When your potential leads and customers land on your website, there are a few things you probably want them to do. You might want them to read about your latest product, check out your blog, or get in touch with your customer service team.
If your web design is difficult to navigate, confusing, or just plain unappealing, visitors are unlikely to do any of these things. Instead, you’ll probably notice that you have a high bounce rate and low conversion rates.
If this sounds like your website, it’s not too late to fix it. Here are 5 web design mistakes to avoid, and a few easy fixes to improve your website and ‘wow’ your prospects:
1. Confusing Design and Layout
These days, it can be ‘trendy’ to reject the most common web design norms. The problem? If your visitors can’t see where your navigation bar is, or understand what your business is actually offering, they’ll quickly click back to the search results. This can sometimes happen if you haven’t locked down your branding, and you may have too many individual components like color palettes, images, and fonts going on at once.
What to do: Visitors expect websites to follow certain design conventions. Make sure you stick to one color palette and ensure your website is easy to use. If you’re not sure if your website is confusing, ask a friend or family member to do a couple of simple things like navigate to a blog post or find your contact page. If this takes too long, it’s a sign that you may need to simplify.
2. Not Enough Whitespace
Whitespace allows you to improve readability, maximize clarity, and make it easier for visitors to understand what they’re reading. If your website doesn’t have enough whitespace, the content can be overwhelming for them to read, and they’re unlikely to stick around long enough to determine what you’re hoping to convey.
What to do: Recognize that whitespace has a purpose. This is particularly crucial for your home page, where you can use it to draw attention to your most important points.
3. Not Being Responsive
These days, there’s no excuse for having a website that doesn’t respond to different types of devices. Nobody wants to zoom in on your website when they’re trying to browse it on a phone or tablet. With more than 58% of site visits happening from mobile devices in 2018, you can’t afford to have a non-responsive website.
Responsive web design will ensure that your information is presented in a way that’s logical, readable, and attractive, without your visitors needing to zoom and scroll.
What to do: This one is simple. Most newer website themes are responsive, and any good web developer will automatically ensure that your website is responsive if it’s time for an update.
4. Weak SEO
Your SEO and web design need to work together so that you can get the best results for both. For example, great design will incorporate intuitive site architecture that makes it easy for users to get to the information they need. Great SEO will incorporate architecture that allows Google to easily crawl your entire website.
What to do: Make sure you incorporate long-tail keywords and ensure that each page serves a purpose. If you’re about to redesign your website, make sure your designer takes SEO into account, preventing any issues with ranking down the line.
5. Too Much Going on
If your website has too many images, too much text, videos, different widgets, and other distractions, it can not only be confusing but can take a long time to load.
If your website takes more than a couple of seconds to load, you’ll be losing potential visitors who will instead click back to the search results and choose one of your competitors.
What to do: Make sure that the most important information about your business can be seen immediately after someone lands on your site. It’s also a good idea to ensure all images and videos are as small as possible and check whether they’re really necessary. You should also regularly conduct speed tests to see how quickly your website is loading and check for improvements.
Web design can have a massive impact on your business. If you’d like to hand your web design over to the professionals, we can help. At VIP, we can be your full-service marketing team, handling everything from web design to PPC, social media to SEO. Get in touch today.