The Most Common Mistakes in Website Design (And How to Avoid Them)

Have you ever visited a website and immediately felt lost or overwhelmed? 

Maybe the colors were jarring, or you couldn’t find what you were looking for. It’s like walking into a room where everything is out of place. That’s often the result of common website design mistakes. In this post, we’ll explore these common pitfalls and how to avoid them, ensuring your website is not just a digital space but a welcoming home for your visitors.

Avoid these drawbacks to create an effective website that engages visitors and ranks well in search results.

1. Using Bad Navigation

Poor navigation frustrates visitors and causes them to exit your site quickly. Ensure your navigation menus are easy to find, allow access to all key pages, and use clear menu labels. Dropdown menus work for sites with minimal pages but can hide content. Consider mega menus for more intricate sites. Also, check your navigation works on mobile devices. Confusing navigation is one of the biggest mistakes that hurts user experience.

2. Overloading Pages

Don’t overwhelm visitors with dense paragraphs of text, multiple images, videos, tabs, accordion drop-downs, carousels and more on one page. Too much content causes cognitive overload. Break up lengthy content over multiple pages. Allow adequate white space between elements. Only display vital information to communicate your key messages effectively.

3. Ignoring Mobile Optimization

With over 55% of web traffic coming from mobile devices, not optimizing for mobile is a critical mistake. Ensure your site adopts a mobile-friendly, responsive design that resizes and reflows for smaller screens. Use a maximum tap target size of 44px x 44px for buttons and links. Avoid hiding navigation behind hamburger menus. If you don’t optimize for mobile, you’ll limit your audience reach.

4. Weak Call-to-Actions

Calls-to-action (CTAs) prompt visitors to take your desired actions, like download an ebook, contact your sales team or place an order. If your CTAs aren’t visible or use weak phrases like “Click Here” you’ll suffer lost conversions. Use contrasting colors to highlight CTAs. Place them above the page fold. And use action-driven labels like “Start Your Free Trial” or “Buy Now” instead.

5. Overlooking Site Speed

Your website speed impacts visitor experience and SEO. If your site loads slowly, visitors will abandon it before it even finishes loading. There are many ways to optimize site speed, like compressing images, minimizing HTTP requests, using a caching plugin and upgrading to a faster web host. You want landing pages under 2 seconds and other pages under 3 seconds.

6. Blocking SEO Best Practices

To rank well, search engines need to easily crawl, index and understand your site content. Avoid common SEO mistakes like not doing keyword research, failing to optimize page titles and meta descriptions, not integrating Schema markup or producing low-quality thin content. Learn SEO basics or work with an SEO expert.

7. No Value Proposition or Brand Messaging

Every business should have a clear value proposition explaining what problems they solve and defining their competitive advantages. This messaging should be prominent on your home page hero images, about page and even 404 pages. Without defined messaging about what makes your company the best choice for prospects, you’ll lose out to competitors who effectively communicate their purpose and differentiate themselves.

8. Using Stock Images Only

Relevant, high-quality images make content more appealing and easier to digest for visitors. But only using generic stock photos instead of custom images can make your website feel impersonal or untrustworthy. Mix high-quality stock with customized photos of products, team members, office locations and customers for authenticity. 

9. Not Optimizing Forms

Call-to-action forms allow capturing leads and conversions but need optimization to increase response rates. Only ask for essential information to reduce abandonment. Make forms short and simple. Use responsive design. Allow Google auto-fill for visitor convenience. Send forms to a “Thank You” page, not back to the homepage. Offer lead magnets for more incentive. And follow up quickly so leads stay hot.

10. Ignoring Accessibility Rules

About 16% of the global population experiences disabilities affecting their use of the web. Ensure your site follows accessibility best practices, so you don’t exclude anyone or risk ADA compliance lawsuits. Use proper semantic HTML elements, adequate color contrast, descriptive alt text for images, ARIA labels where helpful and allow for keyboard + screen reader use. Design websites inclusively for wider outreach.

11. Difficult Site Registration/Login

You want visitors to easily sign-up or login to access gated content or saved details in their user accounts. Overly complex registration forms or forgotten password flows hinder this process. Allow using social media accounts to register. Use progressive profiling to only ask for necessary info first. Include password strength tips during signup. And enable easy password resets for forgotten logins to remove friction.

12. Lacking Quality Content

High-quality, relevant and up-to-date content focused on solving people’s problems or answering their questions is what really engages visitors in the long-run after initial impressions wear off. Prioritize creating fresh, consistent content showcasing your expertise around chosen keywords, not just pretty website templates alone. Blogging boosts organic traffic and leads over 3x more.

Avoid Website Design Failures with Expert Help

Dodging common website design mistakes takes some knowledge and effort yet pays off hugely in your site’s user experience, branding and search visibility. But no website is perfect from inception. The best approach is continually evaluating and improving elements over time as needs or technologies change. Work through this list to resolve any weak points dragging down your website currently.