Solution:  If its bad enough to turn lots of readers away, you probably need a new design (or a design tune up).Check out Elegant Themes for some great looking themes (I recommend Divi), or you can hire us.

Solution:  The first place to look is your hosting.  If you are using some “XYZ hosting” shared plan for $2.99 a month, you may need to upgrade to a more reliable host.  Check out Bluehost or Liquidweb.  Beyond that, make sure you are resizing your images to the actual sizes that you plan to use them as, before you upload (or use this plugin).

Solution:  This is a huge pet peeve of mine.  I know, no one is perfect (and I’m sure I make grammar mistakes too), but make it look like you at least spent 10 minutes editing and proofreading.  If you don’t know the proper times to use there/their/they’re, it may be time to hire a editor/copywriter or take a class.

Solution:  use spellcheck, hire an editor/copywriter or take a class

Solution:  Use a pop up software like Optinmonster that allows you to trigger your pop ups after a certain time delay, after other pages are clicked, after the user scrolls, or only when a user makes a move to click “back” or “exit”.

Solution:  Never publish a “top 10” type list without using bullet points or numeric lists.  Its in your default wordpress post editor, takes one click.   Use it.

Solution:  Respect the environments people might be in when clicking over to our site, and allow the user the choice of clicking play before starting the video.  Anyone who has ever been embarrassed by a loud auto-play video while at work, will thank you.

Solution:  Be discerning about networks that allow shady advertisers – even if their promised payout is a lot, its not worth the tradeoff in ruining your site and your reputation.

Solution:  I get that this is done to increase clicks and potential ad revenue, but is it worth it at the cost of losing readers?   Keep the pagination to only 1 or 2 clicks, and only if really necessary (i.e – if your post is only 200 words long, it should NOT be paginated).   More than that, and you WILL lose people.

Solution:  Allow an option for a user to view the entire gallery as thumbnails on all one page, so I can click immediately to the images I want to see, and not have to click through 50 others just to get there.

Solution:  Delete comic sans, and pretend it never existed.  Same goes for any fonts like that.

Solution:  Images help our brains break up and process content – you need to use them.   Buy a good digital camera and take your own pictures, buy stock photos, or create your own images with Picmonkey.

Solution:  Keep your pop ups to a minimum – keep the clean and well designed, giving people an easy option to close them out (nothing worse than a pop up that you literally cannot exit out of).  Optinmonster is my best recommendation for pop ups that have great timing features, are well designed, and only show once.

Solution: There needs to be enough contrast between your background and text, that say, your grandma could read it legibly.  If not, darken up that text – your readers will thank you too.

Solution:   don’t EVER use red or dark text on a black background, period.  Beyond that, 99.5% of websites don’t do black backgrounds right, so just don’t even go there.

Solution:  Hello, its not 2002 anymore.  Just don’t use them.

Solution:  Take some time to actually test your ad placements and see which ones are being clicked, and which ones aren’t.   If they aren’t helping, they are probably hurting, and you should remove them.   Lucky Orange software can help you with this process by showing you where your users are clicking and spending time.

Solution:  if you’ve got a crazy background, crazy fonts, and tons of colors – there is too much going on to keep me reading your words.  Keep it simple.

Solution:  1 or 2 are “MAYBE” ok, but pages that make every point with a laundry list of animated gif are a huge turn off to me (and likely a lot of your readers).

Solution:  Ask for a sample of the product so you can actually try it out, talk to people who have used it so you can report about their successes rather than recommending it from your own perspective.  Be authentic in your message and clear about why you are recommending something, and whether its your own recommendation, or someone else’s.   Also, make sure you are using proper disclosures to inform users of any paid content (Check out my webinar on Blogging and the FTC for more information on this topic).

Solution: Its possible to get your point across by making valid arguments and not being directly offensive.  Telling them they are stupid if they believe anything else, is not going to get people coming back to your site.

Solution:  A HUGE percentage of content today is curated to some degree.  Most people who curate, spend some time to add some of their own voice/content/feedback as well.  But there are also a ton of sites who just publish RSS feeds or take people’s work, copy a paragraph and hit publish.  Just don’t do it.

Solution:  Stick with Google fonts, preferably Serif or Sans serif based text fonts that are designed for use in web copy.

