It’s critical for a small business to have a website these days, but some make the mistake of thinking that any website is better than no website. While this is true for a clean, simple website, it is still possible to design your website so poorly that it would be better to have no website at all. This is fairly challenging, of course, but if you’re making the following five mistakes, you can get there fast.

If any of these errors are present on your website, fix them ASAP to avoid doing more harm than good with your online presence:

1. Your website doesn’t function

This is by far the worst mistake you can make. If visitors to your website are immediately treated to error messages, broken links, videos that don’t load, images that won’t stay in their designated boundaries, and the like, you need to clean house. Sometimes, this is the result of not testing your site adequately in each of the leading browsers.

Make sure that your site works smoothly and looks the way you want it to across all browsers, so that your visitors have a pleasant first experience with your company. If you don’t, and if things seem broken, they’ll browse to a competing website without delay.

2. There are walls of text

Yes, we realize the irony of complaining about this in the middle of our own pile of text. Our point is not meant to address blogs, however. We’re thinking more of your main sales pages. If your landing looks like a copy of the Declaration of Independence, we salute your patriotism, but feel sorry for your visitors.

First, edit down your copy until you’ve just got your core points, without all the fluff. Your readers will appreciate your focused copy. Then, if you have a lot to communicate, break things up with images and different presentation graphics. It will be more visually interesting and will be a lot more likely to be absorbed by readers.

3. Navigation is confusing

It’s critical to make navigation as clear as possible on your site. Unless you’re going for a uniquely creative presentation that suits your business, the tried-and-true tab system you see on almost every site will do just fine. If you want a lot of different pages, break things up into well-organized tabs and sub-tabs (accessed through drop-down menus) so that visitors can find things on the first try.

Once you have a sensible sitemap in place, make sure all of your links are working and send users to the right place. A speedy and smooth browsing experience is the goal, here. Nothing else will do.

4. Your site is riddled with typos

Nothing says “unprofessional” like visual clutter and spelling mistakes. Take the time to go over your text carefully. If you want some advice from a professional writer: read it out loud, slowly, and do it in a quiet place. (Yes, actually read it out loud!) Also, don’t forget to run spellcheck. Then, have someone else proofread it to make sure there are no mistakes.

Errors in your text will cause people to lose confidence in your business. Pay attention to detail, and you can avoid a major reputational pitfall.

5. There are no clear CTAs (calls-to-action)

Does your website tell all about your business, but then leave readers to figure out the next step on their own? Don’t be coy! Be clear about exactly what action they should take next. This could be creating an account, starting a free trial, reaching out for a free consultation, or something else. Whatever it is, make sure you are explicit and give them a big, clear link to click if they want to move forward.

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