Your website is an important part of the success of your business. You may be losing business because of your website and not know it.
People will judge your company based on the design and performance of your site. They’ll decide if your business is credible and whether or not they will buy from you.
That’s how important web design is to your business. Yet, too many people make critical mistakes when they design their website.
Read on to learn the common web design mistakes that are made and how you can avoid them.
1. A Website Without a Goal
What is the goal of your website? This is a common design mistake that is made. People know that they need to have a website, but they don’t know why.
They also don’t understand the purpose of the website. It can have many purposes, from being a lead generation machine to a business brochure.
Ideally, you want to outline the goal of your website before you start designing the site. If you haven’t, take the time to think about the purpose and goal of your site.
2. No Call to Action (or Too Many of Them)
A call to action simply tells users what the next step is in the buyer’s journey when they visit your website.
The goal of your website will drive everything else on your site. That includes a call to action. Among the web design mistakes that are made is that there is no clear call to action.
There are other websites that have too many calls to action – sign up for this email, call now, schedule an appointment. Users get confused and wind up taking no action at all.
You want to have one clear call to action. The best call to action is to have people sign up for your newsletter or for a freebie printable. That enables you to tell them more about your business, earn their trust over time, and sell to them later.
3. Slow Performance
There is a correlation between a website’s performance and conversion rates.
Loading speed is at the heart of your site’s performance. The slower the website, the less likely someone will wait for your site.
Why are some websites slow? There are a lot of factors that make up website speed. In some cases, it’s poor design. Sometimes, a website host is causing the delay.
You want to look at your website’s speed and test it. Google’s Page Speed Test, GT Metrix, and Pingdom. These three tools combined will tell you how fast your site is, and what you can do to improve the speed.
4. Too Many 404 Errors
When sites are redesigned, it’s inevitable that you’ll find pages that are no longer relevant. You delete them since they’re no longer necessary.
What happens is that you delete them, but users and search engines will still want to access them. They’ll get a 404 Error, which means the page no longer exists.
That will damage your SEO and the user experience.
If you use WordPress, install the Redirection plugin. That will tell you which pages, tags, and images are creating the 404 code. You can redirect those links to updated content on your site.
5. No Way to Measure Success
Do you think you designed a wonderful website? Do you know if users agree?
There’s one important step that is made when designing the site that is forgotten. Designers will forget to install Google Analytics and Search Console.
You have no way to track the success or failure of your site. Google will tell you how much traffic you have and where it’s coming from. You’ll be able to tell what marketing efforts are working, and what needs adjustment.
Search Console tells you how your site appears in Google. You’ll know how you rank for certain keywords, and how many clicks those keywords are getting.
6. Poor Navigation
When people visit your website, they’re looking for information. You want to make sure that they can find it easily.
For example, an online bike shop will have a lot of products and product categories. You want to make sure that those pages are organized and easy to find on any device.
7. Lack of Security
Your website is the starting point of building trust with potential customers. One important way to do that is to have a secure connection between your site and your visitors.
You can install an SSL certificate for free on most hosts. That will enable you to use the HTTPS protocol instead of HTTP. This ensures an added layer of security on your site.
Not only will it build trust with users, but with search engines as well.
8. Images Aren’t Optimized
You know how important website performance is to your site. One of the common causes of a slow website is images.
Images are uploaded as they original image. These can be very large files and they take a long time for users to download them.
You want to compress images to make the image sizes smaller without losing quality. There are a number of plugins that will do this for WordPress sites. WP Smush is one of the top ones to use.
Avoid These Common Web Design Mistakes
The most common web design mistakes are due to a lack of knowledge. So many people are able to create their own website easily, that they don’t know they’re making design mistakes.
They don’t take into account the complete user experience, what helps or hurts search results, or how they can improve their site.
You can avoid these mistakes by learning about design and SEO. Both are indispensable when it comes to creating a website that users will love and rank well in search engines.
Come back to this site often to learn more about business and marketing.
