Your eCommerce website is usually the first impression of your brand connecting with potential online customers. Often, you would want to make sure that your website design represents the right personality, tone, and message. But it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of a flashy, eye-catching design with many interactive elements. Store owners who don’t really understand the concepts of good web design can lead to a site that is less than ideal. Let’s talk about 8 common web design mistakes.
Web design, in the present days, is an art form. And like art, web design aims to give the viewers an exceptional experience. Your website should combine features and functions in a way that makes it interesting, navigable, enjoyable, and usable. In order to do this, there are certain rules that web designers have to follow. When people don’t follow the rules, a website can turn into a mess that no one wants to visit for just a second.
Don’t be that eCommerce site, because that is how you lose money. From my experience, these are eight common web design mistakes that can cost your business, and you should avoid at all costs. Let’s get started!
1. Not Conveying What Your Business Does Immediately
It takes about 0.05 seconds for users to form an opinion about your eCommerce site and determine whether they will stay or leave. This mistake often hurts your website the most. Why? You can do everything else right, but if users can’t see the reason they should choose your business over your competitors, they will leave.
So, in any creative way, you must be clear about what the company is offering. Keep your visitors interested by immediately showing what they can gain from your products or service. At the least, you should present your products/services in a clear way, accompanied by elements like awards, testimonials, and industry trust badges.
Checkout These Website Design Mistakes To Avoid
2. Taking Too Much Time To Load
If you think people are impatient in real-life, imagine how they are online with the option to go back or quit anytime they want. Visitors don’t like to wait for anything and expect your eCommerce website to load in a blink of an eye.
Now, how much time to load do you think is too much? I don’t mean 10 seconds, nor 5 seconds, it is less than 3 seconds. Pages with load times longer than 3 seconds tend to have higher bounce rates and lower browsing time. Long load times have also been proved to negatively impact your conversion rate.
Google has already indicated that site speed is one of the elements its algorithm uses to rank pages. In addition, slow page speeds mean that search engines can crawl fewer pages and negatively affect your indexation.
3. Focusing On Design Instead Of Usability
Every designer’s dream is to create an amazing website that has all the unique features and minimal elements to create a clean user experience. However, this thinking is unrealistic or beneficial to many visitors because they may not understand how to navigate with such a distinctive layout.
An example of this is the hamburger navigator – three horizontal lines at the top of a site. For designers, it is great because it improves the site appearance and shows an interactive element for navigation links. Unfortunately, the majority of the website users are unaware of the navigator and its usage, thinking of it only as a non-interactive design element. So, try to make sure visitors can really use your website.
4. Lacking Responsive Design For Mobiles
By 2020, having a good web design that can function on mobile devices is crucial. Today, people are connected all the time. In fact, more than half of online traffic comes from mobile users! Google studies confirm that any business – small, medium, or even enterprise – needs a mobile-friendly website if they want to have visitors and gain a competitive edge.
If your website does not provide a mobile-friendly experience, it should be considered a priority. When users are looking for the optimal experience, they will always prefer a site with more necessary functionality. This is especially true with eCommerce platforms like Shopify, where finding the right theme that is responsive is a must.
5. Using Bad CTAs
Call-to-action (CTA) buttons help guide visitors to take action and convert on your eCommerce site. These buttons guide users to complete your business goals, such as buying products, making an appointment, or registering an event (Ex: Click here! Get coupons! Find out more about this product!) Obviously, it is very important that your CTA buttons clearly tell visitors what they should do. They should include enough information for visitors to know what they will get from taking action and what they need to provide.
On the other hand, there’s a fine line between being useful and annoying. Design your CTA so it is brief and tell customers exactly what to do. Keep the information needed to be filled to a minimum and give visitors a few minutes on your site before letting the CTA appear.
6. Not Having Enough Contact Info
When on a company’s homepage, 64 percent of visitors would like to see the contact information and 44 percent of them would leave if they can’t find contact information or a phone number. For a vital mistake, missing contact information is somehow very common.
The moment visitors decide to buy your product is extremely important. So they should have the necessary contact information the second they decide to choose you as the right company. If visitors must search a while on your site for contact information, they may be disappointed and leave. Your contact info should always be just a click away or at the bottom of every page.
7. Showing Ads In The Wrong Places
Advertising is necessary in the web design world – especially when it is considered one of the main sources of income for some sites. However, too many ads are noisy and will disappoint your visitors, causing you to lose sales or even your business. Try to analyze your ad thoroughly; if they bother you even a little, your visitors would feel the same. Same with popups, you should make sure they are not full-screen and easy to close.
Put your target audience and your brand image first at every step of the web design process – from planning to analysis. If you can reconcile both, you will have a beautiful eCommerce website that is engaging and fully represents your brand.
8. Not Optimized For Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
There is no magic method to get high search engine rankings and you will need to spend time building your website. However, there are a few common web design mistakes for SEO that you should avoid.
First, don’t use old school SEO – which is a mix of stuffed keywords, thin content, and confusing backlinks (trustworthy or not). These web design mistakes can get your site penalized and lose the site authority.
Second, the search engine algorithms have evolved to become a lot smarter and judge a website on many aspects. Here are some of them that you should optimize for SEO:
- Page Title.
- H1 headings and H2 subheadings.
- Reader-Friendliness.
- Meta Description.
- Consistent new content Natural language keywords.
- Social engagement (content shared on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest).
Have You Known What Web Design Mistakes To Avoid?
With this article, you are off to a good start in improving your eCommerce website’s online presence. Remember that your brand image and target audience should always be first in the web design process to create a good user experience.
Have you made any mistakes listed above? What will you do to improve your web design? Share your thoughts in the comment section below, and thanks for reading!
Guest Post Author Bio:
Avatar: https://imgur.com/gallery/hxRuVbC
Chance is a marketing specialist at Avada Commerce – a fast-growing eCommerce solution provider, whose goal is to never write a boring article. His enthusiasm for online business has spanned over two years, accompanying his articles with in-depth knowledge about eCommerce. He also enjoys drinking tea and playing Exploding Kittens in his free time.
