Introduction
Website is a fundamental aspect of any business, and it is important to design it right. It is a place where you will nurture your prospective leads to get maximum conversions. So, you cannot afford to make any mistakes that can cause your visitors to bounce off your website.
A well-designed website will help you move towards the success of your business as a great website design leaves a lasting impression on the minds of the visitors. On the contrary, a poorly designed website can derail even your best efforts. So, what can you do to keep a check on the common website design mistakes that can negatively impact your business?
In this blog post, we will discuss all the possible mistakes that you should be aware of while designing your business website, and be more successful in converting “clicks” into “sales”.
Why Is Website Design Important?
Before we get straight into the mistakes to avoid, let’s understand the importance of website design first.
Website design is crucial because your customer cares about visual components. Consciously or unconsciously, we all have a soft corner to the visually appealing designs. It is also evident from the studies that people will judge your business from the visuals alone and tend to bounce back if they don’t find the design to be pleasing.
Here are some of the facts that will make your eyes roll on the importance of website design:
- 75 percent of the users admitted that they make judgments about the credibility of the company from the website’s design.
What do you think when you look at a poorly designed website? You may become uncertain about their credibility, right? You either doubt their offerings or look at their competition. According to this research, we judge businesses on the appearance of their websites.
- Visitors take only 50 milliseconds to make an impression about your website design.
As far as the first impression is concerned, visitors can make them instantly. A study by Google states that it only takes 50 milliseconds to create a lasting impression, i.e., you have only 0.05 seconds to either make or break the deal. This first impression is highly dependent on the visual appearance of the website.
- Around 38 percent of the visitors stop engaging with your website when they find the content and layout to be unattractive.
In today’s world, your online credibility is significant. You should have a design, look, and feel that makes your visitors want to stick around on your website for a longer time. If your website design is unattractive, you may start losing them.
12 Most Common Website Design Mistakes
We all know that humans are prone to mistakes. But if we avoid them in the first place, we can save the business from its consequences. With that said, here are the 12 most common website design mistakes that you should avoid while creating an eCommerce website:
1. Unresponsive Design
Nowadays, people want an omnichannel experience. Hence, eCommerce businesses need to work and look good on all devices. Whether it is a laptop screen, tablet, or mobile, responsive website design should be optimized for the screen of the user.
If you fail to create a responsive website, you can suffer from the following limitations:
- It negatively affects the experience of the user.
- It becomes difficult for the user to navigate through the product pages.
- It leads to a poor web layout, thereby impacting the readability and the images in the website.
So, what can you do to avoid such a mistake? You should simply maintain consistency across all devices as much as possible. You should use a mobile-first approach and ensure that all the elements in the website are loaded appropriately. It is advisable to emphasize the quality of user experience for all the devices. Lastly, cross-check the responsiveness of each of the pages in an eCommerce website before making it live.
2. Slow Loading Speed
According to Neil Patel, a renowned SEO expert, if your website takes more than three seconds to load, it has the potential to lose the prospective customer. Hence, your online store must load fast and display your business quickly. Complex graphics or auto-play videos are the fundamental factors that negatively affect the speed of the website. Long blocks of text content are also a waste because they read some part of the text.
The best solution to improve the loading speed of the website is to compress images and implement cache functionalities. Optimizing images and avoiding unclean coding and inline style can increase the loading speed of your website.
3. Poor Visual Content
We all know that images and graphics are highly crucial when creating a website design for an eCommerce store. Websites that have obsolete styles, poor quality images, and terrible color choices create a barrier that restricts the inflow of customers to the website. It also prohibits the users from taking the desired action.
What is the best way to induce good quality visual content on your website? Here are some of the things that you should keep in check when selecting the visual content for your website:
- You should use a maximum of five colors in your web layout.
- Don’t put any unnecessary design.
- Be as minimalistic as possible.
- Use images that are the reflection of your business tone.
4. Non-Prioritizing Intuitive Navigation and Accessibility
Not implementing the essential process of brainstorming, sitemap, and wireframing is one of the primary mistakes that a majority of businesses make, and one such example is a poorly designed navigation menu. If you don’t have an easy-to-use navigational menu on your website, your visitors will start leaving as they don’t want to take the pain of navigating through random product pages.
The best way is to group the product pages into categories and arrange them hierarchically to help users navigate through the online store without any hassle. It can be only done when you have a proper strategy in place.
