Avoid Common Website Pitfalls: Lessons from 3 Real-World Case Studies

Web wins: Real-world examples of website improvement by Kika

Theory is one thing, but seeing real results brings the importance of website maintenance to life. At Kika, we’ve transformed struggling websites into powerful business tools across diverse industries. Each project begins with thorough diagnostics and ends with measurable improvements that directly impact our clients’ businesses.

In the following sections, we break down the three most common website challenges and feature real-world examples of how we helped our clients overcome them. These case studies illustrate how identifying and resolving these issues can dramatically improve your website’s performance, security, and user experience.

#1 — Poor user experience

It takes milliseconds to make a good first impression online. And if your website fails to impress? Research shows that 88% of customers avoid revisiting a website after a bad experience. When visitors encounter confusing navigation, slow-loading pages, or outdated information, they don’t stick around to see what else you offer. Today’s consumers expect intuitive, responsive experiences – and they’ll quickly abandon sites that feel difficult or outdated.

Poor user experience isn’t just frustrating for visitors; it directly impacts your website’s performance metrics. Search engines like Google track user behaviour signals such as bounce rates, time on site, and engagement patterns. When these metrics suffer, your search rankings follow suit, creating a downward spiral of reduced visibility and diminished business opportunities.

The usual suspects behind poor user experiences

When we audit underperforming websites, we consistently find these common culprits:

• Unresponsive designs: Over 60% of all website traffic comes from mobile devices – and about 50% of users will leave a site if it has a badly-designed mobile interface. Responsive web design is no longer optional – it directly impacts both conversions and search engine rankings.
• Complex architectures: Websites with confusing navigation paths, buried information, and unnecessary page hierarchies make finding information feel like solving a puzzle. Users quickly abandon sites when they can’t easily find what they’re looking for.
• Outdated content: Websites with stale information, inconsistent design elements, and duplicate content confuse users and undermine their trust. When messaging no longer aligns with your current brand, it has an adverse impact on your audience.
• Technical bugs: Issues like 404 error messages, broken links, and non-functioning features create dead ends for users trying to connect with your business. Beyond frustrating visitors and increasing bounce rates, these technical problems signal to search engines that your site lacks quality and relevance.

Real-world example: The investor relations firm with declining engagement

A Canadian investor relations company approached Kika after noticing declining engagement metrics and hearing client complaints about their website’s usability. Although they offered sophisticated financial services, their website wasn’t effectively showcasing these capabilities or guiding users to the right solutions.

THE DIAGNOSIS

Our comprehensive site audit revealed multiple interconnected issues:

• Broken internal images, leaving key sections looking incomplete
• Orphaned web pages, making them invisible to both users and search engines
• Page load times exceeding industry benchmarks by nearly 40%
• Content with messaging lacking clarity and consistent terminology

OUR APPROACH

Rather than applying band-aid fixes, we implemented a holistic solution:

• Repaired all technical issues uncovered from the audit, prioritizing user-facing elements.
• Implemented a full website reskin to refresh the brand and create visual consistency.
• Rewrote key content sections to clearly communicate their value proposition.
• Created logical paths to orphaned pages and manually submitted them for search engine indexing.

THE RESULTS

Within 60 days of implementation, the company saw measurable improvements across all key performance indicators:

• The overall health score increased to 95% (up from 63%), creating a smoother, more reliable user experience.
• Page load time decreased by 60%, reducing bounce rates and improving user satisfaction across all devices.
• Average session duration increased by 40% as users engaged more deeply with better-organized content.
• Conversion rates for bookings increased by 28% thanks to clearer messaging and more intuitive pathways.

These improvements didn’t just create better numbers – they translated directly into improved SEO performance, increased business opportunities and stronger client relationships.

#2 — Slow website performance

In today’s fast-paced digital environment, speed isn’t just a nice-to-have feature – it’s a critical business factor. Research shows that 53% of mobile visitors abandon sites that take longer than 3 seconds to load. Every additional second of load time reduces conversions by an average of 7%. When your website lags, your business results inevitably follow.

Performance issues affect more than just user patience – they directly impact your online visibility. Google’s Core Web Vitals are now key ranking factors that measure loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability. Poor performance scores can relegate even the most beautiful, content-rich sites to the depths of search results where few potential customers will discover them.

Common performance roadblocks

When diagnosing slow-performing websites, we typically encounter these key issues:

• Heavy media files: Oversized images and uncompressed video files create massive bottlenecks in website loading. Modern websites often dedicate 60-80% of their loading time to visual media alone, making proper compression and delivery critical, especially for mobile users on limited connections.
• Inefficient code: Bloated websites carrying unnecessary scripts, excessive HTTP requests, and legacy JavaScript libraries burden browsers with needless processing tasks. Each redundant element adds fractions of seconds that quickly compound into frustrating delays for your visitors.
• Excessive plugins: Each plugin added to your website brings its own code, requests, and potential conflicts with other installed plugins. What starts as “just one more feature” often cascades into a complex web of interdependencies where plugins fight for resources and create unpredictable interactions that slow everything down.
• Poor hosting: Even perfectly optimized websites suffer when hosted on inadequate hosting infrastructure. Distant server locations, insufficient resources, and outdated technology create bottlenecks before your content even begins its journey to the user’s browser, undermining all other optimization efforts.

