9 Small Business Website Design Mistakes That Kill Conversion
When it comes to a small business website design, mastering the ‘Art of Designing’ can be a hard task.
It becomes even more difficult if you undermine the basics of website designing and user interface.
Sure, we have our goals decided for the website — Boost Conversions and Generate Revenue.
But without an appealing website design and efficient user interface, your goals will always seem distant no matter how much you try!
We get it. You love to have a beautiful looking website. But it also needs to make money!
To help with the cause, businesses need to focus on a design that not only looks good but also ensures a maximized conversion rate.
The mistakes committed are small, but the damage incurred is devastating.
These inappropriately designed websites push people away.
They come to the website and leave like it’s on fire!
But hey! You know why you are here, right?
Together we will understand these small mistakes and fix them once and for all!
Here are the Top 20 Website Design Mistakes Small Businesses Make.
No Responsive Design
Image source: Google Developers
Responsive design support is the most important feature you need to put on your website.
Responsive web design allows your website to change its layout when viewed on devices with different screen size.
To be precise, a device that a widescreen receives a design display with multiple columns. A device with a small screen will have the same content presented vertically in a single column.
The text size and links are appropriately sized to maintain the user-experience on a smaller device.
Why exactly do you need to add this feature to your website?
Supports a Multi-Device User
When you ensure consistency of information across all devices and presenting a responsive layout of your website, you do your best to give your users a pleasant overall experience.
Improved Search Engine Rankings
Google recommends every small business website design to be responsive. With their approach to improve user-experience, Google took their recommendation one step further by adding a ‘Mobile-friendly’ label to responsive websites.
Future Scalability
When you turn your website design into responsive, it gives you the best chance to support newer devices and screen sizes that’ll come in future. Responsive designs are fluid and can scale up and down with ease.
Handpicked Related Content:
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One Site to Rule ’em All
It’s a choice to keep two design versions of your business website — one for desktop and other for mobile. When managing one website design is such a tedious task, designing two website designs and then keeping them organized will become a definite headache.
Generic 404 Pages
Do you have pages on your website that show the 404 error?
Well, we have bad news for you.
One of the most common types of link error found on the internet is the infamous File Not Found, commonly known as the 404 error.
A study done by the Zona Research estimated that U.S Companies incurred a loss of $58 Million per month in e-commerce just because their websites failed to load!
Another study conducted by the business software developer Parasoft revealed that out of the 292,357 web pages it reviewed, 84, 302 links errors were found!
What is a 404 error message?
When a web server cannot locate the HTML document, it will show up a 404 error on the web browser. The error occurs when a Webpage is deleted or it’s renamed. A syntax error in the URL address can also cause the error to pop up.
Here are some good 404 Page examples:
Losing Customers
Plinko’s Net conducted an informal survey of more than 3000 users to check the gravity of this issue. They found that a majority of the users don’t bother to take positive action against a 404 error message.
To be more precise, here are the responses they chose when they were asked the question –
Hit the Back button and forget about it? 36.92%
Try to get to the homepage to locate the missing page? 20.37%
Write to the Webmaster? 2.82%
Weep uncontrollably? 39.88%
This certainly will be an eye-opener for the all the CIOs reading this!
Slow Website
Let’s make this clear one more time –
“If your website takes more than 4 seconds to load completely, it’s too slow!”
According to Google’s survey, more than 70 percent of the websites in their study took seven seconds or longer to load completely.
Let’s see how Google defines Speed in terms of Average Speed of Indexing, Average Time to Load, Average Request Count and Average Page Weight Bytes. We have shown the statistics for the United States.
Average Speed Index
Average Time to First Byte
Average Request Count
Average Page Weight Bytes
When it comes to designing a website, speed and size matter a lot. The above data proves to be a perfect guideline to tweak your website for speed, size and number of content pieces per page.
Download this Mobile Page Speed Optimization Guideline for your targeted countries which will help you ensure you are taking the right measures.
Here are a few different metrics Google uses to assess your website’s speed:
- Time to the First Byte
- Start to Render
- Visual Completeness
- Document Complete
- Complete Load
- Number of File Requests
Website Rejects Design Norms
When you design a website without paying heed to the standards already defined, you are set to blow up your business website.
Well, one would say that if every website follows the same design standards, will they all not look the same?
That’s not the case. These standards are formed to enhance the conversion rates of a business website.
You can have your own design layout, but following these guidelines will help you increase the efficiency of users converting from your website.
Here are a few guidelines one should follow while designing a business website:
- Logo in the Top Left
- Contact in Top Right
- Main Navigation across the top
- Homepage slideshow
- Value proposition high up on the Homepage
- Call to Action high up on the Homepage
- The search feature in the Header
- Signup Box in the footer
- Social Media icons in the footer
Image source — Orbitmedia
Clarity Trumps Persuasion
Even the most brilliantly written content cannot sustain the attention of the users if they suffer from poor spacing.
