Website projects typically begin with an assessment of the current situation. We go through what's working and what needs improvement. The same observations come up in a design audit, where our experts evaluate the site and identify the most obvious areas for development. Ideally, website analytics or other data are available to support these findings.
Below are the most common problems we encounter on websites that need redesigning or updating. They are problems because the sites fail to serve their purpose: they don't keep visitors on the site, they don't guide visitors to the desired destination, they generate few leads, or they fail to convince – meaning visitors rarely return.
It may also be that the site gives the target audience completely the wrong impression of the company, or an irrelevant perception of the product or service. The site may also fail to reflect the brand, or communicate the wrong things entirely. In these cases, bounce rates tend to be high, organic traffic low, lead conversions poor, and search engine visibility weak.
So what are these problems, exactly?
It's common for a website to grow out of its original concept over time. The UI solutions and visual design choices that once drove the design become dated. Content may have evolved differently than originally planned. Updates to products or services may have required new ways of presenting information, causing the visual structure of the site to work against them. Or the site may have been maintained by multiple people, resulting in a patchwork appearance.
It often happens that unnecessary clutter accumulates on a site, like trinkets on a sideboard. Your own eyes get used to it, but fresh eyes see only a disorganised mess. Content may have been updated with varying intentions and needs. Stylistic coherence suffers, and professional consistency disappears.
There's also the fact that styles and trends evolve. What felt credible a few years ago already looks outdated.
SOLUTION:
The overall look of a site should be reviewed periodically with fresh eyes. Many things can be sharpened without needing to rebuild the entire site from scratch. Content elements and visual definitions can be aligned even without deep technical expertise, as long as the implementation was done smartly on a platform that doesn't require touching hard-coded elements. A credible website evolves and stays current.
Images, videos and animations used on a website are a significant undertaking in their own right. Especially in the AI era, the apparent ease of production easily leads to a situation where almost every image or video is its own isolated idea, with no consistent thread running through the visual language. Photographs, illustrations, image editing, graphics, animations and videos don't build a single coherent brand – they look more like a flea market. Well-crafted brands, on the other hand, stand out for exactly the opposite reasons. You can recognise a coherent brand's imagery even without seeing the logo.
The technical quality of images – whether still or moving – along with image sizes and proportions, is yet another variable. Here, too, it's important to establish clear guidelines, so that both the visual impression and technical functionality are what they should be. The site must be accessible and work responsively across all devices.
SOLUTION:
Check whether your brand guidelines define the elements mentioned above. If so, compare the images, videos and animations in use against those definitions. Outside eyes help here – an external person finds it easier to see things from a distance.
If your brand book or visual identity guidelines don't cover these things – or if the definitions are vague – that's where to start.
Sometimes websites simply don't work well. The reasons can be many: long loading times, image or other files that are too large, slow image rendering, unnecessary calls to external resources, or missing HTTPS protocol and mobile optimisation tags.
SOLUTION:
It's important to get the site into shape. Some of the issues that need fixing require a developer or technical expert. Others can be fixed relatively easily in-house.SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) aims to increase the free, organic traffic that reaches a website via search engines. Wrong content, incomplete metadata, or a confusing site structure can weaken search engine visibility. Poorly optimised pages get buried beneath better ones. Search results are based on data crawled by bots, which index and rank pages tirelessly – and the algorithms show no mercy. Poor site architecture, missing XML sitemaps, missing heading tags, page titles, meta descriptions, or broken links all affect how search engines ultimately rank your pages. This kind of carelessness needlessly hands an advantage to competitors.
Alongside traditional SEO, GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) have emerged as vital disciplines. These aren't just technical extras – they're essential in an era where AI and voice search are changing the way information is consumed. While traditional SEO focuses on appearing in a list of links, GEO and AEO focus on getting AI systems (such as ChatGPT or Google Gemini) to choose your content as the answer to a user's question.
SOLUTION:
These issues are, in principle, straightforward to fix – if you have the expertise. Ideally, the site is built correctly from the start, with all the factors that affect search engine and AI discoverability taken into account. If the site was built carelessly, discoverability issues should be addressed without delay. Otherwise the site won't be found properly, and your entire investment is partly wasted.
