Your website is the central aspect that is essential for your online presence. That’s why you need to ensure that you design it in the right manner. When you are designing your website, mistakes will happen and are inevitable.
However, you can prevent your business from committing blunders by looking at some common web design and development mistakes. These mistakes can cost you big in terms of organic traffic and conversions.
In this article, you will explore various mistakes shared by web design experts to avoid while designing your online storefront, aka your website. By avoiding these mistakes, you will be able to improve the overall user experience on your website.
Mistakes in Web Design: Things to Avoid to Drive Organic Traffic
Here are some common mistakes shared by professionals specializing in web design, which will help you improve your overall website in a lot of ways, as given below:
● Difficult Navigation:
The first mistake while developing a web design is rendering navigation difficult on your website. Users would like to get information conveniently and quickly. If they are not able to find information as soon as possible, they will jump to the other website as soon as possible.
If the navigation on your website is disorganized, it won’t encourage users to browse it. Disorganized navigation makes it difficult for users to find the pages they require. You will drive more users off your page as they won’t be able to find any information easily.
With disorganized navigation, users won’t be able to engage well with your website. It will take the users to unexpected places in your menu, or have pages disappear from your navigational structure. Users can’t find a page they want. Furthermore, this process can become too frustrating for them.
On the other hand, easy navigation makes your website look organized, convenient to browse, and earn leads with due effect.
Some of the best ways through which you can improve your website’s navigation are:
-
Outlining your navigational
hierarchy
-
Ensure easy access for the users to
your homepage
- Check your links twice to ensure they are working properly.
● Unfavourable Choice of Colours:
One of the worst mistakes while designing a website can be choosing an unsuitable colour pattern. The first thing that a visitor will notice on your website is its colour palette.
Sometimes, some companies end up using too many colours, which can be quite overwhelming for users. Using a lot of colours renders your site confusing for the customers, making it hard for users to know where to look at.
As colours are known to have an influence over the identity of a brand, you need to ensure that you select the right colours for your page.
You can consider the following things to rectify poor colour choices:
1.
Focus on a colour palette
consisting of three or four shades.
2.
Select colours that reflect the
goals and vision of your brand.
3. Understand the psychology behind the colours you choose to ensure they influence your target audience in the right manner.
● Lack of Responsive Design:
Web designs that are responsive on cell phones are the most important part of a seamless internet surfing experience. Over 50% of internet traffic comes from smartphones. Yet a lot of businesses avoid optimizing their websites for mobile users.
If your website doesn’t have a responsive design, you won’t be able to offer a great experience for users browsing on mobiles and tablet devices. They will end up browsing your website’s desktop version on mobile, which will make it difficult for them to read the details and navigate your site.
You can fix this issue in the following ways:
-
Use testing tools to check whether
your website is mobile-friendly and optimize accordingly.
-
Use a website theme that encourages
mobile responsiveness.
- Integrate responsive elements that can be used on the smartphone versions.
● Slow Load Times:
Having a website that loads on the screen slowly is definitely a big death knell for your online business. It will deter people from staying on your website.
In a world where people want answers quickly, a slow-loading website is bad for your business. It will prompt the users to jump to another site.
Users expect a webpage to load within one or two seconds. Hence, if your site is taking more than two seconds to load, start optimizing it to ensure better performance.
Here’s what you need to do to improve your page’s loading speed:
-
Use page speed tools like Google
PageSpeed Insights to analyze the loading speed of your page and optimize it
accordingly.
-
Compress heavy images or other
sorts of elements to speed up your site.
● Too Many Elements:
Some sites are known to fill every empty space with something, whether it's a lot of text or a wall of photos. Overcrowding is one of the most common mistakes that will turn the user back to search results.
If you have a lot of elements on your website, you will drive users off the page before they can even learn about your business.
You can fix this issue in the following ways:
-
Lower the number of elements on
your website.
-
Reorganize your website and put
elements that are actually necessary on your site.
- Utilize your white space properly instead of overloading it.
● Uninspiring CTAs:
Call-to-action, also known as CTA, gets people on your website to take the next action, whether it’s to purchase a product or subscribe to any specific service. If your CTA buttons are not being used on your website or aren’t as actionable as they are required to be, it will be a big disaster for your website.
Users should be informed about what your business does. They also need to be provided with the simplest ways to convert using your CTA buttons.
Here’s how you can fix your CTA in the following ways:
-
Use attractive CTAs.
-
Drive attention with your CTAs.
- Conduct A/B testing on your CTAs to check whether they work or need to be improved.
● Hard-to-Read Fonts:
Fonts that cannot be read easily are easily one of the major design flaws that can increase the bounce rates on your website.
Selecting the right font for your website is as important as the colour scheme. If you are not having a suitable font, your audience won’t be able to read your information properly.
Sometimes, the font on your website can be too small or big, too hard to read, or too numerous. Sometimes, the colours used in your font may also clash.
Here are some essential ways through which you can fix this flaw:
-
Use the right font size that is
suitable for your website.
- Use a sans-serif font for body text to ensure it is web-compatible.
To Summarize
Website design is extremely important for your online presence. The more convenient it gets, the better your conversion rates will be. At the same time, there are some notable mistakes that can take your overall online presence down and drive less traffic and sales.
By avoiding these mistakes, you will
be able to attract organic traffic to your website and keep them engaged,
ensuring better conversion rates. Thus, you will be able to reach out and drive
more sales and profits with due effect.