Is My Website Poorly Designed?
A Website Design Litmus Test
Your website is the foundation of your online marketing efforts. It makes an impression on your audience within seconds.
If your business website is poorly designed, you will drive potential customers away from your business and into the arms of your competition.
So how do you know if your website is good or bad? Let’s break down the elements of poor website design. Use this guide as a litmus test to determine if your site could use some work.
6 Issues That Contribute to Poor Website Design
These are the six most common elements that negatively affect your website’s design:
1. Not Mobile-Optimized
Your website needs to meet customers where they are—and most of them are using their mobile devices to find you. We live in a mobile-first world and if your website does not look good or function well on a prospective customer’s device, they won’t trust your business.
If your website is not optimized for mobile, it sends a message that your business is not relevant or modern.
2. No Content OR Too Much Content
Content makes up a huge portion of your website. But, is your content helping or hurting your site’s design?
If you have little to no content on your site, your site will look sparse. At best, it will paint a picture of your site as incomplete and uninformative. At worst, your site will be seen as sketchy. Either way, visitors will likely leave and find another site to peruse instead.
Too much content on your website is also a problem. People have short attention spans, so huge paragraph chunks will either be skimmed (at best) or skipped entirely (most likely).
Photos, infographics, or design elements should accompany your text to help break it up and make it easier for the reader to digest.
When it comes to content on your site, you want a Goldilocks approach: just the right amount.
3. No Whitespace
Whitespace is the negative space between your content, graphics, and images. It is used to help break up the different sections on your site.
If your site has no breathing room, your visitors will have a hard time digesting your messaging. The whitespace gives their eyes a break and time to absorb what they’re reading before they move on to the next section.
4. Slow Load Speed
We’re all a little impatient—and this impatience is especially important in web design. No one wants to wait forever for a site to load on their desktop or mobile device.
If your site loads slowly, users will quickly leave and find another site that meets their needs.
A load speed over three seconds is considered slow according to industry standards.
Check your site’s speed by using tools such as PageSpeed Insights.
5. No Calls to Action
Your website can help drive people through your sales funnel, but only if you encourage them to do so.
If your website has no clear calls to action, then visitors will not know what step to take next.
Make sure you’re driving your traffic towards the next step in your funnel, whether that’s reaching out for a consultation, downloading a resource, signing up for a free trial, etc.
6. Poor Navigation
If a visitor can’t quickly find what they’re looking for on your site, you have poor site navigation. People don’t want to spend time digging through your site to find the answer to their questions.
Poor navigation also includes not being able to navigate back to the homepage or other page they previously visited.
You must set up your site so that they can easily find services, products, contact information, etc. from each page of your site.
How Does YOUR Site Measure Up?
The issues above serve as your litmus test to know if your site is poorly designed. If you struggle with one or more of these issues, it’s time to consider updating your site.
You could be losing business with an outdated and irrelevant website.
With a modern and relevant site, you can drive more traffic through your sales funnel which will lead to more sales!
Let your website grow your business instead of hindering it.
Let Eldie Create a Great Website Design for Your Business
If your website failed our litmus test, let us help. Hire the experts at Eldie to create a great website design that drives more traffic and sales to your business.
When you’re ready to take the first step in redesigning your website, schedule a free 15-minute discovery call with our team. We’ll help grow your business with our web design services.