9 Web Design Mistakes to Avoid: You Should Stop Doing This Right Now!

Web design mistakes to avoid is what you should be looking for when first handling a website project. This is what most business owners didn’t pay attention to, but will affect users' experience the most. Thus, making those faults mean you’re giving competitors a far better advantage when it comes to attracting and serving customers. Yet we knew no business owners or marketers would want that! If your site wasn't well built or looked amazing, you’ll soon notice that traffic is far less than you expect. Meanwhile, the bounce rate is getting higher and the number of visitors you’re missing out on is undeniable. 

If you’ve been struggling with your website, you might have fallen into some of the common mistakes below. With no further ado, let’s get to all those problems along with how you could solve them! 

1. 1st Web design mistakes to avoid: Horrible Load-time 

Slow load times are one of the most common mistakes to avoid. At first, you might not even recognize or can go right past it. But with time, this flaw will definitely affect the satisfaction of your users. Once your site takes any longer than just 3 seconds to fully load, you’d better think of making some changes to your design. The faster, the better impression first-time users will have, giving you far greater benefits. 

When your website has slow load times, the first thing you should consider is to optimize images. It’s good that you’re having high-quality photos. However, don’t sacrifice your speed just have the highest quality pictures. You should try to scale down all your images as much as possible to both serve the speed and the aesthetic. Just remember this, users want a speedy web page first, or else they’ll leave. 

Themes and some plugins could affect the speed of your website as well. You can consider updating all of them to help speed everything up. Besides that, don’t ever publish your site without testing it thoroughly first. This is to quickly figure out broken plugins, slow load times, or any possible faults. 

2. A lack of clear Call to actions 

Your website is made to serve only one larger goal: to draw conversion of any kind that you choose. If your traffic is going in the right direction, all the stats are doing well, yet only 1 problem, your conversion rate is low. In most cases, you might have a lick of a clear call to actions to achieve your goals. By having this problem, you’re not communicating properly with users. They are interested in your products or services, but you’re still one step away from convincing them. However, you won’t have to worry much about this problem since solving it is easy like eating pie.

First, don’t forget to be clear about what you want visitors to do. It could be buying your products, signing up their email for a newsletter, or starting a free trial. Your objective could be anything, but it’s vital for you to make up your mind before anything else. 

Next, it’s time to write a strong, powerful call to action. A lack of call to action would affect your conversion rate heavily, so try to avoid this mistake as long as you can. And lastly, make sure your design follows your CTA and makes it pop. We must say this is one of the simplest web design mistakes to avoid, so why not do it now? 

3. No analytics to measure performance

If you’re not looking at all the important data and analyzing it, then you’re making a huge mistake. In fact, the largest web design mistake to avoid is having no analytics to measure performance. Without looking deep in all your stats, you’d never be able to figure out what you’re doing right or wrong with your website and business. Thus, you’re missing out on the biggest merit of digital marketing: the ability to track, test, and adjust your work. 

The easiest way to overcome these mistakes is to begin using Google Analytics. Not only can you follow up on your goals of conversion, but also learn more about users' behavior. It’s time to say goodbye to a website with no analytics to measure performance. Move on, collect your data, read the stats. After that hard work and a lot of concentration, you’ll be able to target and retarget a group of audiences that bring you revenue. 

4. Unclear Brand messaging is the best web design mistakes to avoid

Well, we’ve said this above, but clearly, unclear brand messaging is the biggest web design mistake to avoid. The brand message is the most obvious thing to identify yourself among hundreds, if not thousands of rivals in the market. It’s the thing all the giants do, and you should pay great attention to it as well. Unclear brand messaging will cause more harm than you think. Once visitors can't figure out who you are and why they have to trust you, they’ll leave. Or even worse, they’ll doubt or forget about you. Strong branding, a great communication plan will give you the benefit of recognizing anywhere. 

Thus in 2021, it’s the decade of personalization. So don’t just come up with an unclear brand messaging, or a generic tagline. It's most likely to be one of the worst web design mistakes to avoid. If you keep everything general, why would your visitors or potential have to care? You’re just like some brands they met down the street. 

Here is our advice to get rid of this situation. The first thing to do here is to create a unique persona for your brand. Then try to communicate to your audience in that consistent voice and mood. Imagine your brand is a human, give it characteristics and features. You should go from building interest, then trust among all your audiences first. Based on that, your effort will turn into more sales. 

