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Top 9 common website design mistakes when building or revamping your site
Is your website accidentally hurting your online presence? Many businesses unknowingly lose potential customers because of critical website design mistakes. These errors quickly break trust; in fact, 75% of your site's credibility hinges solely on its design.
Getting user experience right is vital, as you only have moments to make a good first impression before visitors leave. Even small annoyances can lead to a 6% reduction in page views. This guide cuts straight to the core, exposing the top 10 common website design mistakes and providing clear, actionable solutions. We'll ensure your site doesn't just exist, but truly performs and converts.
Top 9 Common Website Design Mistakes You Need to Avoid
Successfully avoiding these six crucial design blunders is key to building a website that truly captivates customers and makes a stellar first impression. This approach will significantly enhance your sales, conversion rates, and how easily your site is found via search engines.
Intrusive pop-ups
Website pop-ups are triggered windows that appear during a user's visit. They can serve valuable purposes, like gathering cookie consent or highlighting a new promotion. However, a major website design mistake arises when pop-ups become overly intrusive, actively 'hijacking' a user's session. This happens when they appear too frequently, block crucial content, or demand attention before a user has even engaged with the site.
Consider a full-screen pop-up demanding an email address the moment a visitor lands. This immediate interruption creates an extremely frustrating user experience, often leading to instant site abandonment. It communicates a disregard for the user's immediate intent, significantly impacting trust and bounce rates.
Wild Souls features a sticky, non-intrusive email sign-up pop-up positioned at the bottom corner of its main page, effectively allowing users to explore the site uninterrupted while still driving sign-ups.
To overcome these challenges and integrate pop-ups effectively, we recommend treating them as an extension of your site's design, not a disruptive add-on. Here's how to ensure they enhance rather than detract from user experience and conversion:
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Concise messaging: It's crucial to keep pop-up text exceptionally brief, as users are more likely to engage when they can quickly understand the message and its value. Every single word must be impactful to effectively capture fleeting attention.
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Branded design: Your pop-ups should visually integrate with your website. Use your brand's colors, fonts, and themes. This consistency makes the momentary interruption feel like a natural part of your site's experience. Tools like GemPages are excellent for creating pop-ups that seamlessly match your existing brand aesthetic, ensuring a cohesive look and feel.
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Strategic timing: The key is to display pop-ups when they are least likely to interrupt the user's primary goal. This might be after a user has spent a certain amount of time on a page, scrolled a significant distance, clicked a specific button, or even as an 'exit-intent' pop-up when they're about to leave. Thoughtful timing respects the user's journey.
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Holistic Approach: Avoid pop-up overload. Consider the entire user experience across your site. Bombarding a user with multiple, consecutive pop-ups, especially repetitive ones, will quickly lead to frustration and a negative perception of your brand, directly impacting your conversion rate.
Unclear communication & navigation
As businesses increasingly move online, websites often become crowded with complex content. This makes clear communication and easy navigation more crucial than ever. When your site's layout is complicated or its message is unclear, visitors will quickly leave without understanding what you offer or how your products can help them.
To avoid confusing your users, design your website with their needs in mind, not your assumptions. Don't assume visitors already understand your solution or know exactly where to go on your site. Instead, actively incorporate customer feedback into your design process. When visitors land on your homepage, they should instantly grasp who you are and what you do. Clearly show how your products and services solve their problems.
For excellent navigation, remember the 'three-click rule': if users can't find what they're looking for within three clicks, they are likely to leave. People visit websites for a reason, and they need to find what they came for as quickly as possible.
Weak calls-to-action (CTAs)
Many websites suffer from weak Calls-to-Action (CTAs) that fail to effectively guide visitors toward desired actions or tasks. When you don't provide clear, easily understandable CTAs, customers won't know what to do next in their journey. This directly leads to lower conversions, fewer opt-ins, and ultimately, missed sales opportunities.
As Andrew Jasper, Co-Founder of Quest, wisely puts it, "A bold large button above the fold is tried and true to make your CTA effective. But good, emotional copy that makes you believe in the message and service is the key to whatever you're selling. People don't want to simply be sold to anymore, they want to align to a brand." This highlights that while visibility is important, the underlying message is crucial for connecting with users on a deeper level.
For clear, strong CTAs that truly convert, we can draw inspiration from successful brands like Typeform.
