7 errors of web design that harm your site (and how to avoid them)
7 web design mistakes that harm your site (and how to avoid them)
Did you know that 94% of a website's first impressions depend on its design? A poor design can drive away your visitors in seconds. Here are the 7 most common mistakes that harm your website and how to fix them:
-
Complicated navigation: Overloaded or disorganized menus.
Solution: Limit to 7 elements, use clear categories, and adapt for mobile. -
Slow loading speed: 53% of users leave a site after 3 seconds of waiting.
Solution: Compress your images, reduce HTTP requests, and use high-performance hosting. -
Inadequate mobile design: Over 64% of traffic comes from mobile, but many sites are not optimized.
Solution: Use fluid grids, readable fonts, and simplified menus. -
Ineffective CTAs: Poorly visible or designed buttons.
Solution: Choose contrasting colors, clear messages, and appropriate sizes. -
Complex forms: Too many fields discourage users.
Solution: Minimize fields and simplify the layout. -
Neglected accessibility: 15% of the world's population lives with a disability.
Solution: Add alternative texts, improve contrast, and facilitate keyboard navigation. -
Mobile loading time: Slow pages increase bounce rates.
Solution: Prioritize mobile-specific optimizations.
In summary: A well-designed site enhances your credibility, conversions, and user experience. Avoid these mistakes now to maximize your online performance.
Your brain HATES these websites
1. Difficult-to-use navigation
Poorly thought-out navigation can seriously harm your site. Did you know that 38% of visitors focus on navigation links on their first visit? Poorly designed navigation can even lead to the loss of 55% of visitors [2].
Too complex menus: a common trap
Complicated menus pose problems for several reasons:
- Disorganized structure that confuses users
- Too many options, which overload the menu
- Confusing information hierarchy
- Unclear menu labels
A study conducted by a tourism commission in February 2015 showed that overloaded menus significantly reduced user engagement. After simplifying their navigation, they recorded a 34.93% increase in conversion rates and a 35% increase in menu clicks [3].
How to effectively simplify your navigation?
To make navigation more intuitive, here are some practical tips:
| Element | Recommendation | Impact |
|---|---|---|
| Number of elements | Limit to a maximum of 7 elements | Allows for quick understanding |
| Organization | Group elements by categories | Facilitates visitor orientation |
| Visibility | Use color contrasts | Improves accessibility |
| Spacing | Add enough white space | Makes navigation more readable |
Steps to improve your navigation:
-
Conduct a content audit
Identify essential pages and group them under logical categories. -
Intelligently structure your menu
Place important elements at the beginning and end of the menu, as these positions attract the most attention [4]. -
Optimize for mobile
With 54% of web traffic coming from mobile [5], adopt a hamburger menu for smooth navigation.
"Website navigation is the most important feature of the overall user experience and can make or break your chances of conversion." - Netguru [2]
A clear and effective navigation sets the foundation for solving other critical issues.
2. Slow loading speed
Once your navigation is simplified, it is crucial to improve loading speed to keep your visitors on your site. A slow site can ruin the user experience. For example, 53% of visitors leave a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load [6].
Why is speed so important?
Even a 100-millisecond delay can reduce revenue by 1%, as shown by Amazon [6]. Sites that load in 1 second have a three times higher conversion rate than those taking 5 seconds [9]. Moreover, a loading delay of 1 to 3 seconds can increase bounce rate by 32% [7].
"As consumers become increasingly impatient and their attention span decreases, pages that don't load immediately can mean a customer will refuse to buy on the site."
- Daniel Cheung, SEO Manager at Optus [8]
How to speed up your site?
Here are some key measures to improve loading speed:
- Optimize your images: Use tools like TinyPNG or ImageOptim to compress your images. This can reduce their size by 25 to 80%, depending on the format [11].
-
Improve technical performance:
Action Advantage Enable GZIP compression Reduces file size by up to 70% [12] Use a CDN Improves geographical content distribution Reduce HTTP requests Speeds up overall loading time Configure browser caching Makes loading faster for regular visitors - Invest in : High-performance hosting reduces server response times. For example, Electrolux boosted its conversion rates by 385% after optimizing the technical infrastructure of its 200 e-commerce sites [9].
To analyze your site's performance, try tools like Google PageSpeed Insights (free) or other specialized solutions.
With average user attention span decreasing from 12 to 8 seconds between 2000 and 2016 [10], and 79% of internet users not returning to a slow site [9], it is evident that optimized loading speed is essential to convert your visitors and meet modern expectations.
3. A flawed mobile design
After optimizing your site's speed, it is crucial to ensure a smooth and pleasant mobile experience. With over 64.25% of web traffic coming from mobile devices [13], a site poorly adapted to smartphones can seriously harm your online performance. These figures highlight the importance of adopting a mobile-first design.
Often neglected mobile users
Some key data: The French spend an average of 3 hours and 15 minutes per day on their smartphones [13], with 58 daily checks [13]. Despite this, many sites still offer an unsatisfactory mobile experience.
Here are the most common issues:
| Common Error | User Consequences |
|---|---|
| Slow loading time | 15 seconds on average on mobile, far from the recommended 3 seconds [15] |
| Too small touch areas | Frustrating navigation and frequent errors |
| Complicated navigation | Bounce rate exceeding 75% on the homepage [14] |
| Illegible fonts | Difficult reading, leading to quick abandonment |
Designing for optimal use on all devices
To address these issues, adopt a mobile-focused approach with tailored practices:
- Prioritize mobile: Design for small screens first before considering larger ones.
- Emphasize flexibility: Use fluid grids and relative units for adaptable display.
- Add a meta viewport tag: Ensures proper scaling on mobile devices.
- Adapted touch areas: Ensure they are at least 44 pixels with 8 pixels of spacing [14].
- Readable font: Use a minimum size of 16 pixels for body text [14].
- Simplified menus: Incorporate a hamburger menu for intuitive navigation.
Test the effectiveness of your mobile design
Here are some tools to assess and refine your mobile site:
| Tool | Main Feature |
|---|---|
| Google Mobile-Friendly Test | Quickly checks mobile compatibility |
| Hotjar | Analyses user behavior with heatmaps |
| Accessibility tools | Checks readability and usability |
By applying these best practices, you will provide a better user experience while improving your ranking in search results. Google now favors mobile indexing [13], making these adjustments essential to increase your conversions and satisfy your visitors.
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4. Ineffective call-to-action buttons
Once navigation, speed, and mobile design are optimized, your call-to-action (CTA) buttons become essential for converting visitors into customers. Yet, according to Small Business Trends, 7 out of 10 companies do not integrate an effective CTA on their site [16], resulting in a significant loss of conversion opportunities.
Why CTAs fail
Several reasons can explain the inefficiency of CTAs: lack of contrast, inappropriate size, poor placement, or unclear message. On mobile, where 84% of users spend an average of 1.5 hours per day and 49% use their smartphone with one hand [20], these issues become even more critical.
Dmytro Tymoshenko, CEO of Eightify, summarizes this challenge well:
"CTAs can easily be ignored if the color used blends with other elements or the background color."