5. Weak Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

If you think web design mistakes to avoid are terrible enough, it could even get worse with web development. Weak Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the quickest way you could break your traffic and efforts. Good content could generate users automatically, then bad content could make them run away from you, too. If you haven’t paid any attention to your SEO results, then let this be the sign for you. 

Our best advice for you to tackle this problem is to be patient and work hard on your website content. High ranking won’t happen overnight, it’s a long journey to go. Try to use more long tail keywords since it’ll match better with users' search behavior more than short keys. Invest your time in SEO, it’ll definitely pay off. 

Another small tip is to post regularly. With website content, the best way to build constant trust with your users is to post fresh content frequently. Content is king, and why not let the king be your strongest weapon? 

6. No mobile-friendly 

If you lived in 2002, then no mobile phone wouldn't be a biggie. However, we’re all in 2021, and we couldn’t go a day without our mobile device! Without a good mobile-friendly design, you’re making right the huge web design mistakes to avoid. Don’t just expect people to scan through your site on desktop only. Visitors have their phone, tablet, or any possible device to go online, and your mission is to make sure their experience is the same on all devices. 

Give them the ability to connect to you anytime, with the same interface and smoothness. According to a quick survey of ours, more than 60% of users agreed that they’ll choose to buy from sites that are mobile-friendly. Nearly 50% of users said that mobile site design is one of the first things they notice of a business. You've seen the web design mistakes to avoid, now it's time to work on it. With just a few words, we think you now know what to do. Get your developers and start working on a mobile-friendly web design right now! 

7. Design issues: Font, color, graphics,…

When we’re still looking deep into web design mistakes to avoid, why not talk about design issues? You might think about what could go wrong with a design, but let us tell you, there are a lot of things. 

First is font problems! Too small, too big, too overwhelming, or too hard to read. Try to stay simple and neat with your font, and don’t use more than 3, especially on your homepage. Choose wisely and try to stay consistent with your font. Don’t forget to maximize readability with the right font-size: large enough to read, and small enough to stay neat. 

The next thing to keep an eye on is color. We always appreciate designers who give pleasure to our eyes by choosing the right color combination. Not only it’s much more comfortable reading, but it also helps us with eye strain. We highly recommend using a not too harsh color that creates a nice contrast between the text and background. 

And last but not least, don’t forget the responsiveness of paragraphs on mobile devices. If you’re not doing it right now, your mobile users might have had a terrible time try to scale up and down your website on their phones. If we were them, we’d move on and choose other resources instead! 

8. Neglected contents 

If your website has a news section, then it’s a must to keep it up to date. We bet you’ve encountered many sites that only have outdated content from 2-3 years ago, and not liking them. It’s the same for other users, nobody is happy visiting an abandoned home. People always want to read fresh, most recent posts of you instead of those stale, ancient pieces. Once you thin out your regular posting schedule, you’re thinning out the relationship with your visitors. 

Thus, more content means better SEO practice, so just why not? 

Great blog posts will allow you to gain more trust and interest from users, then turning them into your regular visitors. You can try out storytelling, tips and tricks, and helpful expertise about your products. Don’t forget to update all the trends within your industry. This will allow you to be full of knowledge and always helpful to the eyes of your users. Choose your topic wisely, and it’s always better to use long-form (1000 words or more) content. 

If you haven’t started working on content on a weekly basis, this is the time! Post at least 2-3 blogs a week, continuously, then you’ll see the difference.

9. Hard to find contact info 

Another common web design mistake to avoid! Your business should be reached easily, if not with just a click. Users want and must know how to contact you right when they need to. Place a Contact page on your navigation bar. This is where you provide all you have, from email, phone, a hotline to your address, and the map to get there. You can also create an instant call button, so they can reach for it every time. Some websites even add plugins that allow them to chat in real-time with visitors. With contact info, you won’t have to be creative. You just need to put it all out there, obviously, and easy to reach. That’s more than just enough.

We also highly recommend placing your info on the footer of your site. The idea is when users scroll to the bottom of your web page, they’ll see this info. And if they need to contact you, they can do it right away. Don’t forget to add your social media handles here as well. We don't recommend putting links to social media anywhere else than on the footer and on the Contact us page. People nowadays love social media, so when they see it, they’ll click. But you don’t want them to leave your site too early, even for your own media, right? Try placing it down a bit, so users won’t go for that right away.