Mistakes You Can’t Afford To Make While Designing a Website

Nowadays, websites have become a necessity for businesses to thrive. Having a well-designed website that delivers a great user experience can turn visitors into customers. Conversely, a badly designed website could lose you potential customers, which leads to monetary loss. 

To spot bad website design and good website design is very easy. A good website design is a great blend of both technical compatibility and visual aesthetics, where a bad website design lacks the balance between these two aspects.

A good website design is responsive, visually appealing, search engine friendly, communicates your brand message effectively, attracts and retains the right audience, and delivers a great user experience that keeps users engaged and takes the desired action that you want them to take.  

On the other hand, a website with bad design will have poor navigation, be difficult to navigate, be non-responsive, load slowly, and perform poorly on search engines. All these can impact your website and business negatively.

There is a very good chance that you have also come across poorly designed websites that contain all the flaws that we have discussed above, and you know how frustrating it is to engage with those websites. 

So, to develop a website with a very good design, we have listed a few common mistakes that need to be avoided to develop a website that works seamlessly, delivers a great user experience, and not only meets expectations but exceeds them.

1. Inconsistent Design

Inconsistency in design is one of the most overlooked factors. This usually occurs when there is a lack of a clear visual strategy from the beginning, and no unified design system across the pages.

Insight from a prominent web design company in Maryland reveals that many businesses fail to recognize how much visual inconsistency can damage the user experience and business credibility. A minor inconsistency, like a different font size, button style, and image alignment, can deliver a bad user experience and confuse users. 

To avoid this, they recommend creating a style guide before starting to design process as it ensures that your brand communicates and maintains a unified visual identity throughout the website. 

Why it’s a problem: Users are more likely to engage with websites that have consistency. Consistency throughout the website delivers a good experience and makes the website look professional. Inconsistent design affects both aesthetics and user experience and makes users confused. When users aren’t sure if they’re on the same site or not, they’re less likely to stay.

Solution: Keeping design elements such as font, color, and layout consistent. It will help your target users understand and navigate content easily. Make sure you use font type and font size all across the website so users can read your content easily. Avoid using different logos within the website. Develop a style guide before beginning your website design. It will help in keeping consistency throughout the website. 

2. Ignoring Mobile Responsiveness

Nowadays, people around the globe consume information using various devices. Therefore, it is essential to develop a responsive website that allows users to view websites on any screen size, whether large or small. According to statistics, more than half of global traffic comes from mobile devices. Also, search engines like Google rank mobile-friendly websites higher in search results.

Why it’s a problem: Mobile users expect a smooth and responsive experience. Sites that aren’t mobile-friendly can have legibility issues, buttons that are too small to tap, or slow loading times, and users will abandon your site before they even get a chance to interact with your content.

Solution: Implement responsive design principles using flexible grid layouts and scalable images that adjust to the device’s screen size. Make sure the navigation is user-friendly on mobile with touch-friendly buttons and properly sized text. Prioritize mobile-first design to provide the best user experience across all devices.

If you’re working with a web design company, make sure they prioritize mobile responsiveness in their design strategy from the very beginning to stay ahead of the competition.

3. Too Hard to Navigate Your Site

Web designers at CSS Chopper shared a few insights on the importance of designing easy website navigation. They shared that users who come to your website want to take a particular action and want to achieve certain goals. It could be finding certain information on a website, or wanting to purchase a product or service. it could be anything. Here, website navigation plays a very important role in this quest. 

When a website has very easy navigation, it helps users achieve their goals quickly and easily, which ultimately increases the conversion rate. On the other hand, if a website has very bad navigation and makes it difficult for users to achieve its goals, they won’t stay long on your website. 

If your website has disorganized navigation and is missing important pages from the navigation menu, it deters people from engaging with your site.

Why it’s a problem: Poor navigation puts a higher cognitive load on users, forcing them to spend more time figuring out where to go. This leads to frustration, and users will leave your site for a competitor’s site that’s easier to navigate.

Solution: Keep the navigation simple, intuitive, and organized. Limit the number of menu items and use clear labels. Group related pages together and consider implementing breadcrumb navigation to help users understand where they are on the site. Also, use sticky or fixed menus so navigation options are always accessible.

4. Poor Images

The quality of images on your site can impact its professionalism. Using low-resolution images, irrelevant images, or images that don’t scale properly can affect both user experience and site performance.

