4 Fatal Website Design Errors

Is your website design up to scratch? Discover whether you’re making one of these 4 fatal website design errors which could be impacting your traffic, conversions and bounce rates.

Getting your website design right is essential to generate traffic, sell your product or service and improve bounce rates. However, there are some businesses who don’t recognise this and haven’t invested wisely in their website designs. In fact, according to Hubspot, only around 22% of businesses are satisfied with their conversion rates on their website. Does this sound like you? Take a look at this list and see whether you’re making the same mistakes with your website design.

1) Poor website speed
According to Hubspot, 39% of people will stop looking at a website if the images won’t load or take too long. While 47% of people expect a web page to load within two seconds.

The chances are, you probably haven’t thought twice about it. However, it’s always worth using PageSpeed Insights to get a full report on how to practically improve it.

2) Forgetting the UX
When it comes to building a website, the user experience (UX) is one of the biggest elements businesses forget about. This includes anything from the content to the layout and the social widgets to the imagery.

According to WebpageFX, 88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a website after a bad UX, with 75% of people judging the credibility of the brand solely by the website design.

Every page on your website should take the user on a journey and contain a strong call to action. In relatively simple terms, the content should tell the user who you are and how you can help in the H1 and H2. A lot of businesses use first person (‘we’) in their content as well. Try opting for second person narrative (‘you’) when appropriate as this will make the user feel more involved.

Replacing stock imagery with icons and infographics can give your website a fresh, modern feel. While keeping the layout and content compact, will not only have a positive impact on SEO, but also improve the UX. Visitors should have the option to read more if they like, instead of being bombarded by information from the moment they land on your website. Accordion style drop-down menus are a neat way to keep content and imagery contained.

The final fatal UX mistake is adopting the wrong layout. An attractive and unattractive initial appearance could be the difference between a user hitting back or clicking for more information. Videos and scrolling banners in the top fold are very effective at grabbing attention, while centre aligning the text can give it a nice clean look with space running down both sides.

3) Not mobile-friendly
With internet mobile penetration hitting 61.2% this year and 67% of consumers saying they are more likely to buy a product from a company’s website if it’s mobile-friendly, optimising your website to suit these preferences is extremely important.

Yet, according to Salesforce, 32% of businesses haven’t integrated mobile marketing into their strategies.

By simply tweaking image and content sizes, you’ll have the foundations of a mobile-friendly website design. However, ideally, it’s important to build a site with mobile in mind from the start, as there are a lot of variables to consider.

4) Neglecting SEO and website improvements
It may sound obvious from the outset, however, many businesses forget that website design requires maintenance work. This includes looking for broken pages, split testing and updating the content and design to improve the UX. Failure to do this can result in a loss of business.

Take a look at your competitors’ websites and make a list of things you like/dislike about it. Adapting and implementing the points you like can really improve the overall visual experience of the website and ensure you keep up to date with your competitors.

Another important element to consider is website design testing. In the next year, 73% of companies that aren’t currently doing user testing on their website will start. However, this also means that 27% won’t. Will you be one of them?

A/B testing content, button colours and imagery are great ways to test out a few options. Eventually, this should give you a complete website design which is user-friendly and optimised for Google. In the short-term, running an SEO audit is also useful to identify ways to improve your website design.

If you’d like any further inspiration, take a look at our previous post: 5 website design trends set to impact 2018. Alternatively, for a free website review and advice on how to improve it, drop us a line at ideas@eighty3creative.co.uk.