Building a website can be a challenging endeavor. There are so many aspects to it, you can easily get caught up in one detail, while completely forgetting about others.
People often think of design as a purely aesthetic idea. But this isn’t the case, especially with websites. Of course, you want your site to look good visually, but the design also needs to consider usability, branding, and SEO—all of which are highly affected by the visuals.
A poorly designed website can turn away customers. Don’t let these mistakes set you back. Here are some of the most common website design flaws that you should work to avoid.
Unreachable via Mobile
You can’t afford to have a website that isn’t mobile compatible or responsive. Thankfully, many templates and themes offered these days include mobile compatibility from the get go. However, it’s something that you absolutely need to make sure of before building your site. It’s so important because almost 60 percent of searches are now done from a mobile device. If your site isn’t accommodating this, you’re going to lose tons of visitors.
Slow Load Speed
Load speed is a crucial design factor both for SEO reasons and usability. You’ve probably hit “back” or exited a page when it has taken too long to load. You’re not alone in that. On average, the abandonment rate at three seconds is about 40 percent. Additionally, search engines will punish pages that have slow load times.
It’s Confusing
You want your site to look pretty. Having a visually appealing site is a great way to improve people’s’ impressions of your brand. However, you don’t want to go overboard with aesthetics if it comes at the expense of functionality. People don’t want to figure out how to navigate your site. If it’s too complex, they’re just going to leave.
Fonts Are Illegible
Few people consider the full importance of fonts on their website. There are of course some fonts that will always look unprofessional, such as Comic Sans. Still, there are many things to consider when choosing fonts. Legibility is key. If people can’t read your content, it’s useless.
Consider the color schemes between font and background, and just font color in general. Most people struggle to read things that are in yellow or other light colors. You also probably don’t want to use script fonts, as not everyone can easily read them. Even cheap domain hosting options and website builders typically offer a variety of fonts for users to employ. Make sure you take some time determining which ones are best for your brand identity and readability.
Too Many Fonts
There’s another significant way that fonts can really make your site look unprofessional – when you use too many. Constantly changing fonts affects how well people can comprehend your content. It almost never looks as good as you think it does. It’s best to stick to two or three fonts for your whole site.
Not Enough White Space
Just because you have space doesn’t mean you have to fill it with something. White space can help users focus in on what’s really important on your site. Additionally, having too many extraneous things going on will be a distraction, and often looks unprofessional and unfocused.
Dead Pages
You’ve likely ended up on a missing webpage here and there. Isn’t it annoying? It’s not unlikely that you immediately left those sites after arriving at a dead page. That’s often what people will do for your site as well. Make sure all pages are up and working. Dead pages are a huge design flaw that can be easily avoided by ensuring each link is properly mapped to the correct page.
Bad Search Function
You know where everything is on your website. But no one else does. This is why it’s important to have a functional search bar or other tools on your site. It should be simple for people to quickly navigate their way to exactly what they want. If this isn’t the case, they’ll probably get frustrated and leave.
These are some of the most important design mistakes to avoid on your website. If you can stay away from these issues, your site will be much more appealing to users.
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