Nothing hurts the first appearance of your business as a poorly designed website. It takes only a few seconds for the visitors to determine whether they like your website or not, whether they will stay or leave.
As you can understand, your website has to catch the attention of the users within a short time and keep them engaged for as long as it can. The only thing that can ensure it is a brilliant design.
Since a website is a repository of tons of texts, images, and videos, sometime it may get overwhelming and various mistakes may happen. And every mistake takes you a step closer to frustrating the users and increasing the bounce rate. Also, a poor web design hurts SEO and negatively impacts your website ranking on the search engine result page.
Whether you already own a website or planning to get one, comprehensive knowledge of the common (and impactful!) web design mistakes will help you to fix the issues or be cautious from the very beginning. Without further ado, let’s dive in then.
8 Website Design Mistakes You Should Avoid
1. Busy Design
You want to have it all – colours, quotes, motion UI elements – everything. It all looks well in your imagination but not on your website!
The visitors need some time to get adjusted to your website and a busy design with lots of elements puzzle them.
Instead of stuffing numerous elements, pick the essential ones. Minimalism is a trend these days and when done correctly, it encourages people to interact more with the site.
2. Confusing Navigation
Website navigation is about creating an optimal and logical user journey. If your site has navigation issues, people may not find your products/services. And no discovery means no conversion!
Here are a few things that may complicate your site navigation:
- Too many menu options
- Placing important information in unusual places
- No clear CTA button or interlinking to suggest the next step
Website navigation should be intuitive. No matter how unique design elements it features, the interface should be intuitive enough for first-time visitors to easily find everything.
3. Issues With Website Content
You know all about your business but your visitors don’t. It’s your responsibility to make them aware of your offerings, your USP, and everything they should know about your business. It makes them feel connected with your business and also inspires trust. Here are a few things that may go wrong with the content:
- Too much technical jargons or difficult words
- Vague copy without mentioning specific offerings
- Only text-based copy – no image, video or banner
- No use of bullets or different subheads that enhance readability
- Outdated content, low-quality images and videos, cheesy stock photography
- Use of fonts or colours that strain eyes
- Keyword stuffed content that is not human-centric
Also, make sure not to add too many pop-up ads that block content visibility.
4. Does Not Resonate With Mobile-First Approach
A mobile responsive website is no more optional but essential these days. More than half of the website traffic comes from mobile devices. Therefore, offering a superb mobile experience is of paramount importance. In fact, it’s not enough for a website to be mobile-friendly, but it has to be developed with a mobile-first approach.
Here are a few issues you may find in a website that’s not mobile responsive:
- Images and copy don’t automatically scale to the mobile screens
- The site doesn’t have click-to-call functionality where the users can click on a button and directly call your business
- The menu options are too small to tap
- CTA buttons are too small or too long
Remember, mobile accessibility is important both for user experience and SEO. Therefore, paying no heed to the mobile experience is one of the worst possible mistakes while designing a website.
Free website templates may not help you build mobile responsive websites if you don’t have adequate tech expertise. That’s why it’s better to engage professional website development services to build a website that offers a seamless user experience on different devices.
5. Slow Loading Speed
Today’s visitors don’t wait for a long time for a page to load. Studies estimate that people often bounce if a website does not load within 3 to 5 seconds. You may think that loading speed is not a web design elements but let us tell you, it’s a crucial one. No matter how much appealing your website is, people may not wait to see it if it takes about 10 seconds to load! So, what’s the point of integrating all the advanced elements if the users cannot check them out!
No matter whatever design element you incorporate into the site, make sure to optimize it properly.
6. Missing Contact Information
Every business is unique and it presents unique information specific to its niche on the website. However, some information remains constant regardless of the niche you are operating. Yes, we are talking about contact information.
It is a huge priority and this single information instantly increases the visitors’ trust in your site and business. You can feature it in the header or footer section of the site for easy visibility or dedicate a contact page. Make sure that the users can easily find it.
7. Disruptive Pop-Ups
You want to showcase all your offerings with large pop-ups – we get that. But it can frustrate your users and encourage them to bounce.
Pushing the visitors too much to subscribe to your newsletter, buy your products or engage your services only irritate them. It is one of the worst web design mistakes and negatively impacts user experience.
Instead of bombarding the visitors with ten random full-screen pop-ups, it’s better to create one high-converting pop-up. If you own a long single page web application you may use a maximum of two pop-ups at the proper interval.
Let your users get accustomed to your website for some time before you showcase the pop-up. They should spend at least 30 seconds on your site and learn the basic information about your business.
8. Not Having A Creative 404 Page
A 404 page is a landing page to inform the visitors that the requested page is unavailable or doesn’t exist. Usually, it drives people to close your site window.
The point here is to own a creatively designed 404 page that doesn’t frustrate the users. A visually appealing 404 error page underlines that you care about the users’ experience and are interested in retaining them on the site. You can try different things to ensure that, for instance:
- Lead the traffic to the home page
- Lead them to the blog
- Integrate a search bar to allow the users to find a product or service
- Pop-up a chatbot to help them find the right thing
Not having a creatively designed 404 page is a terrific web design mistake that you must avoid.
Wrapping Up
We hope you have got a clear understanding of how some common yet avoidable mistakes may ruin the user experience on your website. If you don’t want to take a risk, it’s better to engage a professional website design company. With long experience and expertise, web designers can integrate advanced design elements into your site and optimize these well.