Your website design is the first thing that visitors experience, and as noted it takes them just around 50 milliseconds to decide whether they want to stay or bounce off to another site—so, the stakes are high.
An optimized, well-designed website highlights your credibility and leads to more conversions. Your website should make the user experience (UX) as streamlined as possible.
Keep Text To A Minimum
Nobody likes massive text blocks. While you’ll need to provide prospective clients relevant, in-depth information through your blog posts, your web pages must use as little text as possible. Your homepage and landing pages are about your brand and your products, but you’ll have to describe them using just a few words.
Engage Visitors Visually
You’ll need to provide visitors visually engaging content that breaks up the text. Visual content is also helpful when it comes to explaining your brand and products to prospective customers. Studies have shown that 85% of businesses marketed their services or products to customers through video content in 2020.
Moreover, well-thought-out visuals are self-explanatory. For instance, instead of a textual explanation about your products, you could use a high-quality image that acts as a diagram and highlights each feature in a few words through arrows. Your product pictures need to be on point, so it’s best to hire a professional photographer.
Short Sentences Are The Way To Go
We live in the age of information—perhaps too much information. People are constantly bombarded with information they neither asked for nor want. If it’s difficult for them to comprehend instantly or takes too much time, many prospective clients won’t try to engage with your content.
Effective website copywriting is key. Shorter sentences are quicker and easier to read. Instead of using large walls of text, use short, snappy, informative sentences. Whenever you need to use long sentences, mix them up with short ones. Variety improves readability.
Use Short Paragraphs
It’s usually fine to use longer paragraphs for your blog posts and in-depth content. However, your homepage and landing pages should use short, quick sentences that make it easy for your clients to understand what you’re offering them immediately.
Use shorter, information-filled paragraphs that add to prospective clients’ knowledge about your brand on these webpages. Each new section should have fresh, relevant information. This way, you can eliminate unnecessary textual clutter and emphasize your call-to-action in a better way.
It’s best to have your CTA in a separate paragraph so visitors who are scrolling through your website can instantly see it. The CTA isn’t as effective if you bury it in a wall of text.
Use A Color Scheme That Matches Your Branding Strategy
When you’re deciding on the colors to use on your website, it’s best to ensure they’re consistent with your overall branding strategy. Being consistent with your branding ensures that you’re easily recognizable to your customers across various touchpoints and marketing channels.
Customers trust brands that employ consistent branding, leading them to increase revenue by 33%. Therefore, it’s best to choose a color scheme for your website after considering your logo. Does your website’s color scheme match your logo and your overall branding colors?
Keep Messaging And Style Consistent
If your central message remains the same on each webpage, your CTA should also be the same. Visitors to your website might browse through your products before converting, so using the same CTA reinforces familiarity. Instead of using variations such as “Add to Cart” and “Buy Now,” it’s best just to have one CTA that keeps the style and messaging consistent.
Streamline Navigation
Your website navigation should make it as easy as possible for visitors to find exactly what they’re looking for. The best way to accomplish an easily navigated website is to ask yourself what you would do if you were in your visitors’ place.
People visit your website to find out more about your brand or buy your products. How easy are you making this task for them? If your website is complex and involves too many tabs with difficult navigation, your visitors will leave before converting. Most viewers spend 15 seconds on your website, so that’s how long you’ve got to give them the information they need.
Optimize Your Website Design For Mobile Devices
Most visitors to your website use a mobile device to access it. If you haven’t optimized your website for mobile devices, it won’t benefit you the way you want. Internet users spend over half their time online browsing through websites on their mobile phones.
87% of smartphone users utilize their devices to perform at least one Internet search a day. Over half of all searches on Google are carried out using mobile devices. It’s no wonder that Google favors mobile-friendly websites on their results pages—70% of results that come up on the first page are websites that have optimized their design for mobile devices.
Invest In SEO
Good search engine optimization (SEO) practices form the backbone of your website’s success. Many websites believe that adding a few keywords does the trick, but SEO is much more complicated than that.
SEO improves your content and makes it relevant, thereby guiding high-quality traffic towards your website. You have to focus on the following on-page elements:
- How easy is it for visitors to navigate and use your website?
- Mobile-friendliness. Is your website’s design optimized for mobile devices?
- Keyword optimization. Does your website regularly use the relevant phrases and keywords that will guide searchers towards it?
- Internal linking. Does your website link to other webpages on your site often?
It’s best to make an XML sitemap for your website that allows search engine crawlers to examine your website’s content more easily. The sitemap shows crawlers your webpages’ location and updates and highlights how all the pages are related. A well-constructed sitemap enables Google to ensure that there’s no duplicate content on your website.
Improve Your Page Loading Speed
The importance of improving your website’s performance is often overlooked. If your website pages take a long time to load, visitors will likely abandon the website midway through conversions. This is especially true in online retail, and proper ecommerce website optimization can mean the difference between 2% and 5% conversion, so it’s not inconsequential. Adding bulky elements such as videos, images, and other media to your website can adversely affect your loading times.
Google’s research highlights that your bounce rate increases by 32% when your website’s loading time extends from one to three seconds. The bounce rate is a measure of how many visitors abandon your website. If your page takes five seconds to load fully, the likelihood of a bounce increases by 90%.
In Conclusion
A well-designed website is crucial to the success of your brand and business. Using the improvements highlighted, you can improve your website’s design, convert more visitors, and ultimately increase profits.
By 2023, e-commerce purchases are expected to account for 22% of the global goods market. Consumers are attracted to well-designed websites. It’s up to you to give them relevant content that encourages them to perform conversions.
While you don’t need to implement all these design changes simultaneously, it’s best to start somewhere and do it ASAP. Doing what you can to follow website design best practices in 2021, even if you only adhere to a few of them, will help ensure the success of your website. You’ll need to update your website with fresh content regularly and design improvements to gain an edge over your competitors.
