Your business can be offering the most useful consumer products on the planet, but a poorly designed website can be a big-time obstacle. There are a number of website design mistakes that can steer customers and profits toward your competitors.
“A website’s design often provides the first impression customers have of a company,” Joseph Putnam of Crazy Egg explained. “If the design is outdated, disorganized, cluttered, or uses unappealing colors, it creates a poor first impression.”
That poor first impression can be costly. You have probably experienced plenty of not-so-great websites while browsing, and you probably didn’t make a purchase because of it.
From confusing user navigation to a not-so-mobile-friendly site, when designing your business’ site, learn from the mistakes of others. Here are five to keep in mind.
Too Much Clutter
Think of your website like your home. If you are having guests over, you probably do a bit of cleaning to make your guests feel comfortable. The same should apply to your site.
Clutter can make your marketing message, product description, and your call to action simply disappear among the lengthy, unorganized content, opt-in pop-ups, and affiliate ads. This can all hamper consumer trust, the bedrock to any robust business bottom line.
The clutter will also slow your site’s load time, causing users to either abandon your site or become frustrated and leave your site for a competitor. This signals to Google that your site is not of value, dropping it in SERP rankings. Not good, so make your site guest ready.
Unclear Call To Action (CTA)
The most successful websites guide users on a highly efficient journey with one goal in mind . . . conversions. Having an unclear CTA can make this journey painstaking for your potential customers, meaning a loss of profits.
“If your call to action is weak, viewers won’t be motivated to follow through,” Aaron Agius of Entrepreneur said. “But if it’s too strong, they’ll resent being compelled to perform against their will.”
It is definitely a delicate balance. Make your CTA very clear and have it visible in multiple places on-page. This could be a simple “Learn More” or “Ask Now” CTA above the fold or at the end of a product description. It is important to have the CTA flow feel natural and not intrusive.
Bad Image Choices
Consumers are more visual than ever before, and having high-quality, relevant images on your website is a must. Good-quality images boost consumer trust, create powerful branding, and improve user engagement.
Unfortunately, if you have bad images on your site, all of the above doesn’t apply. A picture most certainly tells a thousand words when it comes to website design, especially images in the ecommerce space.
If your product images are fuzzy, have no zoom feature, or a single image with little to no detail, potential customers will assume this is how your brand does business and run for your nearest competitor.
Not Mobile-Friendly
According to Google, if your website design is not mobile-friendly, you may experience ranking issues. This is part of the mobile-first index rollout that took full effect this year. Having a mobile-friendly website also caters to the growing number of mobile searches.
“In 2016, the number of internet users on mobile devices exceeded the number of desktop users for the first time,” DreamHost explained in a WordPress web design article. “This was a turning point of web usage and made it clear that creating sites that are responsive on mobile devices is more important than ever.”
Is your website mobile-friendly? It may be hard to tell, but luckily, Google’s Mobile-Friendly tool can give you a little insight. Simply enter your domain URL and wait for results. If the results aren’t good, you could be losing a lot of mobile revenue.
Confusing Site Navigation
User navigation is extremely important. It provides the foundation for your sales funnel, guiding users toward the conversion end goal. Sadly, this is one of the most common mistakes in website design.
A powerful sales funnel will take your audience from awareness (home page) to evaluation (product page) to conversion (checkout page). It really is that simple. The goal is to make the journey easy and fast.
You don’t want to lead customers down a rabbit hole of content. This could cause them to find a page that causes brand distrust, or they may just get bored and forget why they even landed on your page in the first place. A simplistic navigation with a sales funnel is the best way of churning out more profits.
Launch a User-Minded Website Design
There are a lot of elements that go into designing a great website. From compelling CTAs to optimized mobile search, don’t make the same site design mistakes you have run from in the past. Increase your business bottom line by giving your audience a stellar user experience. What website design mistakes did we miss?
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