Today I went to verify ownership of a site in Google Webmaster Tools and received an error message telling me that the verification had failed and the file was empty. Typically the HTML verification file, which was uploaded to the root directory of the site to verify ownership, would simply be blank.
Upon further investigation it appears that Google has updated the HTML Verification file and the HTML file now contains:
google-site-verification: googleefaXXcdXXXXXXXXX.html
When visiting a website today and attempting to use it I was met with a message that said “if the page freezes please use IE”.
Being a Firefox user, I hit the back button, went to a competitor, made my purchase and went about my business.
Any company serious about making it online needs to ensure that their website is accessible by the main browsers as, if not, you can potentially be losing a big percentage of your sales!
Don’t become another statistic and, at the very least, ensure that your site performs in both IE and Firefox as, after all, they account for approximately 93% of browser usage.
Many website owners may be looking at their analytics accounts and thinking “I’m sure I am getting more traffic than this?” The chances are, they actually are!
As people are using newer browsers like Firefox, they are utilising more of the useful extensions and privacy options, one of which is an option where you can choose not to run JavaScript.
Now the big problem with this is that if you use a program such as Google Analytics that rely on JavaScript tracking codes to track visitors to your website, visitors with JavaScript disabled will not be tracked.
The way to cross reference this is to regularly check your analytics data against your websites log files and that way you will be able to see just how many visitors are invisible to your analytics account.
Did you know it only takes 8 seconds for your website’s visitors to decide to leave your website?
First impressions really count in business and they can make the difference between your business’ success and failure.
Things that can make visitors hit the dreaded back button are:
Are you making any of the above mistakes? If so you know what to do, fix them!
