, without requiring you to write a bunch of code. Not only do templates save you design time before launching your site, they can also make a website redesign much faster and simpler down the road.

Webflow is just one CMS that offers hundreds of responsive templates. 

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7. Simple Updates

As discussed above, a CMS enables you to make changes on your site faster and easier — from major updates, like a website redesign, to minor updates, like changing the image on your home page. Rather than hiring a freelance developer or trying to edit the code yourself, you can go into the dashboard of your CMS to update and edit the content of your website. This allows you to keep your content dynamic and relevant.

8. Blogging Functionality

Blogging offers a range of benefits, particularly to businesses. It can help drive traffic to your website, convert traffic into leads, establish authority in a particular industry, generate backlinks, and achieve other long-term results. But building a blog from scratch is difficult, even for experienced developers.

A major advantage of using a CMS is that most provide built-in blogging functionality (or extensions) so it's easy to start creating and publishing blog content and reaping the benefits. 

9. Content Scheduling

Scheduling content is essential to any editorial strategy. When building a site from scratch, you can schedule content — but it will require a combination of coding and tools like GitHub.

With a CMS, scheduling content is as easy as clicking a button. Most platforms allow you to schedule more than just blog posts, too. With CMS Hub for example, you can schedule blog posts as well as website pages, landing pages, and emails.

Here's a look at the scheduling tab within HubSpot's blog editor.

10. Easy Access

With a CMS platform, you can access and edit your site on virtually any device with an internet connection. That's much easier than the alternative of building a site from scratch, which requires you to be on a device connected to the server or connect remotely.

Plus, most CMS systems have a single dashboard or control panel where you can access your site's content, theme, plugins, settings, and more — all in one place. 

If your site is growing, you may need to upgrade to a CMS to meet your needs. You can start your search by checking out a few of the best CMS systems below.

Let's unpack eight popular CMS platform examples to discover which might be the best fit for your website needs.

1. CMS Hub

Ideal for: Any-sized businesses

Price: $25 - $1,200 per month

Why Use CMS Hub: With CMS Hub, you can build websites that are secure, powerful, and optimized for search engines.

Using this all-on-one connected platform, you can create personalized content for visitors based on data from your HubSpot CRM, create custom templates and styles, run A/B tests on multi-language content, safely redesign and relaunch web pages, view performance analytics, and much more.

By combining ease of use and flexibility, this proprietary CMS is ideal for businesses with diverse teams of marketers, developers, and IT professionals that are looking to grow over time.

Learn more about CMS Hub’s customization options, multi-lingual support, reporting dashboards, and more.

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2. WordPress

Ideal for: Small businesses and freelancers

Price: Estimated between $30 to $3,000

Why Use WordPress: WordPress is a self-hosted platform that powers millions of sites. You can easily and quickly build a WordPress site using the Gutenberg editor and then customize it with any of the thousands of plugins and themes available in the official WordPress directory or other third-party sites.

Want to add forms and live chat to your site? Want a theme that comes with a built-in visual builder and split testing? Leveraging WordPress plugins and themes like these, you can create a unique experience specific to your brand.

3. Joomla

Ideal for: Global companies

Price: Estimated between $700 to $6,500

Why Use Joomla: Site owners looking for more functionality built right into the platform may try a WordPress alternative like Joomla.

Like WordPress, Joomla is an open-source CMS. What sets Joomla apart is its built-in multilingual support and advanced user and content management options, which make it ideal for membership, community, and social networking sites. UIDAI, for example, is a multilingual website powered by Joomla. 

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4. Drupal

Ideal for: Corporatations and government agencies

Price: Estimated between $5,000 to $20,000

Why Use Drupal: Drupal is a highly flexible CMS favored by large corporations and government agencies like NASA. While you will need web development experience to fully leverage the power of this platform, you won't have to start from scratch.

In addition to its out-of-the-box features, you can choose among 47,000 modules available in its directory and thousands of free themes in its theme repository to build a complex site that handles large volumes of data and heavy traffic, like Rush University Medical Center's website. 

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5. Magento

Ideal for: Ecommerce businesses

Price: Estimated at $15,000 and up

Why Use Magento: The self-hosted version of Magento, known as Magento OpenSource, is like the Drupal of the ecommerce world. It's highly flexible and secure, but difficult to learn and take advantage of all its built-in functionality and extensions.

