3 of the Top Web Design Mistakes to Avoid

The majority of your competitors have websites that not only look stylish, but that have also been designed with first-rate functionality and outstanding features. These business have invested a great deal of resources for good reasons; the main reason being to attract the very prospects you are competing over.

If you haven’t invested the same resources in your own website, then you will likely have noticed that you receive only a small amount of traffic, and those that visit aren’t spending much time on your site. In either case, you may well have succumbed to one of the many traps that web designers strive to avoid.

Here are three common web design mistakes that could be hindering the potential of your website, and that you could fix in order to improve your ability to attract new prospects.

No call to action

Make sure you are crystal clear on what action you want your website visitors to take on the key pages on your site.

Another technical term for this is conversion marketing. It converts prospects into either followers or customers. You should take the time to learn about conversion rate optimisation in order to improve your onboarding process for new customers or clients.

Your overall marketing plan should determine whatever action you want your prospects to take. Are you looking to attract new subscribers to your blog or newsletter so that they engage with you and get to know you, or do you want them to purchase products right away? Whatever your answer, make sure that you bear your end goal in mind when designing your call to action.

It may be that traffic is not your problem but you are still failing to meet your objectives, such as signing up for a free consultation, or purchasing a product or service. In this case, then you may be failing to guide your site visitors in the right way.

The best way to do this is by adjusting your Call to Action (CTA). Your CTA is the main reason you want to attract visitors to your site in the first place.

Loading time too slow

If your website takes a long time to load, you need to consider the design elements on your site. The faster your website's load time, the more satisfying experience your visitors will have. There’s no shortage of advice online with regards to speeding up your website, so we won’t go into too much depth on that here, but rather just to remind you how crucial it can be to your website's performance.

Firstly, you should look at optimizing your website images. That’s especially the case when it comes to your homepage. There are few things that will scare off your prospects more than graphics and other media that are taking too long to load. So reduce the size of your images and optimize your content wherever possible.

Other large files, such as modules, themes, and plugins can also slow down your website's load time. By updating these elements to the latest versions, you can speed up your website, especially if it’s been some time since they were updated.

Remember to give your website a thorough test before updating anything, just in case there are any changes to how your site interacts with the plugins. That’s one way to make sure that nothing breaks down once the updates have been installed, and you can go ahead and implement the changes once everything has been tested.

Your website isn’t mobile friendly

If your website isn’t mobile-friendly and doesn’t scale well when viewed on a smaller screen, then you are likely turning away a lot of website traffic. Mobile users are used to instant accessibility and won’t spend time trying to view your page if they’re unable to view it properly.

In a Statista survey from August, 2019, it was revealed that 51.65% of Internet traffic came from mobile users, excluding users accessing the Web from tablets.

That means that over half of your website visitors expect a quality experience when browsing on their mobile devices, so you need to ensure that your website is designed to meet these expectations if you intend on attracting this huge share of mobile users.

Conclusion

Many website owners have failed to conquer the above issues, which has led to them potentially missing out on new prospects. If these issues sound familiar to you, make sure that you pinpoint what exactly needs addressing, and seek help to resolve it. This is equally true from one industry to the next, so if you are in the manufacturing industry, get the best manufacturing website design you can afford. If you are in the automobile industry, get the best website designer you can. If you don't, you will continue to turn off many of your prospects, and you will continue playing right into the hands of your competition.