Top 10 Common Web Design Mistakes to Avoid in 2022

Do you know the feeling when you visit a website only to close its tab in the next five seconds? The average attention span of a user on a website is eight seconds. Your website could be a business, e-commerce, or your personal blog. Now, in the next eight seconds, you would like to create an impression on your audience or your customer which is positive. And grab their attention

You would not want them to switch to your competitors, make a terrible impression or increase the bounce rate on your website with a shoddy design. Where the color scheme is messy, the typography does not sit right with the brand, or just in general the UI is ineffective.

Basically, your website can be a deal-breaker for you. Every other business has its presence online, and having a website has become an integral part of being in the market and getting potential customers.

A good website with the right components, clean user interface, simplicity, functionality, color scheme, visuals, typography, and consistency can ensure that people will continue to browse, make a purchase or keep reading your blog.

So how can we have a website that has a balance of all of these? Further, we will explain what website design mistakes can be avoided to make sure your audience has a seamless browsing experience.

What Makes a Good Website?
Common Website Design Mistakes

What Makes a Good Website?

To avoid making website design mistakes, first, let's try to understand what makes a website a good one. You might not be a graphic designer, or perhaps you are paying one to get your website design done. How do you make sure that your vision comes into being?

The design has principles, and again you don't need to be a wizard to know all of it. Just the basic 6 principles that you can follow to get it right. Let's take a look at what design principles are.

The six principles of design

Unity/ Harmony

Create repeating patterns with the elements having a regular repetition of elements that suggest movement or again create a rhythm. E.g., like a maze.

Balance

Arrange the elements in symmetrical, asymmetrical, and radial forms to establish a sense of balance.

Hierarchy

As the name suggests, here you use the other principles and arrange design elements to how you want your users to view them.

Scale/proportion

Use size, ratio, and divisions to create visual harmony and establish a sense of the relationship between the elements.

Dominance/ Emphasis

Create an emphasis, establish a point of difference and bring the focus of your audience to the important aspects of your website by playing with highlights, color, and size.

Contrast

Group together elements that appear to be similar or share the same visual characteristics

While composing, put together the designs that have differences, e.g., the foreground and the backdrop of the web design with different colors.

Common Website Design Mistakes

Not Having a Call-To-Action (CTA) Button

A call to action can be anything that gives your users proof that you exist as an organization or a person. It further guides and encourages the user to take some kind of action on your webpage.

It could be something as simple as a subscribe button, a call, or a sign-up for the free online course that you are offering. In most cases, a call to action is highlighted or made through special buttons.

Too Much Loading Time of the Website and the Images

As mentioned before, the average attention span of a user on a website is 8 seconds. What would you do if you saw a banner ad somewhere and immediately became interested in the brand or the product/service that it is offering?

Following the button, you click on the link, and it takes you to a page that takes too much time to load. You become annoyed and immediately close the tab. It can be terrible for your business, especially if you are dealing in the industry of e-commerce with no app where your website on the internet is the only source available where your presence is.

Similarly, when you upload pictures, make smaller graphics that you use for your web are 300 KB or less with large or full-screen background images being no more than 1 MB.

Not Having Relevant Images and the Content

Let's say you are an NGO that focuses on the education of less privileged children. But the content written on your website is about the meaning of the song that's recently released, rather than giving out any information regarding what your organization is doing to make their lives better. It will definitely confuse your audience. Have content that is aligned to the purpose of your main purpose.

The same holds true for your visuals. If the image does not blend well with your content, you need to change it to a relevant one or get rid of it.

Having Complex and Dysfunctional Websites

Your website can be challenging to navigate, with problems with coding, expired or mismatched domain names, and broken internal links creating a dysfunctional website.

Another reason could be that you don't have a secure HTML website, which makes your viewers doubt the security of your website. Resulting in a bad user experience and frustrating your audience.

Not Updating Your Content

Refreshing and updating your content is necessary because it indirectly influences response times. You can lose data and have your website crash due to outdated plug-ins and themes, and you might even experience auto-redirects to other websites that will hurt your SEO ranking and might even result in Google blacklisting you.