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With Magento, you can manage multiple stores, use several worldwide shipping providers, and transact in different countries, languages, and currencies — all within the same dashboard.

So, if you have the time and resources to invest in set-up and maintenance, you'll be able to build an online store with a huge product inventory and global reach.

6. Webflow

Ideal for: Web designers and agencies

Price: $15 - $235 per month

Why Use Webflow: Webflow is a “visual” content management system designed to fill a market gap for web designers who want to focus on creating and customizing sites without worrying about hosting, security, or performance.

With Webflow, you can start with one of the hundreds of pre-built templates or start from scratch using the Webflow Designer shown below.

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You can also extend the functionality of your site through third-party integrations or embedding HTML code. Since it requires at least some knowledge of HTML, CSS, and web design, Webflow is best suited for freelancer designers or agencies.

7. Ghost

Ideal for: Bloggers

Price: $9 - $2,400 per month

Why Use Ghost: If you're looking for a more simple and lightweight CMS dedicated to blogging, Ghost is a great option. Ghost is a headless CMS, which means that its body (the content repository) is separated from its head (the presentation layer).

Basically, this allows you to create and manage content and then deliver that content via their Node.js APIs (or another front-end tool you prefer) to any platform and channel, from smartwatches to virtuality reality headsets.

With an intuitive editor and built-in SEO tools, Ghost appeals to bloggers and beginners who want a basic site that’s simple to create and manage.

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8. Sitecore

Ideal for: Enterprise companies

Price: Must contact company for pricing info

Why Use Sitecore: Sitecore is an enterprise-level headless CMS that enables you to create and deliver personalized websites, emails, social media posts, and mobile experiences.

You can use its WYSIWYG editor with drag-and-drop functionality, session- and device-based personalization rules, and multilingual tools to scale your content creation and deliver content that’s optimized to your users’ interests, language, and device. And thanks to Sitecore’s headless architecture, you can provide these relevant customer experiences across multiple channels, including web, social, voice, point of sale, and more.

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This CMS powers more than 120,000 websites in industries ranging from sports to banking to travel and more. Some of its biggest brands are American Express, ASOS, L’Oréal, and Volvo Cars.

Use a CMS to Build Your Site 

Using a content management system to build and manage your site can help you grow over time. Not only will a CMS store all of your web content in one place, it will also support collaboration across teams, allow for quick and easy updates, and offer templates and extensions to customize your site.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in December 2010 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

via Perfecte news Non connection

16 Top Website Mistakes to Avoid in 2021 [+ 16 Easy Fixes]

Since 86% of consumers rely on the internet to find local businesses, having a website is a no-brainer regardless of your business type.

Although building a website is great for business, you'll want to avoid making common mistakes that will stop you from getting the most out of your investment. All of these mistakes are easy to identify for free using a handy tool called Website Grader.

In this post, I'll show you the most common website mistakes we've seen here at HubSpot and exactly how to fix them if they apply to you.

1. Lengthy Page Title

A page title, like the one in the Google search result below, tells visitors what a page is about.

Search engines and browsers may cut off your page title if it's too long. From a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) perspective, a concise page title yields the best reader experience. If your page title is too long, it will dilute the importance of each term in the title. This might even prevent you from ranking well on the search engine results page (SERP).

It's best practice to keep your page title under 70 characters so that the reader can see the entire title and make a decision to click through to the post.

Website Fix #1: Use a Headline Analyzer Tool to Write Concise Headlines

Use a tool like Coschedule's Headline Analyzer to draft a concise and keyword-rich description of your page. It's a great idea to test several variations of a headline before choosing the best one. Amanda Sellers, manager of the historical optimization team at HubSpot, recommends a score of 70 or above from the Headline Analyzer tool for most headlines.

2. Long Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions are essential for drawing in visitors from search. The meta description is the text under a page title in search results. Like page titles, meta descriptions will get cut off and replaced by "..." if they are too long.

Website Fix #2: Use a Word Counter to Check Your Characters

You can use tools like WordCounter and SERPsimulator to count the number of characters in our meta description so you don’t go over the limit.

SERPsimulation, for example, shows you what your title tag and meta description would look like on the search engine result page.

