In today’s digital world, web design is crucial. According to research, over 94% of visitors distrust poorly designed websites. As a result, site owners miss out on opportunities to grow in the form of potential leads.
A website serves more than just showcasing your goods or services. Visitors can learn more about you, your offerings, and your unique selling points from this comprehensive portfolio.
So, if you want to improve your business’ online reputation, try to differentiate your website from your competitors. To increase retention rates, add great features. Most importantly, make sure your website is free of design flaws so that users can engage with it without any hassle.
Here are 10 common web design mistakes that can give the wrong impression. To improve the visitor experience and achieve long-term success, avoid these mistakes.
What is web design?
Everything you see on a website is defined by its design. Let’s make this definition more comprehensive.
Content, color scheme, style, functionality, and tone are the five essential components of any website. All of these components should be conceptually organized so that users can quickly find the information they need.
For example, an e-commerce website should display the most popular items at the top. Your niche should be reflected in the color scheme. It should be easy for visitors to find what they want. Additionally, the purchasing process should be simple.
To accomplish these goals, you need an attractive web design that enables users to browse the pages and make transactions with ease.
Good web designs increase visitor retention and conversion rates. On the
other hand, poor designs lead to low profits and high bounce rates.
1. 404 Errors
These errors occur when someone tries to view pages on our website that are no longer accessible. It is possible that the product has been discontinued or the URL has changed in the case of e-commerce.
In any case, they provide a negative user experience to our visitors and show a lack of attention to our website. Google can penalize the positioning of a website if it finds too many such pages, assuming that the content is outdated.
The best way to prevent this error is to scan our website periodically using tools such as Google Search Console. In this way, you can redirect such web pages or inform search engines that the content is no longer available.
Another option to enhance the user experience is to personalize the 404 error page. You can turn a bad experience into a good one by providing such a navigation option. You may even be able to make the user smile. For example, GitHub encourages you to search for websites and has included a Star Wars reference.
2. Your website takes too long to load
If your website is loading too slowly, you should reconsider some of the design components. If your website loads quickly, your visitors will have a better experience on it. There are many tips available to improve the speed of your website, so we will look at the basics to get you started.
According to a Google study, the likelihood of a bounce rate rising to 90% increases as page load times climb from 1 to 5 seconds.
Optimizing the images on your website, especially those on your homepage,
should be your top priority. Reduce the size of your images and optimize your content wherever possible because nothing turns visitors off faster than a landing page with graphics and images that take too long to load.
The loading speed of your website can also be slowed down by heavy plugins, themes, and modules. Updating these components to more recent versions can speed things up, especially if you haven’t done so in a while.
If the way your site’s plugins work changes, make sure you test everything thoroughly before updating your live site. This way, you can verify that nothing was broken by the upgrade, and once everything is tested, you can apply the changes.
3. Missing/Bad Call to Action
This is a continuation of the last point, but it goes one step further. If you’re getting a lot of traffic but not reaching your goals, like getting a product or signing up for a free trial, you can’t properly guide your users.
Sadly, a lot of websites overthink their call-to-action and wind up with ambiguous or occasionally outright perplexing statements.
Making your call to action clear and concise is the biggest and most effective way to do this. Your users mostly come to your site for this reason.
Make sure they can fulfill the duties you have in mind and that you are completely clear about what you want them to do.
Since it converts a visitor into a customer or follower, this technique is commonly referred to as conversion marketing in the marketing industry. To enhance your client and user onboarding process, you can also consider improving your conversion rate.
Your broad plan will outline what you expect a new user to achieve. Do you want them to become regular readers who interact with your content and contact you, or do you want them to join in and start buying things? Make sure your design works and allows you to accomplish whatever you choose.
4. The website lacks the right information
If you don’t have information about the businesses and interests mentioned in the initial paragraphs of your webpages, you’re missing out on important traffic. Visitors typically have enough time to scan 28% of the text on a web page throughout their visit. Visitors are interested in learning more about these things.
For example, if you’re a business, you should provide important information for your clients, such as business hours, as well as your store locations and contact details.
If you want to attract customers to your physical location, you should definitely consider adding Google Maps to your location section and having accurate address information on hand so people can find your business quickly.
Your website will never generate any good revenue if your information is missing or incorrect. Verify the accuracy of any contact details you provide. Make sure the email address you provide on your website is a live inbox that you can access.