If search engines rank your competitors' sites above yours for the key topics and keywords your customers use to find your services – you have a problem.
Many sites look functional at first glance. But more often than not, the site's content doesn't follow a deliberate SEO strategy. Pillar pages and internal linking may be incomplete, a keyword or content strategy may be missing or not consistently followed. The content may also not be relevant to the target audience at all.
If search engines rank your competitors' sites above yours for the key topics and keywords your customers use to find your services – you have a problem. Or if your ideal customer searches for the service you offer using different words than the ones you use to describe it – you have a problem. This is quite common in a world where language is saturated with business jargon. If your customer is searching for "pizza" and you're offering "comprehensive satiation solutions", you're unlikely to find each other.
People increasingly ask direct questions ("What's the best way to..."). In an AEO strategy, content is built to answer these questions as clearly and structured as possible, so that your site surfaces as the "zero result" or direct answer.
AI-powered search engines don't just list pages – they compile answers from multiple sources. In GEO, credibility, expertise, and presenting facts in a format that AI can easily extract and cite are paramount.
If your content isn't optimised for these new platforms, your brand becomes invisible in the conversations happening inside AI assistants. You don't just want to appear in search results — you want to be the source that AI trusts.
SOLUTION:
A professional SEO/GEO audit helps identify the most critical gaps. Retroactively fixing a large body of content is time-consuming, which is why it's important to establish clear rules within the site development and content production process – and to embed those rules in day-to-day work.
Modern content marketing requires moving beyond mere keywords towards mastering context and questions. Technically, this means more precise use of structured data (schema markup) and content that directly addresses the user's need. A site optimised for humans, traditional bots, and modern language models is the winner in the content marketing of the future.
Not all websites have been genuinely designed from the user's perspective. Understanding the real user's mindset, needs, and desires is essential when designing a site. An inconsistent or frustrating user experience can drive a potential customer straight to a competitor.
It also sometimes happens that even if the user experience was well-managed from the start, the site, its content, the offering, the market situation, or user needs have changed over time – meaning the originally designed experience no longer functions as intended.
SOLUTION:
Know your customers. Define your ideal buyer personas with their needs, desires, motivations, and purchase barriers. Map the customer journey for each persona and understand the context in which they encounter your company's website.
Also make sure your site analytics are measuring the right things. In addition to analytics, use tools like heatmaps (such as Hotjar) and surveys to find out what real users actually do on your site. Once you understand why users aren't reaching the pages you want them to reach, you can fix it.
Hardly anyone would watch a salesperson who stands with their hands in their pockets, glassy-eyed, clutching materials from two years ago, failing to respond to a potential customer's attempts to make contact. Yet the majority of websites are exactly that half-comatose figure.
A website is, almost without exception, the place where the majority of a company's customer interactions happen. Even the most enthusiastic salesperson can't meet customers around the clock, everywhere at once. The website is typically the most important touchpoint between a company and its target audiences. It's a waste to let any interaction be passive, static, and out of date.
Hardly anyone would watch a salesperson who stands with their hands in their pockets, glassy-eyed, clutching materials from two years ago, failing to respond to a potential customer's attempts to make contact. Yet the majority of websites are exactly that half-comatose figure.
A well-functioning website attracts the target audience, guides visitors to the right pages, and efficiently converts visitors into leads. The lower the threshold of the conversion points a company has managed to offer, the more likely it is that leads are captured early in the buying process.
By the time a prospect is ready to call a salesperson themselves, the decision-making process is already well advanced. It's good fortune that they contact your company specifically. But before that point, a great deal of research, comparison, exploration, dreaming, planning, and convincing has already taken place. Companies that aren't present during those phases are unlikely to close the deal.
AN EXAMPLE:
Two quality log cabin manufacturers compete for Finnish summer cottage builders. One trusts its reputation, its excellent sales team, and that famous "comprehensive service" believed to be better than the competition. So does the second company.
