While you want your website to convert visitors into actual sales, at the very least, these are the most basic web design elements you need.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a single person wanting to build a website for yourself or a business looking to find new customers. You need to have a good web design if you want people to stay on your website.

The stats for this don’t lie. An estimated 38% of people will stop engaging with your website if they don’t find it attractive.

Are you still trying to find the elements of web design that matter most? Keep reading to learn seven web design elements you need to use for your website projects.

1. Typography

It’s hard to communicate the message of your website if your visitors can’t read what you write. You need to use good typography if you want everyone to read your site.

There is a lot more to picking fonts than picking the default or most popular ones. You need to figure out who will be reading your website and select your fonts based on their demographics.

Take lawyers, for instance. They won’t want to use creative fonts. Their websites will use fonts that are formal and easy to read.

You also need to consider the devices that are used to access your site. If you use small fonts on mobile devices, mobile users will have a hard time viewing your site. You want your typography to be clear on any device size.

2. Color Scheme

Picking your favorite color won’t be enough when choosing your colors for your website. Your colors need to align with your brand and help present a cohesive brand image to the people who visit your website.

Most websites focus on two colors: one primary and one secondary. Staying with two colors gives you room to be creative with your website elements. At the same time, you aren’t overwhelming your visitors with too many colors.

3. White Space

If you used the internet when it first started gaining popularity, you know how crowded websites used to be. A good design meant cramming as much information as you can on a website.

That doesn’t work anymore.

Instead of pushing your elements together, use white space to give your elements room to breathe. A little white space will help your visitor focus on your message and draw attention to the critical parts of your site.

When you crowd your website with information, it becomes hard for your visitors to figure out what they’re supposed to do. With so many places people can go to get answers today, it’s likely your visitors will immediately leave if they can’t easily navigate your site.

4. Call to Action

There’s a reason why you want your visitors to focus on specific parts of your website. You want them to know exactly what they need to do after they visit.

You use a call to action to do this. A call to action can be anything from email signups to a product purchase.

You don’t want your visitor to only come by one time. You want to engage them so they will buy your products or continue consuming the content of your website.

It isn’t always easy to find the best place to place your call to action. It’s important to learn the hot placement areas and test to find what is best for your site.

5. SEO Optimization

What the user sees isn’t the only thing that makes a good website design. You also need to make sure that your website is SEO optimized, so the search engines know how to rank your site.

If you skip SEO in your design, it will be hard for you to get organic traffic to your website from searchers. To do this right, you need to deal with the technical side of web design.

Search engines read a series of HTML tags to decide what to show in search engines. Some of these are your title tag, meta-description, headings, and search engine snippet tags.

6. Responsive Design

The only people you used to consider for web design are desktop users. That isn’t the case anymore. Believe it or not, mobile users now make up more than 50% of all web traffic worldwide.

Because of this, you can’t ignore smaller screens during the design process. If your designs don’t look good on mobile, you’re potentially alienating half of your audience.

You can use responsive designs to make sure your mobile users have a pleasant experience. Instead of creating static designs, your website will change automatically based on the screen size of your visitor.

It isn’t always easy to know the best ways to design for mobile screens. Contact a website design agency if you need help with the process.

7. Performance

It’s easy to go overboard when designing a website. You can make great looking sites by adding a lot of graphics. The question is, how much bandwidth do your users need to use to download your site to their device?

Since much of the internet traffic you’ll see is mobile, you need to worry about the file size of your site. If it takes too long to load for mobile users, you’ll end up losing your visitors before your page even loads.

If you need to use images, make sure you optimize them for the web. There are several programs that will reduce their file sizes without affecting your image quality. Once you do this, implement lazy image loading on your site to stop web browsers from downloading pictures that are lower on your page.

If you want to go a step further, you can minify and obfuscate your code. Doing this will reduce the size of your codebase, making it an easier download for your visitors.

Make Sure to Learn These Web Design Elements

Just knowing the web design elements above isn’t enough. You need to practice using them until it becomes second nature. Make sure to incorporate them into your designs in the future so you can deliver great results to your employer or clients.

Do you want to learn more tips that can help you with your web design career? Head back to our blog to learn everything else you need to know.