Poor web design can make your website lose visitors faster than an ice cream melts during a Texas summer. Want to know how you can make it better to attract and convert customers? Let a digital marketing consultant like me, Mauricio Pina , help guide you through the sometimes tedious realm of website design.
1. Effectively Utilize Visual Hierarchy
Web designers have heard this term many times before but for those of you who might not be familiar with it – visual hierarchy focuses on organizing design elements in an order of importance.
That could refer to the website’s arrangement, size, color, and contrast. Its primary purpose is to guide the visitor’s attention to the important aspects of your website first. When used correctly, visual hierarchy will lead your visitor to your call-to-action (what you are trying to get them to do) without much fuss.
On the other hand, you must be careful when it comes to background colors, contrasts, text, or accompanying images. They could affect your visitor’s ability to read or consume your content.
2. Ensure Your Website is Readable
The readability of a web page is what makes or breaks your whole site. If a visitor cannot quickly scan through its contents because of poor formatting or unreadable text, they will leave to find another website that can cater to their needs.
This goes without saying that your bounce rate will increase, signaling to Google that your content is low quality, meaning you are about to lose some rank. But not all is lost if you’re a little insecure about the readability of your content. Here’s what you need to focus on to ensure that you keep all eyes locked on your web page:
3. Make Sure Your Website Is Easy to Navigate
Creativity may compel you to create a website that has a unique navigation pathway but you would only be doing yourself a disservice. Visitors just want the easiest path to get where they are going. Your one-of-a-kind design may look fantastic, but if visitors can’t find what they want, they’ll simply leave to find another provider that can give them just that.
Take these recommendations into consideration when designing your website for easier navigation:
4. Make Sure Your Website Loads Quickly
Google’s “mobile-indexing first” campaign means the search engine giant will add mobile pages into a search first while using page speed metrics. When your page is loading at an average of 15 seconds, however, that may become problematic. According to Google , 53 percent of mobile site visitors leave a page that has taken longer than three seconds to load.
Web pages that have slower loading speeds tend to have a higher bounce rate, and at worst, these slow speeds can affect your conversion rate – that is site visitors that become customers.
To combat this problem, one of the many things you can do is a simple image optimization, ensuring that they aren’t bigger than they should be or saved in an incorrect format. This blog piece nicely details what you should do to reduce your page load speed. Check it out!
5. Optimize for Mobile!
YES! I’m saying it again… optimize your website for mobile!
Times are a-changin’, and mobile is on the up-and-up. According to the Pew Research Center , 77 percent of Americans own a smartphone, and in another 2015 article by the same institution , 51 percent of Americans purchased something using a cell phone. In total, 79 percent of Americans have made purchases online, which is equal to eight out of 10 Americans that shop online.
That means that you are going to want to have your website design properly optimized to ensure that your visitors—and potential customers—stick around on your website when they are accessing it from their mobile device.
A good way to check how your website would look like on a mobile device would be to, well, look it up on a mobile device. Check to see if all the content fits within the device’s screen comfortably. Check the menu for ease of navigation. Check the other pages to make sure they are in line with your mobile optimization.
Mobile is becoming a big thing, and if you don’t optimize your website for mobile devices, you will lose out on a lot of revenue.
A lot to take in? Why don’t you contact me, Mauricio Pina, at (956) 566-4998 for a one-on-one digital marketing consultation?
While some of the tips in this blog may just touch the tip of the web design iceberg, a one-on-one consultation with me can help you build a crisp, clean website that will attract traffic and compel them to stay.