When a new lead lands on their homepage, they often aim to encourage a specific action, like signing up for a free trial. The best practices used to guide users towards that goal include:
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Strategic Placement: A clear CTA button should be positioned prominently, often "above the fold" where it's immediately visible without scrolling.
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Addressing Concerns: Directly tackle common user hesitations. For example, explicitly state there's no time limit on a free plan or that no credit card is required to sign up.
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Integrating USP: Weave your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) directly into your homepage's copy and design. Show how your product stands out and offers a superior experience compared to competitors.
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Communicating the Problem Solved: Clearly articulate how your products and services will help users overcome their challenges or achieve their goals.
Their homepage effectively revolves around their free trial CTA, featuring a clear button supported by relatable copy that resonates with users.
Pro tip: To maximize the power of your CTAs and optimize conversion rates, it's essential to understand user behavior. Utilizing visual builders like GemPages allows you to design and test different CTA placements and styles with ease. You can create eye-catching buttons, strategically position them in high-visibility areas, and quickly iterate on design variations to see what resonates most with your audience, leading to higher engagement and better conversion rates.
Slow page loads
Few things are more frustrating for a website visitor than a page that takes ages to load. This common website design mistake significantly impacts user experience and your bottom line. Did you know that if a page takes over three seconds to load, over 53% of mobile visitors will abandon the website? This statistic clearly shows that users expect pages to load quickly and instantaneously.
To understand your site's speed, you can benchmark its performance using Google’s Core Web Vitals framework. This framework provides three key metrics:
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Page load performance: How fast elements on your page appear.
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Responsiveness to user input: How quickly users can interact with the page once it starts loading.
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Visual stability: How well the page minimizes disruptive layout shifts as content loads.
These metrics help you pinpoint exactly where your page load experience needs optimization. Beyond these diagnostics, here are crucial best practices to improve your website's performance:
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Optimize Images: Large, unoptimized images are a huge culprit for slow speeds. They require servers to transfer more data, slowing everything down. Always compress and optimize your images before uploading them to your website.
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Minimize HTTP Requests: Every script, stylesheet, or image added to your site increases the number of HTTP requests, which adds bloat and increases load time. Regularly audit your third-party requests, JavaScript libraries, and CSS styles. Remove anything redundant or unnecessary.
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Choose Reliable Web Hosting Partners: Your hosting provider plays a massive role in speed. Reliable providers host your website on high-performance servers optimized for speed, uptime, scalability, and security. For example, platforms with robust global Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), image compression, and SSL certificates can dramatically enhance load times for your visitors worldwide.
Too many website elements
Design teams often get overly enthusiastic, including too much content on their site. This common website design mistake leads to a cluttered user interface (UI), overwhelming customers with too many elements competing for their attention.
A good website allows users to navigate clearly and intuitively, free from unnecessary clutter. As Graham Sawrey, CEO of Pixel True Design Studio, aptly states: "It’s great to have a fancy page and show off your design talents but when our audience comes to our page, we want them to know what they are supposed to do intuitively."
He further clarifies, "What action do we want them to take with the information on the page? The design should answer that without taking all of our audience’s time." To create a simple Browse experience, avoid an overload of different fonts, colors, images, and buttons.
Here are two effective techniques to streamline your web design:
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Incorporate negative space: Also known as white space, this is more than just a trend. Adding more negative space between elements makes interfaces look cleaner and naturally draws customer attention to your most important content.
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Prioritize the most important elements: Use insights from user behavior to pinpoint which elements customers focus on most. Once identified, you can strategically move or remove anything that isn't truly serving your users' needs.
IMDB's homepage serves as an example of web design that can confuse users. While their fonts and colors are streamlined, they feature too many different videos and clickable icons front and center.
Their menu is also hidden, and the search bar is quite small. These are elements users likely want to click often but are difficult to find. More negative space and streamlined media would give users a clearer, more enjoyable experience, better serving their actual needs.
Not prioritizing accessibility- Poor color and contrast
Contrast is a powerful design tool. It uses different colors, sizes, and shapes to create a visual hierarchy, making pages appealing. This helps draw attention to key elements like CTAs and significantly improves text readability.