Solution:  You start your blog about one topic and over time you either lose interest in that topic, or you find that your audience resonates with you more when you cover something else.  This is VERY common – people grow, change, and interests change.  There is nothing worse that trying to stay passionate about writing on a topic that is no longer interesting or relevant to you.  There are a lot of ways to approach this dilemma – Sometimes a spinoff or name/blog url change is necessary.  Other times if the blog name still works – you can make a change to the logo and branding to better incorporate the new focus.  Ultimately though, if people are clicking over to your site and expecting to find a post about one thing and see a logo and branding that is about something totally different – you’re going to lose people.  Find a way to update your name, your url, or even just your logo and branding to fit more cohesively with your new niche.

Solution:  If you’re taking on a topic that is difficult to describe or explain without video or a live demo – then take the time to shoot a video and show someone how to do it.  Spending 3 paragraphs trying to describe an intricate bit of work with typed out words, will only frustrate users.

Solution:   Use Adobe Kuler to find a color scheme that is designed to work well together.

Solution:  Don’t be a jerk – if you didn’t come up with it, don’t play it like you did – give proper credit where credit is due.

Solution: If you must use a pattern (say on a parallax background effect), make sure your text has a white or solid color box behind it to set it apart from the busy background.   Sometimes you can get away with this if you are just using 3 or 4 words as part of a call to action, but if you’re uncertain, go ahead and frame your text.

Solution:  If the sole purpose of your blog is to drive visitors to a product or service that you offer – find ways to talk about your niche without making every post be a pitch for your product.  Add value, solve problems related to that topic.   Serve a greater need with the majority of your posts and people will see your expertise and willingness to help, and be much more interested in becoming a customer when the product hasn’t been forced down their throat.

Solution:  (click here for an example) –  if you want a graphic background, either use one large graphic that is big enough to cover the entire screen, or create a graphic at a site like BGPatterns that is intended to be repeated either horizontally, vertically or both (but for the love, please keep it simple).

Solution:  Increase your margins – both around your content areas, as well as around your paragraphs and graphic elements.   Its much easier on the eyes when the content is nicely spaced and easy to process – if my brain is too tired looking at the mess on your page, I’m not going to have the patience to want to read anything you have to say.

Solution: I get that not everyone wants to get into the potential drama/management of comments, but your readers want to see that you are engaged and interested in their feedback.   If not comments, then post a contact form or social media profiles where they can find/reach out to you.

Solution:   There are millions of other free themes out there, just pick another one, make it look like you halfway tried.   Better yet, make a small investment into a great looking professionally designed site like Divi from Elegant Themes (my fav!).

Solution:  Pick 1-3 complementary fonts tops, and keep it at that.  If you must go with a font that is harder to read (say if its part of your branding), then pick one and only one.  Here is a great site that will give you ideas for good font combinations, created with Google’s Font library (which can be installed onto any wp site with the Google Fonts plugin)

Solution:  Make sure your images are not stretched horizontally or vertically – this can often happen with CSS that affects images that it wasn’t intended for.   If its happening to you – check your CSS file (right click on the image and go to “inspect element”).   If you don’t know how to modify custom CSS, have a web designer (or us) check it out for you – should be a simple fix.

Solution:   I get that some bloggers user their site to air out some of your personal frustrations, but getting TOO personal can be a big turn off.   Hopefully I don’t need to go into gory details as to what type of stuff this would include, but if it feels weird to be writing about it, it likely will feel uncomfortable for your readers to read it.

Solution:  Money is appealing, and it can be tempting to take money for a sponsored post that is totally unrelated to your site, because money is money.  Before you decline, work with the advertiser to see if you could work it in a way that would fit the voice and topic of your audience – making it a better fit for your audience will be a better result for the company as well.   If they are unwilling to adapt, decline the offer.

Solution:  Video is great, but add a little text into the post to set the context for what I can expect in the video.  I’m not going to hit play if I have no idea what the video is going to be about.   Pro tip:  You can use Rev.com to create a transcript of your video (only costs $1 per minute), and post that to add content to your blog post which will tell both your readers and Google, what the post is about – plus its great for SEO!

Solution:  a blog post titled “My Daily Thoughts” is not going to compel me to click and even see what is is about.   Make sure you think about writing your titles in a way that is compelling to click on, and to read – draw interest & create curiosity.

