8 BUSINESS WEBSITE DESIGN MISTAKES AND HOW TO AVOID THEM

92% of internet users access it through their smartphone. If your site is only designed to be compatible with computers, only 8% of visitors can use it properly. So without a mobile-friendly website, you lose 92% of your potential clients.

To avoid this, make sure your website is responsive on all devices. Whether someone is using a laptop, phone, or tablet, your website should be just as easy.

However, if a visitor arrives at your site, it's likely for a specific purpose. They may have been looking up a local service, so they want to learn about your business history and services. Or they may have come to your site through some content that answers a question they had.

Either way, once they're there, it needs to be plain as day how to get to other areas of the site. Most important are the contact details. If your contact information isn't easy to access from all pages, they may not find it, and you lose a client

Once site visitors have scrolled around, what do you want them to do next? Should they contact you, apply for a free trial, or book a consultation? Then make that call to action clear!

If you don't have a prominent button with crystal clear instructions, they won't follow the path you want them to. They'll just scroll around until they click away.

Cluttered web design is one of the most significant issues that turns visitors off a website. It looks unprofessional and overwhelming and doesn't offer a clear path to follow.

The most obvious example of cluttered design has too many elements. If you have buttons, text, your logo, and a video crammed next to each other, your webpage has no focal point. Visitors don't know what to look at next and would instead click away.

Your site colors can also have this effect. It looks like an amateur job if your pages are full of bright or contrasting colors or too many subtler colors. That's not the impression you want clients to have of your business.

Even if your brand is very colorful, minimally incorporate this. Only use a few colors on most pages and ones that aren't too bright.

Cluttering your page can cause another issue. It can make your text hard to read, as can your choice of font and text size.

If site visitors can't glance at your text and read it instantly, it's not clear enough! Make your site text so clear that visitors absorb the information subconsciously. Any amount of required concentration is too much.

Even if your color palette and font choice are streamlined and easy to read, walls of text are not. Multiple paragraphs of information look cluttered, and most people won't read them. 

If you're sure you need that much information on your site, there's a better way to present it. Keep paragraphs small and sentences not too complex. Then break up the text with relevant imagery.

If the amount of text you need to share is too significant, add a blog or news section to your site. Then when visitors reach that area, they expect to be greeted by 1,000 words. But don't put that much text on any other pages!

Web design tools like analytics help you track your visitors' behavior, such as:

• The links they use to get to your site
• Pages they spend the longest on
• Which page is the most visited

When you have access to this information, you can adapt your website to visitor behavior. It also helps you monitor which marketing techniques and backlinks are most effective. This is crucial information to have if you want your site to be a long-term success.

If your website takes more than three seconds to load, 53% of people will leave before seeing it. That's over half of your potential clients!

How can you ensure your website loads fast enough to keep visitors from clicking away? It used to be all about image sizes, but nowadays, how you build and host your site has more of an effect. The most surefire way to have a quick-loading site is to work with web designers that know how to optimize it without compromising on quality.

The lock symbol in the web address bar is a paid-for service. It protects hackers from accessing things on your site, like credit card details that customers have entered.

You may think that if your site isn't for eCommerce, paying for a secure site isn't necessary. But all un-secure sites make users uncomfortable. They would rather err on the side of caution and leave.