When it comes to web design, one must consider whether their design is successful in being able to convert the audience well. In this case, designing a website is not only about making it look good, but also about how good your design can turn leads into customers. As a business owner, your top priority is, of course, to attract as many people as possible, so that they are eager to buy your products or services. Therefore, it is important to know what kind of designs that will most likely fail. In this article, we are going to help you identify some of those. Hopefully, after reading this you can prevent your web designers from making the same old mistakes.
Using Images Instead of Actual Text for the Important Element
The first common mistake often made by many people is that they use images for their page titles. This is a crucial act, as the page titles are generally the H1 tags of a page and very important to search engines. Basically, there are three main reasons why people keep making this mistake. First, it is because they want to use cool typography but the web developer doesn’t know how to implement it using modern HTML techniques.
Second, they want their pages to look stunning in a certain way, but they don’t know how to lay it out using CSS; therefore, they design the whole page as an image in Photoshop, so that it looks exactly like what they want. Another reason is, they want to use cute little pictures for their navigation menu, instead of text.
Unfortunately, while it is true that images help people easily understand your message better than text, search engines only “read” text, not images. Therefore, if you want your site to get good ranking on Google, then you have to find other ways to style your page. Over-sized visual content that are heavier than any other element of a webpage can decrease your site’s loading speed, which can kill conversions. It also makes the mobile view so much complicated and heavy.
Using too Much JavaScript or Too Many Plugins
Let’s face it, people don’t like slow loading pages – we all don’t like it. If a website keeps people waiting, of course they will leave that website within seconds when it’s getting more difficult to access the pages that they might be interested in. This then results in a decrease in conversion rates. Therefore, it is important to avoid any hindrances that can cause your site to load slowly.
One of the examples you can use is by reducing the usage of JavaScript or WordPress plugins, since using too much of them is what causes the page to load slowly. So, ask yourself, do you really need it, or you just want to try different things?
Not Updating the Content and the Look of Your Site on a Regular Basis
Not only clothes, gadgets, houses and most of the things in life that can change with time, depending on the trends and the future, website styles can also (and always!) change over time. This is because technologies quickly change; it can easily be overused and out-dated within several years. Therefore, you should consider refreshing and updating your website every 3 to 5 years.
Neglecting your sites will make visitors think that your company is too old-fashioned and doesn’t keep up with modern times, and even worse, they may think that it is a site that belongs to a company that is no longer in business. For that reason, remember to always update the quality of your content and the visuals to stay relevant to Google, Bing and other search engines and constantly add content to your website, so that visitors can get a lot of information from your website.
Displaying Company News on the Homepage
It is actually okay to update your website with your company news, but do not add long list of your updates straight on the homepage. This is because a homepage is a good place to show your offers, products and services, instead of scanning through your company’s news blurbs only, since this is what potential customers want to see actually. In fact, people will become more curious about your company when they know enough about the things you have offered.
Cluttered homepage
We know that Google prefers text, but that doesn’t mean that you can clutter homepages with unnecessary text and images. Cluttering the pages of your text with too much content will only decrease conversion rates, even if you have a properly optimized page in terms of meta data and keywords. So, instead of making it wordy, it is better to make every word count, clear and concise. Another important thing is to make sure that your copy is properly SEO optimised and every word used is to-the-point.
Too many CTA
CTA is a good option to convert website visitors into customers, but having too many CTAs added to one page can result in customer paralysis, even though there is no one-fit-it all rule regarding the right positioning of CTAs on one page. As a suggestion, you may place one button at the top of the page and somewhere at the bottom. You can also add more buttons in the middle of the text. We recommend attention is focused on this all, as online marketers often use A/B testing analysis to slowly improve conversion rates and where you want visitors to travel on your site, instead of dumping every single CTA idea and popup to the page.
No Trust Indicators
Trust indicators can play a huge role to the success of your site’s conversion. Trust indicators include reviews of other customers or social approaches. In fact, they are much better than the well-written marketing text, since nothing has a better effect on your target audience than reviews left by your existing customers. This is because all reviews shared on the pages of your site should be real messages from people who tried your services.
So, it is important to understand how to convert a visitor into a real buyer through a web design. By knowing this, a business owner can give good directions to their web developers or web designers about what should be done to avoid mistakes in designing a website, so that your website can perform the “magic” for you and your company. Good Luck!