Solution:   many plugins will output errors when there is a coding conflict, which often can be easily fixed by keeping your plugins updated.  If I see a lot of php errors, I may just assume your site is either completely outdated and abandoned, or has been hacked and may be a threat to my system.   Make sure you are regularly checking your WP version, your plugins, and your theme for compatibility, and immediately address any errors or issues that users report.

Solution:  If I see a post with 3000 comments that all have links to viagra websites or SEO software programs or russian websites, I’m going to assume that you are clearly not as active or engaged on your blog as you’d like for us to think, and its not going to give me an incentive to keep reading.

Solution:  This is a tough one to solve, as typically if your posts are all about you, all the time – then that may just be who you are, and we can’t do a lot to fix that.  If that is the case, you may find a smaller following of people who think you are as amazing as you do. But if you are open to growth, try writing your posts with a mindset of helping your readers in some way – maybe you are part of the story, but its educational or entertaining in nature – something that will offer a benefit to the people reading your blog.  But people will grow tired of it if your blog is nothing but selfies and stories about YOU that they can’t draw some sort of personal interest from.  (That is unless you are a Kardashian).  🙂

Solution:  unless you are Huffpo, or Mashable – its really hard to do this without losing your audience in the process.  Pick a niche, and try to stay on topic most of the time.   This article might help if you are looking for inspiration.

Solution:  Write your posts as if you were writing to a 13 year old…  ok well maybe not a modern 13 year old, as we know they have their “own” language nowadays – LOL/YOLO/4eva…   but focus on wording your content with clear, simple, easy to understand language.  That’s great that you’re a Harvard PHD, but myself and probably most of your readers are not.  We don’t want to read someone’s blog post that sounds like a graduate thesis that I need to pull up the dictionary to understand. Keep the age/genre/location specific slang to a minimum unless that is the ONLY audience you ever intend to write towards.

Solution:  if I see you posting 20 times a day and each one looks pretty slapped together, I’m guessing your content is pretty watered down and not worth my time.  Spend more time on less posts, and make the post that you DO publish, totally awesome.

Solution:   we get it, you are awesome, and you have great stuff that you want to sell.   You’ll have a lot more success by providing value, offering great free content that wows people, and then allowing people to dig deeper if they want to find your more premium content.   No one wants to learn from a used car salesman.

Solution:  If you’re writing about “Fashion trends for 2015” and I see that phrase 25 times within your first 2 paragraphs, I’ll leave you to continue your love affair with Google, because you’re clearly not writing for me.   Instead, you should install the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin and run through their blog checklist every time you post.  If you want to dig deeper on how to optimize your blog for SEO, check out my recent Blogging and SEO workshop.

Solution: if I need to click somewhere else to find the content that I want, and I can’t find it in 3-5 seconds, I’m usually gone.   Think about the most IMPORTANT elements/pages/features of your site.  Those should be highlighted front and center in your primary content navigation.  Move things like privacy policies, terms pages, and possibly even contact pages, advertising pages and about us pages to a secondary navigation bar.

Solution:  overly dark pictures, fuzzy pictures, bad composition – it happens to people, but if every picture on your blog is like that, I’ll lose interest pretty quickly.  Solution:  edit those bad boys with Picmonkey before you post them, takes only a minute and makes a world of difference.   Beyond that, consider taking a course in photography to hone those skills – graphics on your site are SUPER important.

Solution:   long posts are good for SEO so this is tricky, but word vomit is a major turn off (especially if you like to use a thesaurus to add unnecessarily complicated vocabulary to make your blog post longer).  Say what you need to say without delving into the dictionary to try to hit some magic blog post word count.   If you need to make it longer, broaden your topic or include quotes or other sources to expand the article.

Solution:   Pick a tone of voice for your blog, and stick with that.  If your blog has a tone that includes regular cussing/profanity –  keep that tone throughout your posts, and don’t apologize for it.  Those that are offended will leave, but those who you resonate with, will stay and will love it.  If you never take that tone and then suddenly publish a blog post filled with F-bombs, you’re going to shock and upset a lot of people.   Be who you are, use your personality, write in the voice you’ve established for your blog – and stay consistent with that.