Not only does navigation, but accessibility is also one of the vital factors to consider. People with visual impairment or color blindness may find it strenuous to access your website. Ignoring these users in the design thinking approach could also be one of the common mistakes of website design. Therefore, you should use content like ads, carousels, scrolling news feeds, auto-playing videos, and tickers to prioritize accessibility.
5. Cluttered Content
Have you come across the fact that we tend to read slower on the screen than the printed book? As a matter of fact, we don’t read the entire blocks of text, we just scan them.
Too much information on one page can scare away the visitors as it becomes difficult for them to understand and consume the entire content. Thus, cluttered content is a big no-no when it comes to website design!
If you want to give a better experience to your website’s visitors, you should build scannable content. This way, whenever they will land on your website and notice walls of text, it doesn’t feel overwhelming or boring. You should also try not to clutter your website with too many photos, videos, animations, hyperlinks, etc.
Here is a simple “divide and conquer” strategy that you can adopt to avoid cluttering your eCommerce website: Split the overall website interface into different product pages which include product listing, product description, user interaction, user profile, and a lot more. Further, split each webpage interface into reusable blocks.
6. No Prominent Call to Action Button
Another common mistake of website design is not having a prominent call to action button. Websites are like the marketing and sales pipeline or funnel. You need to guide the visitor at every step of the funnel with an appropriate call to action button. Not putting a proper CTA button may mislead the hot prospects and prohibit them to take the desired action, thereby impacting the conversion. On the contrary, too many calls to action can also irritate the reader and shoo them away. Therefore, put a prominent call to action button on your website wherever applicable.
7. Insecure Website
Although the security of the website is much of a technical aspect, it is also related to the website design and buyer journey. If the security of the website is at stake right from the design stage, it may hamper the overall experience of the consumer. It may also run a risk on SEO ranking.
Prioritizing the security of the website can prevent loopholes in the design, and avoid falling users into the trap of insecure websites. For instance, obtaining an SSL certificate can eliminate security risks.
8. Lack of Contact Information
You may find it strange that even lack of contact information can be a common website design mistake. The customers must know the contact information when they have decided to buy the product from your company. If your online store does not have a clear “Contact Us” Page, your visitors may get frustrated and leave.
Therefore, the contact information should be displayed at the bottom of every page. You can also integrate chatbots for the live chat features.
9. Wrong Placement of Ads
Advertisement is an obligation in the website designing world, specifically in terms of blogs where it is considered to be the mainstream of income. But, placing a lot of advertisements or flash ads may have a negative impact on the business and make you lose customers. Hence, it is advisable to place the ads appropriately. You should look for the ads keenly. If any ad annoys you even the slightest, chances are that it will also do the same with the visitors.
Moreover, you should take notice of the pop-ups. Don’t keep disruptive pop-ups in your website design because they obstruct the view and impact navigation. On the other hand, if you still choose to keep them, make sure that they are not full-screen size and easy to close.
10. Excessive Use of Fancy Fonts
Fonts are a key aspect of readability. It means that the fonts that generally look “simple” and “boring” are indeed the best ones. The businesses make the mistake of using excessive fancy fonts in the header and other large text, which suppresses the readability and usability. Thus, you should opt for fonts that set your eCommerce store apart from your competitors.
11. Not Using Enough White Space
White space refers to the negative space between the elements (like images, paragraphs, etc.) in the composition of website design. Commonly, novice designers underestimate the value of white space a design needs. The appropriate amount of white space that may feel too much to you, won’t reflect the same way to the user. It adds a good amount of margins between each of the design blocks.
Flat lay images are highly popular in the space of website design as they provide ample space for unobstructed text.
12. Inconsistent Image Size
The worst mistake that most new online store owners do is to start uploading product images to the templates irrespective of the size. To resolve this issue, you should crop the images to the suggested size in the template before uploading them. You should also not rely on the auto-crop feature as the result is not what you expect it to be.
Read Also- A Step-by-Step Guide to Create your eCommerce Store with WorksLeader
Key Takeaway
A website is the most valuable asset of your business. While creating your website design, you should be simple and consistent. After all, you don’t want to obstruct the clarity of your brand story! Therefore, you should test and experiment extensively, so that you can find a balance between your brand and the customers.