3. Keyword Stuffing

We've seen many people make the mistake of stuffing their page title with keywords or targeting unrealistic keywords. For example, it’s often a futile effort if a new website in the online marketing space is trying to rank for a keyword like “inbound marketing.”

Sometimes websites target keywords that would attract a ton of traffic but fail to convert.

From a user's standpoint, using too many keywords in your content creates a bad user experience and makes it hard to read your website. As for search engines, Google Search Central mentions that keyword stuffing can harm your site’s rankings.

Website Fix #3: Conduct Proper Keyword Research

Start by creating a list of all the relevant terms used to describe your business. Then, you can break these terms up into content or topic buckets. For example, here at HubSpot, we have topic buckets like “inbound marketing,” “blogging,” and “social media marketing.”

The next step would be to fill these broad topic buckets with keyword phrases your potential customers might use when searching for that type of content.

If you already get a bit of traffic from Google, you can dig into your Google Analytics instance to find the keywords people use to get to your website.

Aside from Google Analytics, you can also use SEO and keyword research tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush for more keyword ideas.

4. Keyword Cannibalization

Keyword cannibalization is when two or more pages on your website are targeting the same keyword.

The problem with keyword cannibalization is that your web pages targeting the same keyword would be competing against each other on the search engine results page. This could result in a low click-through rate and cause a decrease in the value of each page.

Each page on your website is a new opportunity to get found online. You don't want to waste all these opportunities by reusing the keywords.

Website Fix #4: Try the Pillar Cluster Model

With tools like Moz Keyword Explorer and SEOScout Cannibalization Checker, you can easily identify pages competing for the same keywords on your website.

Once you’ve identified these pages, you can try the pillar cluster model to reorganize your website. The pillar cluster model involves grouping related blog posts into specific topic areas instead of long-tail keywords.

With this model, the individual blog posts link back to the pillar page and share hyperlinks.

5. No Image Alt Text

Search engines do not "read" images. Instead, they scan primarily for text. Fortunately, with the alt tag, you can associate text with an image.

Considering that around 33% of Google’s search results now show an image pack — a snippet display of horizontal rows of image links appearing in any organic position — you’d be losing out on a ton of traffic if you don’t add alt text to your website images.

Alt text also helps you make your content accessible to users and improves the user experience in addition to helping you gain more traffic.

Website Fix #5: Add Alt Texts to All Your Images

Assign ALT text to pictures whenever possible by adding something like this to your HTML:

alt="David Ortiz of the Boston Red Sox batting from home plate at Fenway Park"

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When writing alt text, use proper sentence structure and be as specific as possible when describing the image.

6. Too little (or Too Much) Text

Search engines read text better than anything else. So, it's important to have text on your web page. Knowing this, some people cram as much text as possible into a page. As a result, search engines then struggle to extract the relevant text.

Website Fix #6: Focus the Page on One Topic

Make sure your page is readable and contains the keywords you are targeting. However, don't add unimportant text just to hit a specific word count.

7. Not Using Analytics

Even after you've created engaging content on your website, optimized, and converted traffic into leads, your work is not done! You still need to track your website’s analytics.

Web analytics are essential because they help you better understand your visitors and how they interact with your site. Without proper tracking, you won’t be able to tell what pages on your website get the most/least traffic, which devices visitors are using to access your site, and so on.

Without access to these vital metrics, you’d be left in the dark when making decisions that affect your website.

Website Fix #7: Track Metrics That Matter

It’s going to be a waste of time to track all the analytics on your website. Instead, focus on the metrics that align with your business objectives. For starters, you should track and analyze website metrics like unique page views, bounce rates, number of returning visitors, and traffic sources.

You can then analyze the data you collect to make informed business decisions that’d drive your business’ growth.

Web analytics tools like HubSpot's Marketing & Analytics Dashboard and Google Analytics can help you track all the metrics you need.

8. Slow Load Times

Nobody enjoys waiting in a queue, especially not when they have other options to choose from. You can say the same of your website visitors. They’re not going to wait around if your website takes forever to load when they could hop on the next website that loads almost instantly.

If your website loads slowly, it could be because your hosting is insufficient, you have large images across your site, you have too many redirects, or you've installed too many unnecessary plugins.

Website Fix #8: Increase Your Website Loading Speed

You can use simple tools like Pingdom Website Speed Test, GTmetrix, Google PageSpeed Insights to check your website’s speed.

