5 common website design mistakes
As the first point of contact between potential customers and your business, your website must convey your businesses' ideals and values quickly and effectively.
Not only is the aesthetics of your website important, but the user experience must also be excellent to retain and convert potential customers.
Many business owners fall short by having a poorly designed and un-optimised website which fails to generate leads, sales or conversions.
In this article we explore 5 common website design pitfalls that business owners encounter.
The importance of your websites' design
A crucial point with a successful online presence is having a well designed website.
By having a professional team design your website, it will build trust with your customers by improving your businesses' credibility. Along with this, a well designed website will increase engagement with your content;
An increased engagement generally means a good user experience, which will equate to more leads, conversions and sales.
The 5 common website design mistakes
You may be tempted to build your website in-house with a simple drag-and-drop editor on WordPress, however this can be detrimental to your businesses' online image due to poor performance and inexperience in UX and UI design.
Below are 5 common mistakes with website designs which you can avoid, especially if you have your website designed and developed by an experienced team.
1 Poor website navigation
Poor website navigation means that users cannot browse your website efficiently. Every important page or piece of content should be easily found to navigate to.
If your website has a poor navigation, it is likely that you'll be seeing a high bounce rate from visitors of your website.
To combat this common mistake, ensure your header has clearly labelled and an organised structure, a search bar and other elements such as breadcrumbs on deeply nested pages.
2 Slow page loading times
A large proportion of websites are highly un-optimised, sending way too much code and large images to the user browser.
Un-optimised websites lead to slow load times and laggy-feeling interfaces, resulting in a poor user experience, which in turn will reduce your customer / user base.
To combat this mistake, ensure your website is highly optimised for fast load times and page changes. Read our guide on improving the speed of your website for more tips.
3 Un-optimised mobile layouts
If your website is un-optimised for mobile layouts, you'll be negatively impacting a large percentage of your website traffic (~60-70% of traffic is from mobile devices on the majority of sites).
A poor mobile experience on your website will not only negatively impact your mobile users but search engines will also down-rank you, meaning less organic traffic.
To combat this mistake, ensure your website is designed and developed with a mobile-first approach and has a usable and interactive design across all screen-sizes.
4 Annoying layouts and features
Websites which have a cookie popup, newsletter signup popup, discount code popups or other disruptive banners and ads will greatly impact on your users experience.
It is highly likely that if you're using all these annoying popups on your website that a large percentage of your website users will exit the website and go to a competitor with a less annoying and disruptive website.
To combat this mistake, ensure you only include the necessary popups such as cookie consent popups. If truly required that you have discount code popups etc, delay the time in which they appear and make them un-intrusive to the general flow of the user.
5 Inconsistent branding
An overuse of different colours, typographies and font sizes across all of your businesses' profiles online will impact on your perceived credibility, along with this, fonts which are hard to read will reduce engagement.
To combat this mistake, remain consistent with your branding whether on your website, Instagram or printed leaflets. Don't go overboard with the number of colours you use on the website. Your chosen typographies should also be easy to read and pass WCAG accessibility contrast tests.
Conclusion
Your website is an essential part of achieving a successful online presence. By avoiding these 5 common mistakes, you will achieve improved user engagement which could lead to more of the goals your website is built for; be it leads, conversions, sales or foot traffic into your brick and mortar location.
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