Acquiring and maintaining strong web visibility and an engaging web presence are becoming increasingly more challenging today with the high rates of online competition. Just when your website has gained a high SERPs ranking on Google, other competing sites in your industry or web marketing niche may take the lead before you realize it. Even if you do manage to retain your high ranking with use of engaging website content, optimal quality SEO and updated digital marketing techniques, your site’s web traffic volumes may not grow substantially. If this is your situation, it is most likely time to examine your site management practices to identify any neglect or unproductive habits that may be affecting your website’s visitor counts and conversion rates.
Web Design Turn-offs that You Should Be Sure to Avoid
1. Slow Loading Website. With instantaneous access to myriad types of data on contemporary smartphones, web users now expect the same speed for accessing information on all websites and landing pages using any computer or digital device. Internet users can make immediate contact with friends and business associates around the globe via social media or instant messaging yet they may need to wait four to six seconds for content on a “slow” website to load.
Unless your site loads completely within three seconds, you can count on losing a large percentage of your site visitors. In fact, Google has released research results showing that greater than 53 percent of mobile web users will exit a site that requires more than three seconds to load.
2. Distracting Popups. Most Internet users have had the annoying experience of accessing a website with an over-abundance of popups, often accompanied by alerts announcing this intruding web page’s request to send you notifications. After the first couple of popups appear, web users begin to feel annoyance at this unwanted onslaught of content that has no relation to the site and information that they attempted to access.
In order to excavate this desired content, you as the web user must manually click out of each successive irrelevant popup. Although some Internet marketers and advertisers report gaining significant numbers of conversion rates through their use of popups, the majority of web users view popups as irritating online clutter.
3. Animation Overload. Although high quality animation can brighten and enliven an otherwise bland or static website, it can easily be overdone, distracting from the site’s primary content. If your site visitors must view the same animation each time they return to your homepage, they may become discouraged and abandon your domain to access a competitor’s web content instead.
When your returning site guests are required to wait for a fade-in animation to complete before they can view and click their preferences on your site’s navigation bar, they may lose patience with your website, even though they have valued your content during past visits. Also, some web users have difficulty viewing and focusing on content that is filled with animated elements displaying flashing images and colours. These site visitors will most likely leave your website abruptly, seeking similar content from another online source.
4. Media Auto-play. One major web user pet peeve is media auto-play on websites. Considered advantageous in the early days of web design, this persistent audio-video content has been widely overused and can be exasperating to site visitors. Especially when one of these videos is irrelevant to the content that it appears with on a web page, it is distracting, annoying and somewhat suspicious as though it is included to draw your attention away from the page itself, encouraging you to turn your focus to other subjects and pursuits. One consolation is that Google Chrome and some other browsers are tending toward permitting only silent or muted audio on auto-play videos.
5. Lack of Mobile-Friendliness. Mobile optimized or responsive design websites are the norm in today’s fast-paced digital media environment. However, many mobile sites still display strange formatting with misaligned or overlapping content. Today, designing a new responsive website or optimizing an existing site for mobile use is an essential element of web design.
Catering to mobile web users is no longer serving the needs of a “niche group.” Multiple studies have shown that upwards of 52 percent of web usage took place on mobile phones during 2018. With the Google algorithm change during March of 2018 that prioritised mobile-first indexing, it is essential to enhance the web experience of your site visitors while improving your SEO results with a mobile-friendly website design.
