5 Tips for Improving your Web Design

Are you planning to build a new website?

Or are you seeking ways to make your current site more effective and engaging? You have landed in the right place. In this post, we will guide you through some effective tips for improving your web design.

Whether you run a small online business, own a grocery store, or have another type of small business, an engaging website is essential for your business’s success. When a visitor comes to your website, you have barely five seconds to grasp their attention.

There are a few key determinants that decide if your visitors will stay on the website or not:

• The load time of the website
• A visitor can determine your company’s nature of business
• Your site’s navigation plan
• Your pricing layout and contact us information

Suppose your website’s load time is not perfect and your visitors can’t navigate quickly to the desired page. In that case, they are likely to leave your site within five seconds.

So, how are you supposed to fix these issues and keep visitors on your site? A complete redesign might seem to be the solution, but not always feasible. A full-fledged overhaul can take a lot of time, and if you are paying an agency to do it for you, may not be a cheap endeavour.

Continue reading to learn more about how to improve your website design and instantly boost your site as well as your online presence.

1. Use high quality images intelligently

The key to designing an efficient, attractive, and engaging website is using a wide range of engaging media, including images, video clips, and infographics. Images particularly have better retention power than text. Also, photos can trigger various emotions and memories in visitors, making your website more engaging.

Use high-quality images wisely to add value to your website and not just add colour to the site. For every image you select, ask yourself the following questions:

• Why you are using this image
• Why you are placing the image at a particular position on the website

If you know the answers to these questions, you can move forward with those images. Otherwise, take a minute and rethink. Only use relevant images that support your website’s theme as well as the content.

The best thing is to use original images, especially your product photos. If you can’t afford to hire a photographer, you can always use stock images to compliment your product images.

There are hundreds of free and paid stock photos available online. But you must utilise relevant stock photos from reliable sources to avoid any copyright issues. Make sure to only use stock images that are not overused, and don’t forget to check their licensing details.

2. Make sure your website has a responsive design

The most important thing is to ensure your website has a mobile-friendly or responsive design. People nowadays are using mobile phones more for browsing the internet. So, if your website is not mobile-friendly, it is high time that you upgrade it to a more responsive site.

A mobile-friendly design will do wonders for your website. In 2015, Google even started penalising websites that were not mobile-friendly.

Here are three tips to improve the responsiveness of your website:

• Ensure a decent font size for smaller screens
• Compress high resolution images
• Ensure share buttons do not block your images or text

This will also help improve your website’s Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and help you position yourself higher in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

A study found that 80% of Alexa’s top-ranked websites are mobile-friendly. Some other reports found that 91% of small businesses do not have a responsive, mobile-optimized website.

3. Simplify website navigation

The navigation bar on your website helps the site in two ways:

• it helps the visitors find what they’re looking for
• it helps your search engine rankings

If the visitors cannot get the hang of your website navigation, they may run away within seconds. So, make sure your website has the simplest possible navigation plan.

• Ensure you do not have more than seven items on your menu
• Ensure you do not have more than three steps for customers to complete a conversion action
• Make labels in the navigation bar as descriptive and creative as possible
• Have a fixed or sticky navigation bar
• Be mindful of the order of the website navigation

Ensuring a straightforward navigation structure will help you keep visitors on your site for longer.

4. Improve page speed for lower bounce rate and longer sessions

Website speed is one of the critical determinants of online sales and marketing. If a website takes longer to load, visitors don’t take long to say goodbye. Web pages that take five seconds to load have a high bounce rate of 38%.

In fact, if your website takes a second’s delay to load during a transaction, the chances are high that your potential customers will abandon the website. Every single second of added page load speed can cause sales to drop.

So, if you are struggling to hook the visitors, check your website speed. If it is slow, work on speeding up your site before doing anything else. Google has several PageSpeed tools available online that you can use to check the loading time of your website.

5. Design a clear Call to Action - guide user behaviour

Having a call to action (CTA) button on your page can make a significant difference. You got potential customers or users to your website, you have engaged them, now what do you want them to do? This is where the CTA button comes in handy.

Have a CTA button instead of a text link, and you will see a notable increase in conversion rates. Further, for optimum results, use actionable words like start, learn, build, discover in your CTAs.

In addition, find a contrasting colour for your CTA buttons. An SAP study found that orange CTA buttons boost conversion rates by over 32.5%. Another study found that red CTAs boost conversion rates by 21%.

Final Words!

Creating a website design that works is not an easy task. But it isn’t that difficult either!

Follow the tips mentioned above and create a presentable website that delivers your message clearly and is optimised as well. This will help your business compete effectively in the online marketplace.