Looking for a website design tool

Murmansk

I've had a website for my business for more than five years that I made myself using Wix. It's served me well and cost me nothing as I have the free version of Wix where their advert appears at the top of the site.

I've had some emails from Google suggesting my site is lacking in some way that need attending to but I can't make any sense of what they are saying is wrong. 

I'm thinking I might be happy to pay for my site to be hosted but that seems to cost a minimum of £7.50 a month which seems a big jump from free and I wondered if anyone had any recommendations?

I'm fairly good with tech in general but not with website building or coding so I need something aimed at those with limited skills in this area and it's only a simple site.

Tiexen

I would say ignore Google - if your happy leave it as it is - or you need to pay a lot more for a decent website

PHK

Tiexen said:

I would say ignore Google - if your happy leave it as it is - or you need to pay a lot more for a decent website

I don't think that's particularly good advice. The OP has a business website, if the problem is a security issue then ignoring it will mean (at the least) not appearing in search results or may even appear on unsafe site lists. 

OP, what does the email say? Does your business take payments on the web ? Is there a contact form or email address on the site. What's the address of your site?

Neil_Jones

This is probably regarding search engine optimisation.

https://support.wix.com/en/article/search-engine-optimization-seo

Murmansk

This is what Google said to me in an email:

Search Console has identified that some pages on your site are not being indexed due to the following new reason: Soft 404 If this reason is not intentional, we recommend that you fix it in order to get affected pages indexed and appearing on Google. And then info_filled Why pages aren’t indexed Pages that aren’t indexed can’t be served on Google  Reason Source

ValidationTrendPagesSoft 404Website

Not Started

1Duplicate without user-selected canonicalWebsite

N/A

0

Neil_Jones

Now it makes sense.

There are two types of 404 errors - the soft one mentioned and the "page cannot be found" one.

The former is usually a  search engine error, it thinks there's a problem and there isn't, so upping sticks and moving provider for those is akin to using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

The latter is your more common 404, page cannot be found, which means what it says on the tin.

You may have a link to the page in question, though your message from Google suggests there's a page there but it can't see it (by accident, deliberately or otherwise).

DullGreyGuy

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/technical-seo/404-vs-soft-404-errors/

The above gives a reasonable explanation of 404 -v- soft 404; soft 404 isnt an official response but what Google calls it when it try to get a page, gets a 200 all ok status, but then is presented with a page that says the URL doesn't exist which is common when using a CMS system rather than getting a proper 404 error. 

Does Google list the URLs that are being impacted? You just need to check that those pages are running properly... it could be a one off error in the CMS, could be you restructured your site and didn't put 301 redirections from the old "about.html" to the new "aboutus.html" page

Murmansk

DullGreyGuy said:

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/technical-seo/404-vs-soft-404-errors/

The above gives a reasonable explanation of 404 -v- soft 404; soft 404 isnt an official response but what Google calls it when it try to get a page, gets a 200 all ok status, but then is presented with a page that says the URL doesn't exist which is common when using a CMS system rather than getting a proper 404 error. 

Does Google list the URLs that are being impacted? You just need to check that those pages are running properly... it could be a one off error in the CMS, could be you restructured your site and didn't put 301 redirections from the old "about.html" to the new "aboutus.html" page

Thanks for those replies, I've not done anything at all to my site recently so it's a bit of a mystery. I'll take a look at the link - thanks for that

Murmansk

The problem seems to be related to "1Duplicate without user-selected canonicalWebsite"

I think it relates to the mobile version of my site on Wix so I have cleared out all the stuff on the mobile version and put in some text, an image and note saying it's under construction. 

I'm hoping that this might make it OK for Google and am waiting for their web crawler to take a look

Please don't think that any of what I have said means I have much idea of what's going on here!!

Ultimately, I am puzzled why my website seems to have been OK for five years but has recently become problematic when I'd not changed it.

Neil_Jones

Murmansk said:

Ultimately, I am puzzled why my website seems to have been OK for five years but has recently become problematic when I'd not changed it.

Google changes/tweaks the way the search engine spider works, but doesn't tell anybody.  You only find out about it when the algorithm thinks you need to know.

DigSunPap

Wix is good if you're just looking to create a landing page as the interface is very simple. It depends what sort of site you are going for. I would recommend getting to grips with Wordpress. I used to work for a start-up real estate agency and I built I pretty solid website from scracth using Wordpress. You can learn most of what you need from YouTube. But it provides you with a lot more functionality than what Wix does.