When I’m talking to people about what I do, one of the most common misconceptions I face is that there’s still a strong belief that running a website is easy to do. Running a successful website is far from easy, it’s blooming hard work!

So I’ve put together a list of the top 7 problems and issues you’ll soon discover when running a website. My goal is not to put you off, but to highlight that it takes experience, skill and bucket-loads of effort to sustain a great website.

1) Web hosting downtime and poor response times

Your web hosting will go down at some point. Forget those claims of 99.9% uptime guarantees from your hosting company, which mean nothing anyway. Sometimes the server might still be accessible, but the page loads so slowly that your website becomes unusable.

Just accept it. When you least want your website to go down, it will go down. The trick is to find a web host who is proactive about their server management, namely that they’re already working on fixes by the time you’ve noticed your website is not working.

2) Random drops in visitors

Any seasoned website owner will agree with this problem. At some point your visitor levels (and/or sales) will just drop for no apparent reason. You’ll spend hours looking over the statistics trying to work out why. Sometimes you might be able to determine that you’ve had a a random drop in rankings in the search engines.

Get up, dust yourself down, and move on. Often it’s better to spend time getting more visitors rather than establishing the actual cause of the drop.

3) You get demotivated and bored

When you’ve been running a website for a while, you do lose interest. Perhaps your earnings aren’t increasing as quickly as you’d like? Perhaps you’re not making any sales? Perhaps you’ve run out of ideas? It’s usually people who persevere through the low periods that become successful.

Try to find ways to inject new ideas and inspiration into your website to give you fresh motivation. I recently wrote a great article on how to come up with fresh ideas.

4) You’re being sued

If you have a website that allows visitor-generated content, such as reviews, comments or forum posts, then there’s every chance that you’ll end up with something offensive on your website. Offensive remarks, in their various guises, can lead to law suits.

Moderate all visitor-generated content. No exceptions. If the content sounds as if it might be an issue, remove or reject it. Moderating user-created content is hard work, but it’s cheaper than being sued.

5) You have no time to update your website

Updating your website includes many aspects, such as moderating comments, adding new articles, adding new products, adjusting the site design, etc. Great websites are constantly evolving and growing.

If you don’t have the time to update your website, then hire someone, be it by outsourcing, via a contract or an employee. If your time is worth more focused on other tasks, then it’s worth spending a little money to keep your website fresh and up-to-date.

6) You need to promote your website

If you want your website to grow, you need to promote your website. However, promoting a website is easily one of the most time consuming aspects of running a website. You need to spend time getting links to your website, you need to create a presence on social networking platforms, you need to establish relationships with other individuals in your community, you need to spend time on marketing materials, etc. The list just goes on.

Just because you have a website, it doesn’t mean you’ll automatically get visitors. Promotion is hard work, and there are no quick solutions either.

7) Competition and copycats

Once you have a great website, it’s not long before someone copies you or starts doing something that’s very similar to you. It’s often because someone wants to replicate your success for themselves. However, they usually don’t realise that they’d be better off doing something different and unique.

Don’t resort to childish behavior (as tempting as it might be to throw a tantrum)! Sometimes you might have a legal case if there’s a copyright dispute. However, I’ve found that working with the competition can yield some great results. This includes advertising exchanges, selling adverts on your website, possibly selling your website to the competition, or even buying the competition!

Any more challenges?

These are the challenges that I’ve personally faced with running my portfolio. What challenges have you encountered with running a website?

Here are my collection of ideas and reasons why Social Media is so damn hard to master.

1. You spend your time updating your status to reflect today’s menu, or that you’re cleaning the fluff from out of your belly button.
2. You’re busy reading everyone’s social marketing ebook on “how to get instant traffic with social media in 5 minutes and only 2 brain cells”.
3. You have no friends in real life, so why would you expect to have friends in a virtual environment?
4. You can’t be bothered to put the effort into learning about it.
5. You are too proud to ask for help.
6. You are too cheap to pay for advice from a consultant.
7. You think that you’re better than everyone else.
8. You spend hours with social media platforms and spend all your time just reading other people’s content.
9. You want the world, but only offer a speck of dust in return.
10. You speak, but you don’t listen.
11. You believe that your contribution to the world is telling everyone how brilliant your website/product/content is.
12. You have 50 social media accounts and forgotton the passwords for 49 of them.
13. If you do have friends, you’ve asked them to digg/stumble/tweet your content so often that they’ve blocked you on their instant messaging clients.
14. You think that all celebrities on twitter actually bother to use twitter themselves rather than get an assistant to do it for them.
15. You look for people with 2000+ followers on twitter and then beg them to retweet your tweets (about your website/content/product).

“In the year 3000 YouTube, Twitter & Facebook will merge into one super time wasting website called YouTwitFace.” – Conan O’Brien

I hope that you enjoyed the article. Please let me know if you have any other ideas to add to this article!