Top 10 website design mistakes that hurt your business

It will not come as a surprise that the website is the backbone of every business. If you want your business to be successful in this era of pandemics, you’ve got to have a well-designed website. As, due to social distancing, the vast majority of potential customers are searching for information via the company’s website.

A well-designed website can help you grow your business as a quality design creates a great impression on your potential customers inducing them to take the desired action. Common web design mistakes, however, can quickly derail even your best efforts. And while you hear a lot about what to do when designing your website. But do you know what not to do?

At Noetic, creating websites for the future is our mission. We have highlighted 10 common website design mistakes that hurt many businesses. Avoid them while designing your website, and you should have more success in converting visitors to clients.

• Slow load times

A slow website is a major web design mistake. Most visitors only care about accessing the content as quickly as possible. It's not always about the visuals on the screen. More than half of web users will start leaving if the website does not load within 3 seconds. Speed is something that matters to most visitors. It also matters to search engines so that means page speed and SEO are connected. It also means that a slow site can hurt you while designing and building a website for speed can help you gain more visibility in the search engines.

• Confused or cluttered navigation

It is important for website visitors to find what they want quickly and easily. Your website’s navigation is important for finding what they need. If your site is designed well, then visitors will have no problems finding what they need. It takes a split second for people to decide whether they like the website or not. Having a cluttered website will lose you, valuable customers

• The website is not secure enough

You can have the best-designed website but if your site is not secure enough, the design does not matter. Not only search engines, but web users also prefer secure websites. If your site does not have an SSL certificate and is not set up for HTTPS, visitors will get a warning that your site is not secure enough, which will drive away customers in a jiffy.

Also Read: Why you need a Redesigning of Website?

• The website is not mobile-friendly

For a majority of people, smartphones are the primary device for connecting to the internet. Many search engines are mobile-first. That means they evaluate a website based on their experience on a mobile phone. If you want to offer a good experience on your website, you need to make sure that it is responsive and mobile-friendly. A poor mobile experience will harm you and is one of the biggest mistakes to avoid

• Low-quality images

High-quality images are essential for a good website design. Humans are visual creatures, so having a website with arresting images is beneficial. Websites with low quality, grainy, fuzzy images look cheap and bring down the value of your brand.

• Disruptive pop-ups

When used correctly pop-ups can convert up to 1375% of email subscribers. The problem emerges when pop-ups interrupt and annoy your customers. According to Google, websites with annoying pop-ups do not rank high on SERP ratings.

• Having too much or too little content

Your website design needs to provide for your visitors what they need without going overboard. Too many design elements can make your website look cluttered, contribute to a confusing experience, and slow down the load time.

On the other hand not having enough can leave your website empty and incomplete. It can also leave out the necessary information visitors expect to see and find. for example, your contact information should be prominently featured. Not doing so can leave the visitors with the wrong impression.

• Judicious use of whitespace in your design

You don't want to overwhelm the visitors, but you also want to make sure you are providing necessary and exact information to cover the topic, answering questions, etc.

• Generic 404 page

Web design not only includes page layout and user experience but also content and search engine optimization(SEO). From an SEO point of view, multiple common web design mistakes can be avoided.

The first mistake is not having a dedicated custom 404-page template. Broken links on a website are bad for business. It does not inspire confidence and visitors may see it as a scam.

Also Read: Successful Outsourcing of Web Development Project

The second mistake is not having a title and heading tags. Using descriptive page texts won't be as impactful as describing it in the title.

• Not having a clear CTA

Not having a clear CTA is another common web design mistake. Websites are like marketing and sales funnel or pipeline. Your website visitor traverses within that funnel to go from the prospects’ stage to the converted clients’ stage. Not giving a clear “call to action” at the appropriate places may lead to not converting many hot prospects. Overdoing CTA may also lead to irritating prospects.

• Misleading content or page titles

The titles of website pages should clearly define what one should expect to find on the page. For eg., if the content of your page says fixing website design mistakes, then your titles should reflect that. Using misleading titles, content offers a poor user experience, reflects poorly on your brand as a whole.