To improve your website’s speed, follow these best practices:

• Choose a web hosting platform that’s designed for speed
• Compress your images
• Embed videos instead of uploading them directly to the site
• Reduce redirects
• Enable cache browsing
• Leverage a content delivery network (CDN)
• Uninstall any unnecessary plugins

9. Unresponsive Website

Mobile devices account for over 54.8% of global website traffic. Since most people use their handheld devices to access the internet, it’s in your best interest to make your website responsive on mobile screens.

Unfortunately, many website owners make the mistake of only optimizing their websites for desktop devices, thereby leaving out the larger chunk of their audience and traffic.

Website Fix #9: Optimize Your Website For Mobile

You should avoid including content that is only accessible on desktop. Avoid large header sections so that mobile users get to the content quickly. You should also ensure the font size is not too small to read.

Google Search Console has a neat feature that lets you test how mobile-friendly your website is. Here’s the test result for HubSpot’s website.

10. Poor Internal Linking

Links are essential for improving website authority on search engines. However, many website owners make the mistake of either using too many or too few links.

If there are too many links on a page, it can become distracting. And too few links could make the article or web page look less authoritative.

Another poor linking mistake is when you don’t use anchor text for internal links. You've likely come across websites with a “Click here” or some other generic text. Did you click it? Likely not.

Website Fix #10: Create an Internal Link Structure

With a tool like SEMrush, you can run a site audit to identify internal linking opportunities across your website.

You could also create a link structure that helps you naturally include internal links to existing content whenever you’re creating new blog posts or web pages.

However, as much as you want to build internal links between your web pages, don't go around linking to everything just for the sake of it. Instead, emphasize link quality over quantity. Finally, use relevant keywords in the anchor text for your internal links to help the search engine infer a relationship between the posts.

11. Poor Website Security

You probably wouldn't sleep well at night knowing your home is vulnerable to a break-in. Like you, online shoppers (or website visitors in general) also feel edgy whenever they try to navigate or shop on an insecure website.

The recent rise in personal data breaches and website hacks also makes it necessary for your website to be secure.

Now, web browsers like Chrome and Firefox show a warning, as seen in the photo below, to alert users whenever they visit an insecure website.

Website Fix #11: Enable an SSL Certificate

You can protect your customers and gain their trust by installing a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate on your website. SSL is a security protocol that creates an encrypted link between your web server and your visitor’s browser.

To know if your site is protected, check its URL to see if it starts with “HTTP” or “HTTPS.” If it’s “HTTPS,” your site is secure. If not, you need to purchase an SSL certificate from your domain provider or a site like Let’s Encrypt.

12. Lengthy Website Forms

Website forms are crucial for converting traffic into leads, but the leads will only convert if your form is done right.

Most website forms today require a lot of work from visitors to fill out. These forms might ask for unnecessary information and have several “required” fields that look pushy, leaving visitors confused or frustrated.

Website Fix #12: Ask For Only the Essential Details

Limit the content of your forms to only the information you need. For example, use only 3-5 fields in each form. Also, reduce the number of required fields, and add help text in the field's default.

This form from Hubspot's Marketing Grader shows how simple a form can be to optimize conversions.

13. No Calls To Action

Another common website mistake people make is not including a CTA on their website. You've probably spent lots of time and effort directing people to your website. But what happens once they arrive on your website? Do you want them to buy a product? Sign up for a newsletter? Share what they've read?

Whatever you want them to do, you have to ask them for it.

Website Fix #13: Add Specific Calls to Action

If you are selling a product, make purchase buttons stand out and guide visitors on the next step to take. If you want them to sign up for a newsletter or something similar, create a sign-up form available as soon as possible before they leave your website.

It's also good practice to place your calls to action above the fold.

14. No Search Box

A search box is a simple feature many websites lack today. Without a search box, it’s more difficult for visitors to find the specific web pages they’re looking for on your website.

The absence of a search box causes a poor user experience and reduces users’ time on your website.

Website Fix #14: Create a Search Box

If your website has multiple pages, you should include a search box. Then, as your website gets larger, visitors can use the search box to find what they’re looking for within seconds.

To add a search box on a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, simply place the widget where you'd like your users to see it. The home page is a great place for a search box.