Lack of a Proper Layout, Color Scheme and Typography for Your Website

Some websites are too crowded with information, graphics, videos, and more. This will only increase the load time for the website and will make it difficult to read. Make use of whitespace, do not have too many elements cluttering your website.

If you have a high-end brand, choose a layout that can be aligned with the industry. Talking about branding, another mistake people make while designing a website is not selecting a proper color scheme and typography. And the whole website ends up looking like a clown with mismatched color palettes and fonts.

Each color represents something. When designing your website, try to keep color psychology in mind. And select your colors accordingly. The same rules apply to typography; it should suit your brand's personality. Use fonts that are easy to read unless your brand screams funk, and have an appropriate font size.

Not having mobile-friendly websites

Websites designed just for desktops can be a problem when your user is browsing them from other devices like macOS, mobile devices, or tablets. The user experience is affected, and not in a good way. Have your website optimized for other devices and be mobile-friendly by building a responsive design for your site.

Having No Backlinks, Internal Links, or Links to Your Social Media Accounts

In simple terms, back linking is when a user is directed towards your website from another website to your website. The credibility of your website depends a lot on backlinks, especially for Google's PageRank and SEO.

It confirms that your site has the relevant content related to the site linking to it and ensures quality. Backlinking is one of the most prominent elements in your SEO.

Internal linking is when your user is guided from one page to another on your website. It's again important as search engines use these links to navigate your website. Linking your social media accounts to your website is one of the influential social media integration strategies.

It helps your audience connect to you on different platforms as well as makes it easy for them to find out more about you, which can also drive traffic to your page.

Lastly, if you are not using these practices on your website, you are missing out on a lot of actions that can give you an advantage over your competitors.

Not Having a Minimalistic and Clean User Interface

Less is more, and most of the time people underestimate the power of simplicity. But having a website design that is minimalistic in nature started growing around the early 2000s and the concept is booming today. By not having one, you increase the risk of complexity.

A minimalistic design will steer the focus of your viewers quickly to where you want to while cutting back on the clutter. Helping to present your content in a simple and direct way.

Similarly, a clean user interface will be easy in the eyes of the users, easy to read, and well organized. By not having a clean user interface, you make it difficult for your viewers to focus on one thing without getting distracted. You can refer to the principles of design to help achieve a clean and minimalistic user interface.

No SEO or Analytics

If you ignore the strategy of using SEO on your website, you miss out on the organic traffic that comes your way, and the ranking of your page is affected. One should always keep SEO in mind while creating a website, and at least know the basics of SEO.

Another key part of your website is analytics, which helps you understand your audience. Where is your audience from? What type of content do they like on your website the next time? And if you are an e-commerce site, you can use your metrics to scale up your sales game.

In addition, tracking outbound links will provide new opportunities for collaboration. You can also see what questions cause users to reach your site, your click-through rate (CTR), and your average position.

Conclusion

We looked at a lot of things that make a website perform badly. But as we conclude, let's take a quick revision of the Do's and the Don'ts, so you can avoid the mistakes while creating a website

What should your website consist of?

• Have a mobile-friendly website with a clean and minimalistic user interface.
• Follow the principles of design while creating your website.
• Have relevant visuals/ graphics and content that is relevant to your website. This also means having no pixelated or distorted images on your site. Optimize your images that have larger file sizes.
• Include SEO and analytics on your website to level up your ranking
• Have inbound and outbound links to your website and integrate linking your social media accounts to your website
• Make it a practice to align your typography and color scheme for your website with your brand's personality.
• Don't miss out on the call-to-action button.
• Make use of whitespace, don't let your website be crowded or complex.
• Have your content refreshed and often updated with a clear message.

FAQs

What are some common website design mistakes

Not adding a CTA button, not having a mobile-friendly website, not having a clean and minimalistic design, and long loading time are some of the common website design mistakes web designers should avoid.

What makes a bad Web page design?

Non-responsive design, cluttered layout, hidden navigation menu, and bad color contrast indicate a bad web page design.

What are 4 common design errors?

Use of too Many fonts, using stock images, not proofreading and bad color contrast.