Design mistakes that can cost your business a fortune

Have you ever wondered why one website design is a home run, while another has struck out? Among the reasons is because some practices in design are just not encouraged, and non-designers and even professionals tend to make mistakes. A poorly planned and executed design will cost your business not a small fortune but a big one. Unless you want to make it on Forbes Top 10 List of Website Mistakes of even the largest companies, there are some things to avoid.

web desite mistakes

An example of one company listed on Forbes is a mega car company, where one of their pages was taking more than 9.96 seconds to load. When a website takes 1-3 seconds to load, the probability of bounce increases 32%. When it takes 1-10 seconds, that probability increases to 123%. The bounce percentage is one of the tools used for measuring the performance of a site. When talking about website design, there are several design practices to watch out for or stay away from altogether.

 

Let’s have a look at some of these issues.

Call to Action

Abbreviated as CTA, the point of having a website is not just to increase traffic towards it, but knowing what you want customers or potential customers to do after they reach your site. Your website needs to guide them to do something and this is the CTA that many small business owners often neglect on their web pages. ‘Click Here’, ‘Download this ebook’, ‘Try for one month free’ are types of CTA that should be clearly visible on your site. Keep it clear and simple.

Slow loading

Your website needs to load fast, and by fast we mean 2 seconds. Around 47% of people expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less, and if they’re browsing on a mobile phone that percentage jumps up to 53%, which leads us to a another point.

Mobile-friendly

For 2019 and beyond, it’s of utmost importance that your website is also mobile-friendly. Drew Roberts, an expert on data analytics and digital marketing might advise you that your digital marketing strategy needs to shift focus on mobiles as well because consumers spend an average of 3.3 hours per day on digital media.

 

All pages are the same

On any website, some pages are going to be more important than others. Here, you can use the 80/20 rule in where 80% of your traffic will be driven by 20% of your site. This means you need to determine where 80% of the traffic will go to on your site, and draws attention to those pages.

Poor font

Squinting to read print on a website either because it’s too small or just not clear is considered a waste of time for consumers who will just click the back button.

 

Lots more involved

There are several other factors in making your design more user-friendly to convert your traffic. Design mistakes are costly, but can be easily avoided. Like most other things, it will cost you less to do it right from the start rather than to fix it later on.


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With a passion for Knowledge, Smashinghub has been created to explore things like Free Resources For Designers, Photographers, Web Developers and Inspiration.

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