15. Contact Info is Hard to Find

This is a mistake that's especially costly for ecommerce websites. If potential customers find it difficult to get in touch with you, they might lose trust in your product or service.

Website Fix #15: Make it Easy to Find Your Contact Information

Make it easy for visitors to reach out to you by including your contact information like email and phone number on different pages on your website.

You can also link to social media accounts to give visitors a way to engage with your business. If you’re stuck, you can find helpful templates, information, and inspiration from HubSpot's guide to contact forms.

16. Using Stock Images Throughout Your Website

Stock photos make it hard to differentiate your website from many other sites that use the same free images. These stock photos also don’t feel original and may create a poor experience for your visitors.

Website Fix #16: Use Original Images or Graphics

Whenever possible, take and use original photos that showcase your products or your work culture. If it’s too expensive to take new images consistently, you can use a design solution like Canva to create engaging graphics that leave a more lasting impression.

Fix Your Website the Right Way

Despite your best intentions, you could be making some mistakes on your website that cause you to lose leads, but it doesn't have to stay that way. Now that you know these common website mistakes, test out these simple solutions to optimize your site for traffic and conversions. Examine this list of mistakes against your website and see what changes you can make to improve how well your website works for your business.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in June 2010 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

from Marketing https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/6121/10-common-website-mistakes-and-how-to-fix-them.aspx

Since 86% of consumers rely on the internet to find local businesses, having a website is a no-brainer regardless of your business type.

Although building a website is great for business, you'll want to avoid making common mistakes that will stop you from getting the most out of your investment. All of these mistakes are easy to identify for free using a handy tool called Website Grader.

In this post, I'll show you the most common website mistakes we've seen here at HubSpot and exactly how to fix them if they apply to you.

1. Lengthy Page Title

A page title, like the one in the Google search result below, tells visitors what a page is about.

Search engines and browsers may cut off your page title if it's too long. From a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) perspective, a concise page title yields the best reader experience. If your page title is too long, it will dilute the importance of each term in the title. This might even prevent you from ranking well on the search engine results page (SERP).

It's best practice to keep your page title under 70 characters so that the reader can see the entire title and make a decision to click through to the post.

Website Fix #1: Use a Headline Analyzer Tool to Write Concise Headlines

Use a tool like Coschedule's Headline Analyzer to draft a concise and keyword-rich description of your page. It's a great idea to test several variations of a headline before choosing the best one. Amanda Sellers, manager of the historical optimization team at HubSpot, recommends a score of 70 or above from the Headline Analyzer tool for most headlines.

2. Long Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions are essential for drawing in visitors from search. The meta description is the text under a page title in search results. Like page titles, meta descriptions will get cut off and replaced by "..." if they are too long.

Website Fix #2: Use a Word Counter to Check Your Characters

You can use tools like WordCounter and SERPsimulator to count the number of characters in our meta description so you don’t go over the limit.

SERPsimulation, for example, shows you what your title tag and meta description would look like on the search engine result page.

3. Keyword Stuffing

We've seen many people make the mistake of stuffing their page title with keywords or targeting unrealistic keywords. For example, it’s often a futile effort if a new website in the online marketing space is trying to rank for a keyword like “inbound marketing.”

Sometimes websites target keywords that would attract a ton of traffic but fail to convert.

From a user's standpoint, using too many keywords in your content creates a bad user experience and makes it hard to read your website. As for search engines, Google Search Central mentions that keyword stuffing can harm your site’s rankings.

Website Fix #3: Conduct Proper Keyword Research

Start by creating a list of all the relevant terms used to describe your business. Then, you can break these terms up into content or topic buckets. For example, here at HubSpot, we have topic buckets like “inbound marketing,” “blogging,” and “social media marketing.”

The next step would be to fill these broad topic buckets with keyword phrases your potential customers might use when searching for that type of content.

If you already get a bit of traffic from Google, you can dig into your Google Analytics instance to find the keywords people use to get to your website.

Aside from Google Analytics, you can also use SEO and keyword research tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush for more keyword ideas.

4. Keyword Cannibalization

Keyword cannibalization is when two or more pages on your website are targeting the same keyword.

The problem with keyword cannibalization is that your web pages targeting the same keyword would be competing against each other on the search engine results page. This could result in a low click-through rate and cause a decrease in the value of each page.