Why is it a problem?: Low-quality images make your site look old, and improperly sized images lead to slow loading times. When images do not align with the content and context you are sharing on your website, it creates a contradiction. Which leads to bad user experiences that take users away from the website.

Solution: Always include relevant high-quality photos that relate to your brand. Compress images for the web to optimize quality and performance. Logos and icons should be saved as SVG files, which allow for scaling without loss of resolution. Also, use lazy loading and other modern image delivery methods to prevent images from negatively impacting page loading speed.

5. Missing Call to Action Button

Websites are part of your marketing and sales funnel. Through a website, you can reach out to your target customers to sell your products and services. While visiting your website, the user can be at any stage of the buyer journey; it could be a prospect or about to make a final action.  

So it is very important to have clear CTA buttons at appropriate places to make them do what you want them to do. It can increase the conversion rate by 161%. If you don’t create and place the CTA button at the right spot, the chances of converting prospects into customers could decrease significantly. Also, overusing the CTA button can annoy website visitors. 

Why is it a problem? When CTA buttons are not clear and easy to use, it makes users confused, and that leads to users leaving the website without taking any action. A website without enough CTAs won’t be able to get the many conversions they want.

Solution: CTAs like "Sign Up Now," "Learn More," and "Get Started" should be easily found on every page. These buttons should stand out through their placement, contrasting colors, and surrounding whitespace.

6. Slow Loading Speed

Website loading speed is surely one of the mistakes that you must avoid because around 53% of users leave the website if it takes longer than 3 seconds. Search engines also rank websites higher they load faster.

When a user requests a website, a browser asks for every file from the server and then downloads it. It includes image, CSS, and JavaScript. Each file adds time to how long it takes to load a website. Websites that load slowly frustrate users and make them leave the website. This increases the bounce rate. 

Solution: Following efficient code practices, leveraging CDN to deliver files can help in improving website speed, minifying CSS and JavaScript can reduce file size, and minimizing the number of requests by merging files can significantly improve the website loading time.  

7. Limited Accessibility Features

Once Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, shared a quote that tells, “The power of the web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.” 

When designers emphasize website accessibility features from the beginning, it makes the website available to everyone and reaches the maximum potential users. Accessibility features in websites power the web because they make it accessible no matter who is accessing it even people with any kind of disability.

But many times, designers, especially those with less experience, often make the mistake of ignoring the accessibility feature while designing a website. This directly impacts the website's ability to reach out to a large number of potential website users.  

So, why is this a big deal? When a website lacks accessibility features, it makes it tough for individuals with disabilities to navigate your site effectively. For example, a person with visual impairment might prefer to consume content on websites through speech rather than text. Here, if a website does not have text-to-speech features, then it could lose users who prefer speech over text.

Solution: To enhance the accessibility of the website, you can make sure that images on your website must have Alt text, pick high-contrast fonts that pass the accessibility test, choose easy-to-read and large fonts, probably 18px, integrate features such as speech-to-text, keyboard navigation, and make sure you follow WCAG guidelines.

8. SEO Negligence

Search engine optimization is the process of optimizing a website and making it search engine-friendly so it ranks higher in search engines such as Google. 

Website designing is not just about creating aesthetically pleasing and visually appealing websites, but is also about creating website structures that search engine crawlers can easily understand. 

Many web designers give more focus on creating visually appealing designs while overlooking key SEO elements that impact the website's visibility in search engines.

Here that Web designers at Manypixel have shared a few things about SEO that are needed while designing a website, keeping website design mobile responsiveness from the start, avoiding putting important information on images and using image alt text, minimizing the use of intrusive pop-ups immediately after page loads, Do not designing a generic web page for 404 and broken webpages. 

Conclusion

Website design plays a very important role in creating a good impression among your target users. If target users find a website unattractive and outdated, they will leave your website, and that could lead to the loss of potential customers. 

Having a flawless website for business could be a highly rewarding asset; it can create a good brand image and impression among your target users, and it can get you good conversions for your business.   

But to design a flawless website. You must avoid common mistakes, ranging from inconsistency in design, ignoring mobile responsiveness, limiting website accessibility, and slow loading speed.

If you are not a professional website designer and designing a website on your own, there are high chance that you might make these easy website designing mistakes, as you might lack knowledge of website designing. But not to worry if you have already made this mistake, you can hire a web design company to fix it for you and make your website aesthetically pleasing and functional.