Common Website Design Mistakes That Hurt Conversions
As a web design agency, we work with clients across the world helping them design websites that bring them business. The experience gathered over years has given us the insights this article needs to be useful for readers. So here goes some of the most common website design mistakes that (with or without you knowing) may be hurting your conversions.
Overwhelming designs – Websites that fail to convert curious visitors into paying customers are often those that are overdesigned. So much that the primary objective of design gets questioned. The use of animations, attractive visual objects, banners, videos etc., are ok, but they don’t belong everywhere and their use on a website is limited to a point. We’ve seen websites that overfocus on design rather than supporting the intent of it, often struggle with conversions. For example, a visitor on a pricing page is looking for details and wants to be reassured before making a decision. This page needs to be simple with no use of distracting visuals.
Treating everyone the same – Every visitor has an intent for visiting your website. They need information asap. There’s a difference between casual browsers and first time visitors and returning users. Knowing what separates each of them is the key to successful designs. A visitor landing on your website from a paid ad needs to act quickly. If your landing page is populated with long-form content they have nothing to do with, expect no or delayed action. Oftentimes, no conversion at all because absence of the information they want in the first place would drive them away to your competitors.
Not optimizing for all screens : It is important to understand that mobile users do not have the same intent as desktop users. They often look for quick information, they’re making impulsive decisions in-store, almost ready to act. So, having long scrolls, popups, wrongly sized forms disappoint user experience, eventually barring them from making a purchase. In other words, having a responsive design is not just a need, it’s a must have.
Not updating content: Okay, this point has to do with content but design and content go hand-in-hand, so they must compliment each other. Pages with outdated content lose rankings if they once had, which means reduced or no visitors from organic search and disappointing conversion rate. Make sure to regularly update your website’s old pages, blog posts, resource pages, case studies etc., to appear fresh and valuable to search engines and now on LLMs.
Loading time: Slow loading speeds are one of the main culprits of a website seeing bad conversion rate. Studies report that improving speed by meagre second can also boost conversion rate. This is why it is essential to regularly audit your website and optimize its performance keeping all best practices.
Having no style guide: This is a very common issue for websites with low conversion. They begin without having a style guide that defines how they want to appear: from typography to color palette, spacing rules and others. As a result, the designs created for marketing and promotion get varied visual languages. And it leads to different issues: People do not remember your brand uniformly, it reflects badly on your professionalism, and eventually hurt conversion.
Besides the above, not optimizing websites with SEO in mind, using bad quality images and media, lack of using proper CTAs, poor navigation etc., are among the mistakes that hurt conversions.
Having a business website is useless if it is not making you money. With years designing a plethora of websites for clients of all shapes and sizes, we understand what it takes to build websites that increase staying time, reduce bounce rate and improve conversion rate.
Want to improve your website’s conversion rate? Get started now with a free audit. We’ll examine your site and pinpoint the real reasons causing you lost conversions.