Each page on your website is a new opportunity to get found online. You don't want to waste all these opportunities by reusing the keywords.

Website Fix #4: Try the Pillar Cluster Model

With tools like Moz Keyword Explorer and SEOScout Cannibalization Checker, you can easily identify pages competing for the same keywords on your website.

Once you’ve identified these pages, you can try the pillar cluster model to reorganize your website. The pillar cluster model involves grouping related blog posts into specific topic areas instead of long-tail keywords.

With this model, the individual blog posts link back to the pillar page and share hyperlinks.

5. No Image Alt Text

Search engines do not "read" images. Instead, they scan primarily for text. Fortunately, with the alt tag, you can associate text with an image.

Considering that around 33% of Google’s search results now show an image pack — a snippet display of horizontal rows of image links appearing in any organic position — you’d be losing out on a ton of traffic if you don’t add alt text to your website images.

Alt text also helps you make your content accessible to users and improves the user experience in addition to helping you gain more traffic.

Website Fix #5: Add Alt Texts to All Your Images

Assign ALT text to pictures whenever possible by adding something like this to your HTML:

alt="David Ortiz of the Boston Red Sox batting from home plate at Fenway Park"

Image Source

When writing alt text, use proper sentence structure and be as specific as possible when describing the image.

6. Too little (or Too Much) Text

Search engines read text better than anything else. So, it's important to have text on your web page. Knowing this, some people cram as much text as possible into a page. As a result, search engines then struggle to extract the relevant text.

Website Fix #6: Focus the Page on One Topic

Make sure your page is readable and contains the keywords you are targeting. However, don't add unimportant text just to hit a specific word count.

7. Not Using Analytics

Even after you've created engaging content on your website, optimized, and converted traffic into leads, your work is not done! You still need to track your website’s analytics.

Web analytics are essential because they help you better understand your visitors and how they interact with your site. Without proper tracking, you won’t be able to tell what pages on your website get the most/least traffic, which devices visitors are using to access your site, and so on.

Without access to these vital metrics, you’d be left in the dark when making decisions that affect your website.

Website Fix #7: Track Metrics That Matter

It’s going to be a waste of time to track all the analytics on your website. Instead, focus on the metrics that align with your business objectives. For starters, you should track and analyze website metrics like unique page views, bounce rates, number of returning visitors, and traffic sources.

You can then analyze the data you collect to make informed business decisions that’d drive your business’ growth.

Web analytics tools like HubSpot's Marketing & Analytics Dashboard and Google Analytics can help you track all the metrics you need.

8. Slow Load Times

Nobody enjoys waiting in a queue, especially not when they have other options to choose from. You can say the same of your website visitors. They’re not going to wait around if your website takes forever to load when they could hop on the next website that loads almost instantly.

If your website loads slowly, it could be because your hosting is insufficient, you have large images across your site, you have too many redirects, or you've installed too many unnecessary plugins.

Website Fix #8: Increase Your Website Loading Speed

You can use simple tools like Pingdom Website Speed Test, GTmetrix, Google PageSpeed Insights to check your website’s speed.

To improve your website’s speed, follow these best practices:

• Choose a web hosting platform that’s designed for speed
• Compress your images
• Embed videos instead of uploading them directly to the site
• Reduce redirects
• Enable cache browsing
• Leverage a content delivery network (CDN)
• Uninstall any unnecessary plugins

9. Unresponsive Website

Mobile devices account for over 54.8% of global website traffic. Since most people use their handheld devices to access the internet, it’s in your best interest to make your website responsive on mobile screens.

Unfortunately, many website owners make the mistake of only optimizing their websites for desktop devices, thereby leaving out the larger chunk of their audience and traffic.

Website Fix #9: Optimize Your Website For Mobile

You should avoid including content that is only accessible on desktop. Avoid large header sections so that mobile users get to the content quickly. You should also ensure the font size is not too small to read.

Google Search Console has a neat feature that lets you test how mobile-friendly your website is. Here’s the test result for HubSpot’s website.

10. Poor Internal Linking

Links are essential for improving website authority on search engines. However, many website owners make the mistake of either using too many or too few links.

If there are too many links on a page, it can become distracting. And too few links could make the article or web page look less authoritative.