Real-world example: The design-build company with bloated code and media files

A Vancouver-based design-build firm approached us with a challenging dilemma. Their website had become painfully slow, weighed down by numerous third-party services and high-resolution images and videos. As a visual-focused business, showcasing their impressive portfolio of office interior designs was essential for demonstrating their expertise. However, the combination of unoptimized code and heavy media files created frustrating load times that were negatively affecting audience perception of their business.

THE DIAGNOSIS

Our performance audit identified several critical issues:

• High-resolution images were being served at full size even for thumbnail displays.
• The site was making over 120 separate HTTP requests on the portfolio page alone.
• Multiple redundant plugins were performing similar functions.
• Their hosting plan was insufficient for their traffic and media-heavy content.

OUR APPROACH

We implemented a comprehensive optimization strategy:

• Minified and optimized code to eliminate redundancies and streamline resource loading.
• Implemented responsive image techniques, reducing file sizes by 60-80% while preserving visual quality.
• Audited their plugin list, removing redundant tools and replacing others with more efficient alternatives.
• Migrated the site to WP Engine, a managed hosting provider optimized for media-rich WordPress sites.
• Deployed Cloudflare as a content delivery network to cache assets closer to users and reduce server load.

THE RESULTS

The performance transformation was dramatic and immediately measurable:

• Google Core Web Vitals improved from a 34% score to a 93% score across all metrics.
• Page load times decreased by 67%, bringing the website under the critical 3-second threshold.
• Overall site health dramatically improved from optimized code and media files.
• Organic search visibility increased by 34% over three months as performance improved.

For a design-build firm where visual presentation is paramount, these improvements didn’t just enhance technical metrics – they ensured their digital showcase properly reflected their commitment to quality and attention to detail.

#3 — Weak security protocols

Website security often remains invisible until something goes wrong – at which point the consequences can be disastrous. Without regular security checks and software updates, your website becomes vulnerable to DDoS attacks, hacking, malware infection, and data breaches that can compromise both your business operations and your customers’ trust.

The security landscape is constantly evolving, with new vulnerabilities discovered daily. What was secure last month may be exploitable today. When business owners treat security as a one-time setup rather than an ongoing process, they create an expanding attack surface that sophisticated hackers are all too eager to exploit.

Security weaknesses that invite trouble

Our security audits regularly identify these critical vulnerabilities:

• Outdated software: When businesses neglect regular updates to core CMS installations, themes, plugins, and other third-party services they leave their websites vulnerable to exploitation. Hackers actively scan for sites running outdated components with known security flaws, making them easy targets for automated attacks.
• Insecure code: Poor development practices like insufficient input validation, weak authentication mechanisms, and outdated programming patterns create invisible backdoors into your systems. These vulnerabilities enable sophisticated malware infections such as malicious redirects, virus downloads, and data theft.
• Unencrypted data: Modern websites must protect all data in transit and at rest. Inadequate encryption practices including expired SSL certificates, unsecured form submissions, and improper data storage practices expose your customers’ personal information and your business intelligence to interception and theft – potentially leading to legal and financial consequences.
• Misconfigured server: Even small mistakes in server setup can create major security gaps. Default admin credentials, unnecessary open ports, and improper file permissions might seem insignificant, but they’re frequently the entry points attackers use to gain initial access before escalating their control over your entire digital infrastructure.

Real-world example: The business consultation firm with a compromised website

A B2B corporate consultation service contacted Kika after experiencing increasingly frequent website disruptions. Years of neglect had created a digital patchwork that was becoming progressively unstable, with pages loading incorrectly, features breaking randomly, and backend access becoming unreliable. This technical deterioration not only affected functionality but also left gaping security vulnerabilities that could have exposed sensitive data at any moment.

THE DIAGNOSIS

Our security assessment revealed a troubling picture:

• Legacy code and outdated plugins contained known vulnerabilities that had been unpatched for years.
• Technical errors and conflicting plugins made updates impossible without breaking functionality.
• No systematic backup protocol was in place, putting years of content at risk.
• Several suspicious files indicated previous security breaches had already occurred.

OUR APPROACH

Given the severity and extent of the issues, we recommended a complete rebuild:

• Created a fully refreshed web design with optimized UX/UI layouts. 
• Preserved and migrated all valuable content while discarding compromised components.
• Tailored new SEO-friendly content that conveyed their unique offering. 
• Implemented a multi-layered security approach with regular automated scanning.
• Established proper backup protocols and recovery procedures.

THE RESULTS

As a result of the rebuild, the company saw immediate improvements across multiple dimensions:

• Enhanced security protection eliminated vulnerability alerts and suspicious activity
• Streamlined architecture and consistent codebase created a foundation for easier future maintenance
• The modernized design and improved functionality led to a 42% increase in qualified lead generation
• The implementation of modern SEO techniques led to improved search visibility.

While a complete rebuild represents the most intensive intervention, this case illustrates how accumulated security debt eventually forces more dramatic measures than ongoing maintenance would have required.