Remember to stay on top of your interactions with your customers and respond as often and promptly as you can if they are sending emails to an address that is never reviewed. This will save you and your visitors time.
5. The website is not mobile-friendly
A key part of User-Friendly Web Design is ensuring your site looks great and works smoothly on all devices.
If your website is not responsive, mobile-friendly, and scales well on small screens, you are missing out on a lot of visitors. This is because if users on mobile devices are unable to access or understand your page properly, they will not come back to try to use it.
According to Statista, mobile users accounted for about 52.4% of global internet browsing traffic in the third quarter of 2018.
If you want to maintain this large percentage of interested users in your content, you must ensure that you can meet the expectations of more than half of your visitors, who want you to provide them with a high-quality mobile experience.
6. The size of the web page is too large
We support interactive websites, dynamic content, stunning images, etc., but we never ignore the purpose of any element.
Adding too many images, animations, or videos to your website can make it difficult to navigate and, most importantly, take longer to access. If the latter occurs, you will have two problems: Google will penalize the positioning of your website, and users will likely abandon it if they are unable to access it within three seconds. Do not add content to your website without a purpose, and always try to optimize the images you collect.
7. Black Hat SEO
Effective SEO is essential for your website’s positioning in search engines. But not everything is acceptable. Designers will occasionally be willing to provide you with shortcuts to help you get to the top of Google’s search results. When it comes down to it, our advice is clear: turn around and go the other way.
Some of the behaviors that Google often penalizes include keyword stuffing and text over-optimization, which is the practice of repeating keywords in an excessive and unnatural way. Similarly, a few years ago, it was common practice to use text that was the same as the website’s background, but could only be seen by search engines.
Cloaking is another black hat SEO tactic. It involves misleading the user into different content while serving content specific to search engine spiders. Currently, Google actively pursues this behavior and penalizes it heavily.
Common sense is essential: always bet on high-quality writing and user-interesting, excellent content that maintains its naturalness and consistency.
8. Poor quality images
You should avoid doing the exact opposite and reject the use of low-quality, pixelated, or distorted images to prevent the problems associated with high-resolution photos that we were talking about earlier. Images are extremely important, especially for online retailers.
Whenever possible, show your facilities, goods, etc. using original images. If this is not possible, use high-quality image banks.
9. Font size/color issues
If the text and main navigation menu of your blog are incomprehensible to your users, you have a serious problem. To maximize readability, you should choose the best fonts and colors so that users can extract the most information from your site with minimal work.
You risk losing a mobile user before they finish your call to action if they can’t see the font or if it doesn’t automatically shift to the appropriate size and layout.
If your website contains a lot of content, treat your users with kindness by using eye-friendly colors. Make sure your site allows readers to read your information comfortably and that your font and background colors aren’t too harsh because the last thing you want is to cause eye strain.
For mobile users, who rely on a website’s responsiveness to automatically format paragraphs to fit the unusual viewing dimensions of mobile devices, text is also very important.
It will be extremely difficult for mobile users to scroll through your website line by line if it’s not responsive. You could lose a customer because most people would rather find another source of reading than deal with that kind of hassle. Avoid ignoring the responsiveness of your text elements on the page.
10. Thin or incomplete content
Websites that prioritize their design over their content will eventually rank lower in search engine rankings.
Images are used by most popular websites to enhance their content.
Additionally, search engines will start rewarding your website with higher rankings the longer users stay on the page to view that content.
What’s the best way to keep them on the page? By creating content that speaks directly to your customer persona and writing it in a way that engages them emotionally.
By identifying your brand voice and solving your customers’ problems, you can increase your sales and search engine rankings.
Always keep in mind that your content should be long and in-depth enough to cover a topic well, be relevant to your target audience, and be relevant to the keywords.
Finally, it should explain what you do, how you do it, and who you do it for. It should also be written in a way that keeps the reader interested.
Conclusion
Websites are great resources for lead generation and brand reputation. According to a recent study, over 84% of consumers trust companies with attractive websites.
After all, businesses need attractive and engaging websites that can interact with customers, not just any old website. As a result, the main factor in the success of any website is its design.
The user experience, functionality, and overall success of your website can be greatly improved by avoiding these common web design mistakes. You can design a website that not only attracts users but also keeps them interested and satisfied by prioritizing mobile responsiveness, load time, easy navigation, and other important elements.
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