It’s now a necessity for a business to have an excellent online presence to remain competitive in the marketplace. This makes your website an extremely essential component in your marketing efforts. For you to have an impeccable online presence, your website needs to feature an excellent design, that’s easily navigable, accessible, interactive, and responsive. The content needs to provide value to the audience, too.
All these components are what make your visitors stay, browse through, and ultimately make a purchase. A minor user experience mistake on the website can cost you current and potential customers, which means losing business. Besides that, poor user experience can ruin the online reputation of your brand. To keep that from happening, look at some of the web design mistakes that can ruin user experience:
1. Poor Navigation
Visitors expect a website to not only look good but usable. Navigation hugely impacts the user experience, and the overall success of a website. Good navigation enables users to find what they need quickly, which means good web direction and no distractions. However, if navigation on your website is poor, users get confused, feel clueless, and are likely to opt out of the website.
Good navigation gives users an excellent digital experience and helps them find the right content, keeping them interested to move forward to the sales funnels. Your focus in the placement of the navigation bar should aim at connecting with your audience by seamlessly directing them throughout the website.
The best practice is to position the navigation bar at the top or at the side where it’s clearly visible, and where users expect to find it. You may also include a sitemap that shows all the pages on your site at a glance.
2. Building An Unresponsive Design
Nowadays, people are using different kinds of devices to buy, sell, and connect online. That makes it clear that websites, too, should be accessible on multiple devices (e.g., desktop, phone and tablet). According to recent statistics, 88% of visitors aren’t likely to return to a website after a bad mobile experience. Therefore, a web design that’s not responsive is likely to discourage your visitors, no matter how good it looks.
With more people shopping on the go, an eCommerce website experience, especially, needs to be flawless on any device. Otherwise, customers will go to other sites where they can shop easily regardless of the devices they choose to use.
3. Pages Loading Too Slow
If web pages are taking too long to load, visitors get frustrated and leave. Even one second matters in a website’s loading speed as it’s said to reduce customer satisfaction by 16%. This can impact the flow of users on your website, and increase the bounce rate. If you want your web visitors to enjoy visiting your site, look at these recommendations that can improve your site loading speed:
- Reduce redirects
- Optimize your images
- Reduce server response time
- Avoid too many plugins
- Optimize the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) delivery
4. Overlooking Visitors With Disabilities
There are a lot of people living with some level of disability. Be it visual, hearing, motor, or cognitive disabilities. These people, too, need to access online content, communicate, and transact the same as the other people. A web design that overlooks the persons with special needs can ruin user experience because these users also have buying power. In fact, there are legal guidelines set for web accessibility designs that you need to follow.
This means an inaccessible design won’t just ruin the user experience but can also put you in legal trouble. Besides, more and more people want to see inclusivity in society, and therefore, your brand may end up with a bad reputation and loss of customers.
5. Low-Quality Content And Irrelevant Images
Web audiences love valuable content that’s easy to understand. The content should focus on the visitor and their needs. Content that focuses too much on the business can make it harder to convert visitors to customers. You should aim at creating engaging content, and avoid sounding generic and bland.
Also, having irrelevant or low-quality images leaves visitors confused and wondering what message you’re trying to relay. Therefore, use good quality and relevant imagery in your website to improve user experience and ultimately convert them to customers.
6. Improper Placement Of Call To Action (CTA)
CTAs are essential in directing users to your website’s desired outcome, and increasing conversion rates. They generate leads, drive sales, and boost revenue and profits. You need to design and place CTA buttons where they stand out without being intrusive. Direct visitors on how to take action, and give information on what happens when they do.
Final Thoughts
User experience is crucial in a website. It gives visitors a glimpse of what you are as a brand, and the things you care about. When visitors encounter difficulties browsing through your website because of poor loading speeds, navigation, accessibility, or content, they’ll look for other sites that meet their needs.
It may not be entirely possible to build a perfect website, but users will appreciate the effort to make their visits more effortless and engaging. The trick is to have the user in mind at every step, whether you’re developing, optimizing, or updating your website.