10 Common Web Design Mistakes to Avoid

Websites are the digital representation of businesses competing online to grab customer attention. They offer an interaction and engagement platform to potential customers and an online shopping destination to existing buyers. The website’s design is the most significant part of its digital existence and cannot be compromised because visitors are influenced by it. A captivating design with easy-to-navigate elements makes the website popular and gains traction.

However, many business owners are not aware of the importance of design, which includes visuals, colours, images, content, fonts, call-to-action buttons, etc. The design of the site affects its loading speed, navigation, architecture, user experience, and SEO.

Here is a list of ten common web design mistakes to avoid when launching or revamping a business website. Avoiding these will reduce bounce rates and increase traffic, quality leads, and conversions.

1. Ignoring SEO for the Website

A website is useful only when it shows up on the first page of the search engine results page. Otherwise, the target audience will not be able to locate the site and visit it when they want to buy your products or services. Thus, it is essential to hire SEO experts in Gold Coast to make the site search engine friendly and increase its visibility.

SEO ensures the content has the relevant keywords to appear in the search results. It also helps with link building to increase the authenticity of the site. It helps add image alt text, meta descriptions and tags that increase traffic.

2. Not Optimising the Site for Mobile Phones

In early 2024, the number of cellular mobile connections used in Australia reached 33.59 million. Most customers use their smartphones to compare products and purchase goods online. Therefore, it is crucial to build mobile-responsive websites that allow easy browsing and navigation on a small screen.

It must adapt to the device’s screen size and offer the same engagement as on a laptop. It ensures visitors can easily read the content, open pages, and click on buttons to take action.

3. Irrelevant or Invaluable Website Content

The website is the most significant part of all the attractive elements filling the screen. SEO experts in Gold Coast emphasise creating unique and high-quality content for all web pages to inform and educate customers about the business and its products.

They must find the information valuable and relevant, and it must convey the value proposition. Search engines offer a higher ranking to sites with trustworthy and authoritative content. The images must be appropriate, and white space must be used to reduce clutter.

4. Increased Website Loading Time

The attention of consumers has been decreasing and they can quickly jump to the competitor’s site if the web pages do not load quickly. The ideal loading time should be between zero and two seconds. If it goes beyond three seconds, bounce rate will go up.

Thus, it is necessary to optimise the images, cache web pages, decrease redirects, reduce heavy scripts and find a reliable hosting provider. Also, monitoring page speed regularly with the help of tools can keep this problem at bay.

5. Cluttered Design That Affects User Experience

Cramming too much content, images and visuals into the page can make it look unsightly and confusing to the user. The web page layout must be carefully designed to make it more engaging and immersive for the target audience.

The structure of the content must be arranged effectively with headlines and subheadings. Bullet points, images, and infographics must be used to highlight the most important details that visitors should not miss. It must allow them to smoothly move from one section to another and increase the comfort of browsing and viewing.

6. Disregarding Cyber Security

Most business websites have an online store to sell products to customers. It includes product catalogues, shopping carts and payment gateways. Since selling online requires using the confidential financial information of customers, cyber security must take precedence while developing e-commerce functionality. It must have a legitimate HTTPS certificate to prevent cyber attacks that are growing in the country.

Thus, it is imperative to create a robust site that cannot be hacked. Entrepreneurs must run audits to identify vulnerabilities and fill the gaps to prevent breaches. They must encrypt login pages and use a reliable hosting service with a secure payment gateway. In addition, regularly taking data backup is needed to safeguard the business in case of data theft or loss.

7. Using An Unsuitable Colour Scheme

Colour contrast and scheme on the website must be assessed before implementation. While keeping the brand colours on the page is necessary, ensuring the hues are soothing and do not blur the vision is also vital. They can also create accessibility issues for people with visual impairment and colour blindness.

According to companies offering SEO in Gold Coast, the colour scheme must perfectly contrast the background and foreground to make the text and images legible. The font size and colour must be appropriately chosen for easy reading.

8. Unclear Call-to-Action and Navigation

Call-to-action buttons are highly significant for conversions and help visitors take actions like signing up for a newsletter subscription, filling out a form, or purchasing a product. They must be clearly visible and encourage the user to click. They must stand out on the page with attractive text, colour, font, and size to evoke the desired result.

Navigation is made simple with the help of the menu bar. However, many businesses clutter them with long drop-downs and too many labels that are not in order. The menu bar must have short, clear labels with ordered drop-downs for easy navigation.

9. Using A Generic 404 Page Design

Most website owners do not pay attention to broken links and pages that do not exist. They use a default error message for such non-existent landing pages. However, it can impact the authenticity and traffic of the website as the user may find it confusing.

The best way to resolve the issue is to customise 404 pages to allow the user to understand the error and take corrective action. The page design, graphics and colour scheme must match with the rest of the site and redirect users to another page.

10. Not Leveraging Website Analytics

Web analytics gives an insight into the performance of the site and engagement levels achieved. It informs the business owner about the traffic volume, sources of traffic, most visited pages, bounce rate, time spent on each page, etc. It helps entrepreneurs realise the website’s strengths and weaknesses to make improvements.

SEO experts in Gold Coast use data analytics effectively to create immersive user experiences and increase interactions with target audience. They use behaviour analytics to make changes to the design and content that can improve conversions.

Wrapping Up

Web design mistakes can significantly impact a business. Thus, business owners must collect user feedback about their experience and use it to improve the site. In addition, they must follow SEO and design best practices to stay on top and relevant.