Another poor linking mistake is when you don’t use anchor text for internal links. You've likely come across websites with a “Click here” or some other generic text. Did you click it? Likely not.

Website Fix #10: Create an Internal Link Structure

With a tool like SEMrush, you can run a site audit to identify internal linking opportunities across your website.

You could also create a link structure that helps you naturally include internal links to existing content whenever you’re creating new blog posts or web pages.

However, as much as you want to build internal links between your web pages, don't go around linking to everything just for the sake of it. Instead, emphasize link quality over quantity. Finally, use relevant keywords in the anchor text for your internal links to help the search engine infer a relationship between the posts.

11. Poor Website Security

You probably wouldn't sleep well at night knowing your home is vulnerable to a break-in. Like you, online shoppers (or website visitors in general) also feel edgy whenever they try to navigate or shop on an insecure website.

The recent rise in personal data breaches and website hacks also makes it necessary for your website to be secure.

Now, web browsers like Chrome and Firefox show a warning, as seen in the photo below, to alert users whenever they visit an insecure website.

Website Fix #11: Enable an SSL Certificate

You can protect your customers and gain their trust by installing a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate on your website. SSL is a security protocol that creates an encrypted link between your web server and your visitor’s browser.

To know if your site is protected, check its URL to see if it starts with “HTTP” or “HTTPS.” If it’s “HTTPS,” your site is secure. If not, you need to purchase an SSL certificate from your domain provider or a site like Let’s Encrypt.

12. Lengthy Website Forms

Website forms are crucial for converting traffic into leads, but the leads will only convert if your form is done right.

Most website forms today require a lot of work from visitors to fill out. These forms might ask for unnecessary information and have several “required” fields that look pushy, leaving visitors confused or frustrated.

Website Fix #12: Ask For Only the Essential Details

Limit the content of your forms to only the information you need. For example, use only 3-5 fields in each form. Also, reduce the number of required fields, and add help text in the field's default.

This form from Hubspot's Marketing Grader shows how simple a form can be to optimize conversions.

13. No Calls To Action

Another common website mistake people make is not including a CTA on their website. You've probably spent lots of time and effort directing people to your website. But what happens once they arrive on your website? Do you want them to buy a product? Sign up for a newsletter? Share what they've read?

Whatever you want them to do, you have to ask them for it.

Website Fix #13: Add Specific Calls to Action

If you are selling a product, make purchase buttons stand out and guide visitors on the next step to take. If you want them to sign up for a newsletter or something similar, create a sign-up form available as soon as possible before they leave your website.

It's also good practice to place your calls to action above the fold.

14. No Search Box

A search box is a simple feature many websites lack today. Without a search box, it’s more difficult for visitors to find the specific web pages they’re looking for on your website.

The absence of a search box causes a poor user experience and reduces users’ time on your website.

Website Fix #14: Create a Search Box

If your website has multiple pages, you should include a search box. Then, as your website gets larger, visitors can use the search box to find what they’re looking for within seconds.

To add a search box on a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, simply place the widget where you'd like your users to see it. The home page is a great place for a search box.

15. Contact Info is Hard to Find

This is a mistake that's especially costly for ecommerce websites. If potential customers find it difficult to get in touch with you, they might lose trust in your product or service.

Website Fix #15: Make it Easy to Find Your Contact Information

Make it easy for visitors to reach out to you by including your contact information like email and phone number on different pages on your website.

You can also link to social media accounts to give visitors a way to engage with your business. If you’re stuck, you can find helpful templates, information, and inspiration from HubSpot's guide to contact forms.

16. Using Stock Images Throughout Your Website

Stock photos make it hard to differentiate your website from many other sites that use the same free images. These stock photos also don’t feel original and may create a poor experience for your visitors.

Website Fix #16: Use Original Images or Graphics

Whenever possible, take and use original photos that showcase your products or your work culture. If it’s too expensive to take new images consistently, you can use a design solution like Canva to create engaging graphics that leave a more lasting impression.

Fix Your Website the Right Way

Despite your best intentions, you could be making some mistakes on your website that cause you to lose leads, but it doesn't have to stay that way. Now that you know these common website mistakes, test out these simple solutions to optimize your site for traffic and conversions. Examine this list of mistakes against your website and see what changes you can make to improve how well your website works for your business.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in June 2010 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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