Users want clarity and uniformity in how the content appears on the screen. You just cannot persuade the readers to take a desired step until they understand you.
When it comes to typography, we need to take multiple things into concern.
Clarity is an absolutely essential element of persuasion.
So, let’s take a look at the three most important design elements one should focus on –
Kerning
Kerning is what we refer to space in between two characters.
Tracking
Tracking refers to the spacing given in between the words and phrases.
Leading
Leading refers to the space given in between two lines.
Kerning, Tracking and Leading when tackled carelessly can make clarity difficult or impossible.
It takes just seven seconds of user-experience for a user to decide whether he likes your website or not.
Therefore, special attention should be given content display as well.
Using Conflicting Fonts
Using two or more fonts on a website is a bad idea.
Why?
It’s because conflicting fonts fight for a visitor’s attention!
This takes away their attention from what’s important on the webpage.
You don’t want your visitors to pay attention to what’s not relevant.
When you use too many fonts on your website, the cognitive fluency reduces and can become a major setback to your conversion rate.
Here’s a guide on how to choose the right font for better website optimization.
Your Content Not Focusing on Visitors
Visitors on your website don’t read much.
For most of the website visitors, scanning is the most common behavior.
Whenever a user lands on your webpage, it has just enough time to go through 30% of the text on an average page during an average visit.
It is really important to display content in a way that makes it easy for visitors to scan in one go.
The amount of content you present on your website also matters.
As you can see in the above graph, users tend to spend more time on web pages that have more content on them.
To make the visitors stay longer on your website, make sure you make your content scannable.
This is what a scannable content contains:
- Descriptive sub-headings
- Short Paragraphs
- Bold, Italicized, and highlighted formatting
- Bullet points and numbered lists
One of the common mistakes that inexperienced content creators and marketers do is that they focus majorly on their brand and try to tell how good they are.
This kind of content ignores the visitors and fails to solve their problem.
Eventually, the credibility of you as a trustworthy information source decreases, making it harder to convert visitors into customers.
Invisible and Uncontrollable Navigation Menu
When a visitor is on your website and moving through its different pages, it’s your responsibility to make sure he knows where he is.
By that we mean the user should know which part of the website he is on right now.
Your navigational menu should answer the ‘Where am I?’ question.
The website should use visual cues from your navigation menus and breadcrumb navigation to go through your website without getting lost.
Invisible navigation menus tend to mystify everything that is on a website. The visitor is left to think whether a particular button on the website brings them to a web page which answers their question.
This strategy may backfire when a visitor is looking for a quick answer.
With clear navigation, the visitor has a complete idea of where to find the information it seeks and also answers the ‘Where am I?’ question.
It’s important than you think.
Here’s another tip you would like to know –
Your cute animated navigation styles are conversion killers.
To be precise, anything that rolls, flashes, bounces or moves while your visitor is trying to find an answer are going to irritate your visitors.
Website Not Answering Visitor Questions
Why does any user land on your website?
It’s because he’s in search for answers.
When visitors arrive on your website, they are looking for specific answers to the questions they have.
Visitors tend to leave websites that ignore or refuse to satisfy their thirst for information.
Here, we have mentioned all the questions that a user has when he lands on your business website –
- How do I get in touch with a person at your company?
- What’s the price of your products or services your business offers?
- How do you handle product refunds and exchanges?
- What will you do with my information?
- Where is your office located?
- Why should I subscribe to your newsletter?
Handpicked Related Content:
Websites Design Tips That Still Work And Convert
Lack of Clear Call to Action
One of the biggest mistakes business owners commits while creating a small business website design — not giving a proper Call-to-Action.
That’s right!
How would you know that we design the best business websites if we won’t ask you to check us out?
How would you ask your visitors to take the next step if you don’t show them the way? After all, it’s your website!
Well, missing Call-to-Actions on your website is a huge mistake.
The best user-experience should tell the visitor the W-H-W of a website:
- What to do.
- How to do.
- Where to do.
It’s important for you to have a clear language while giving a Call-to-Action. It should be simple, succinct and should tell users exactly what to do!
Here are a few examples of CTAs that heavily convert -
Final Thoughts
This list is a great starting point when you have just set out to create a website design for your small business.
These are handy when it comes to optimizing your website to gain lots of traffic and conversions.
It’s true that most businesses struggle to get the expected ROI from their small business website, but their quest should not end.
Creating a website design that works is not rocket science. With the right strategy and best practices, you can always create a website design that provides the result.
Just make sure you create a website that provides value to your visitors in the most efficient way possible.
And since you are here, let’s take this little acquaintance a step forward.
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Author: Dinesh has been doing digital marketing since 2007. Now he manages a team of digital marketers, developers, and project managers. As the CEO of Ads Triangle, Dinesh has helped hundreds of businesses to grow their revenue through digital marketing.