However, poor contrast is a common website design mistake. It increases the effort needed to understand content and harms the user experience. For example, light yellow text on a white background is very hard to read, failing crucial accessibility standards for people with visual impairments.
Sonar Music provides a great example. Their use of white text on a black background effectively draws the eye to images and captions like “The Sound of Sonar Music.” This creates a visually compelling yet cohesive homepage experience.
To avoid poor contrast, take a thoughtful and iterative approach:
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Emphasize Key Elements: Use contrast sparingly. Highlight only the most critical parts of your page, such as CTAs, your brand's unique value, or main product features. This guides user attention effectively.
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Maintain Consistency: Contrast choices should always align with your site’s main visual identity. Stick to a consistent color scheme and typography hierarchy to avoid a chaotic appearance. We suggest exploring various templates and design resources for inspiration.
Pro tip: GemPages has 200+ CRO templates tailor-made for Shopify merchants in every niche! You can try all template to craft and test visually stunning pages using high-converting templates.
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Test and Iterate: What looks good in theory might not work in practice. Always show your designs to others for feedback or use dedicated tools to test new visual combinations. This iterative approach ensures optimal user experience.
Not investing in customization
Imagine walking downtown. One clothing store has a creative, visually attractive window display, telling a story with unique pieces. Another shop simply has a few mannequins with generic clothes. Which one catches your eye?
Your website is your business's internet storefront. It must reflect your unique branding and feel distinct. A significant website design mistake is choosing a "cookie-cutter" template and failing to customize it deeply enough to stand out.
To truly differentiate your online storefront and avoid this common pitfall, investing in genuine customization is key. Tools like GemPages are specifically designed to empower you with full control over your website's appearance and functionality.
With GemPages, you can go beyond basic templates, leveraging its powerful drag-and-drop builder to create unique layouts, incorporate custom elements, and ensure every part of your site reflects your brand's personality and value. This allows your website to tell your story, not just a generic one, ensuring it truly stands out to visitors.
Untrustworthy design elements
With more websites online than ever before and growing concerns about cybercrime, building brand credibility through your website's design is vital. When users arrive, they need to feel reassured about your identity and the trustworthiness of your business.
This is especially crucial for newer or less-known businesses. If users don't trust your website, they'll be reluctant to interact. This directly leads to fewer leads, higher bounce rates, less traffic, poor SEO rankings, and significantly lower conversion rates.
To create a trustworthy website and avoid red flags, consider these points:
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Missing or incomplete contact information: Ensure your site has a comprehensive contact page. This should include a physical address and a phone number, showing legitimate presence and accountability.
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Excessive graphics and pop-ups: While pop-ups have their place, overusing them can make your site seem spammy. When visitors are bombarded with too many visual elements, it immediately raises suspicion and reduces credibility.
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No SSL certificate: An SSL certificate encrypts data and communications, verifying site ownership. It's critical for preventing cybercrime and making customers feel safe when interacting with your site, especially for transactions.
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No ‘About Us’ page: Customers want to know the story behind your brand and see the real people involved. Without an 'About Us' page, users may question your transparency and the authenticity of your business.
Here is an About us page example created by GemPages
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Performance issues: A trustworthy site must be consistent and work well. Problems like slow loading times, glitches, bugs, or broken elements instantly make your brand appear less credible and unprofessional to visitors.
Not optimizing across different devices
Users now view websites on mobile devices almost as much as they do on desktops. This means your web design must work brilliantly and seamlessly on screens of all sizes, from large monitors to small smartphones.
If you don't prioritize design that's responsive to both mobile and desktop interfaces, you'll inevitably lose out. This website design mistake can cost you significant traffic, conversions, and sales on one device or the other.
So, why does non-responsive design happen? Some designers plan their site's desktop version first, then treat the mobile interface as a mere afterthought. Others might try for mobile design, but fail to truly observe user behavior or test it enough to ensure intuitive interaction.
Avoid Common Website Design Mistakes to Boost Site Credibility
Throughout this guide, we've highlighted critical website design mistakes that can undermine your online presence. From intrusive pop-ups to a lack of mobile optimization, each error can deter visitors and erode trust, directly impacting your bottom line.
A well-designed website is more than just aesthetically pleasing; it is a foundational element for building strong brand credibility. By actively avoiding these pitfalls, you create a seamless user experience that encourages engagement, trust, and action.
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