But the second company also invests in serving the target audience in the early stages of the buying process. The first waits aggressively for the phone to ring or an email to ping. The second offers information, assistance, and inspiration related to building a summer cottage – financing calculators, inspiration galleries, planning guides – in other words, lead magnets. When an interested prospect downloads a guide from the site, the sales team picks up the lead and enters the process at the very moment the need is just forming. A skilled salesperson takes the lead in hand and guides the cottage builder step by step towards realising their dream.
Before closing, the cottage builder wants to verify that the quoted price is in line with the market. They call a couple of competitors. Those competitors are unlikely to have influenced the formation of the need. Their only way to win the deal is to push the price down. The passivity in the early stages of the buying process thus forces competition on price – a tricky position, since low price is often a perverse signal of lower quality. And there's always someone willing to go even lower.
SOLUTION:
Developing conversion points is, in principle, straightforward. It's worth experimenting agilely with different approaches and building a measurement framework that makes it visible which things work and which don't. Inspiration for implementations can be found, for example, by benchmarking competitors.
When conversion points are properly implemented, a company has the opportunity to collect leads from its website 24/7 – at the exact moments when a potential customer chooses to engage: one early in the morning, another during working hours, a third in the middle of the night while on holiday. This iterative, testing-based work is important to do, even if it takes time. Once a reliable way of generating qualified leads is found, it becomes possible to scale by increasing volume.
Responsiveness means that a site functions as designed across all devices: desktop, phone, tablet, or even a car's touchscreen – regardless of resolution or input method (keyboard, mouse, touchpad, finger).
Responsiveness has been discussed for a long time. The term was popularised by Ethan Marcotte, who published his book Responsive Web Design back in 2011. Often discussed in the same breath is the mobile first principle: the site is optimised to work primarily on mobile devices, based on the smallest screen size. This influences choices around image sizes, column layouts, flexible positioning, horizontal scrolling, and navigation in UI design. The idea is that if a site works on mobile, it will work on larger screens too.
The prevalence of mobile use and new design paradigms have significantly influenced how modern websites are designed. The variety of UI elements decreases (there's no value in implementing column layouts, image proportions, or navigation in multiple ways), while the focus shifts to the content itself. This creates better opportunities to differentiate through quality content.
Some sites have been built incorrectly or carelessly from a responsiveness standpoint. The code may be flawed, or the content may be unsuitable. Responsiveness shortcomings affect many things: algorithms penalise the deficiencies and the page ranks lower. The user experience is also poor, which in itself undermines visitor trust in the brand.
SOLUTION:
Technical fixes will likely require professional help. A skilled developer can quickly identify where the problems are. Content-related issues can often be fixed in-house – though here too, code often dictates what can be done.
TIP:
If your site has a Google Analytics script in place, you can easily see what proportion of your users access the site via mobile. It's probably an increasing share. It's really important that the site works properly on mobile devices.
Websites in the 2020s are expected to meet standards quite different from the early days of computing. GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) sets strict requirements for how websites must be implemented. Sites collect a wide variety of user data. Data protection obligations must be taken seriously – authorities impose sanctions on companies that don't handle these matters professionally.
GDPR has also changed the competitive landscape for hosting platforms. Ten years ago, open-source solutions (such as WordPress) were popular even among businesses. Now that companies are required to handle data processing professionally, the balance has shifted towards licensed platforms. The professional HubSpot platform, for example, makes it easy to meet GDPR requirements.
A professional platform makes life easier. If you're your company's data protection officer and your site is built on the back of open-source plugins, and you're not entirely sure how a volunteer developer community updates its code – you're probably not sleeping well at night.
Website security is also affected by the quality of integrations, and by whether the site uses SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption and HTTPS rather than unencrypted HTTP.
SOLUTION:
If you're unsure how your site has been implemented, whether GDPR matters are properly handled, or whether the platform you're using is secure – it's worth getting professional advice.
A website's fitness for purpose and effectiveness should be assessed against the goals set for it. If the purpose of the site is to serve as a "digital business card", then a minimal approach may suffice – though a site in that role is about as useful as the physical business card itself.
If, on the other hand, the site is meant to reach a target audience, facilitate interaction, generate leads, help close deals, or strengthen customer relationships – then those are exactly the things you should demand from it.
If you'd like help with any of the above, or simply want to talk through the topic, get in touch with me.