All business websites look a little bit different, and many design elements of your home inspector site will come down to personal preference.

But there are a few design no-no’s you should almost always avoid, no matter your taste or your industry. Check your site today for these 5 critical errors.

1. Too many fonts.

Once you see all the font options available, it can be easy to get carried away.

“I’ll use this font for my headers, and this font for my menu, and this font for my text…”

A good rule of thumb is to stick to just two different fonts per site—one for headers/menu options, the other for body copy.

Not sure which two fonts to pair together? There’s an app for that.

FontPair.co is a free site that suggests great-looking font combinations hand-picked by designers.

While all home inspector websites will be a little bit different, there are some mistakes you should avoid no matter what your site’s layout or content looks like.

2. Patterned backgrounds

Patterned backgrounds on a website almost always make us cringe immediately.

In fact, we searched specifically for examples of “good” patterned backgrounds for use in this post, and couldn’t find a single one we felt confident enough to cite.

That right there should tell you—unless you’re working with a highly talented web designer, stay away from patterned backgrounds at all costs.

Instead, stick to a solid background in a subtle color. When in doubt, you can’t go wrong with a solid white background.

3. Broken links

A broken link is exactly what it sounds like: a link that takes the visitor to an error page instead of the page they’re expecting.

Broken links are bad because not only do they inconvenience the reader, they take away from your credibility.

There are many reasons broken links can happen, especially if you’ve had your site for a long time, have changed the titles of pages or have switched hosting providers.

Luckily, there’s an easy way to check your site for broken links that takes just a couple seconds.

Go to BrokenLinkCheck.com and type in your URL. It’ll return a list of all the broken links on your site—hopefully it’s not too long.

Clicking on the little link that says ‘url’ next to each broken link will show you the page of your site that contains it, so you can go in and correct it.

4. Not optimizing for mobile

In 2014, mobile web traffic surpassed desktop web traffic for the first time.

This tells us something: approximately half (if not more) of your website visitors will be checking out your site from a mobile device. And if your site isn’t optimized, that’s half your traffic that will probably click away as fast as they came in!

The easiest way to optimize your site for mobile is to use a theme—Wordpress or otherwise—that’s mobile responsive. Most modern themes released within the last few years will have this feature.

If your site isn’t mobile responsive and you don’t want to change themes, we strongly recommend you invest in a web developer to produce a mobile-friendly version of your site.

5. Hard to find contact info

If the visitor wants to contact you, don’t make them search for a tiny contact link hidden in your footer!

We recommend having your phone number within your site’s header, so it’s displayed on every page of the site. Another great option is to include a contact form on all or most of your pages, either at the bottom of the content or within the sidebar.

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