15 Common Website Design Challenges and How to Overcome Them
Challenges with Building Successful Business Websites
Excellent website design leads to a great user experience (UX) and improved time-on-page, conversions, and search engine rankings.
But if you don’t address common website design challenges at the right stage, you could pour time and money into a website that doesn’t convert and requires a complete redesign.
A well-designed, professional website is an irreplaceable asset for your business. A good website serves as an online identity for your business and is perhaps the most powerful platform for generating business both in terms of clients and revenue.
However, to ensure that your website is profitable for your business, you need to proactively engage in building a website.
In this post, I want to show you common website design challenges that come in the way of building and maintaining business websites and how to overcome them.
Common Website Design Challenges
1 – Budget and Timing
Building a website is an enjoyable project. So many people are joining forces to share ideas, and together, you’re designing the face of your company. Still, it’s easy to get wrapped up in overly ambitious goals, and these distractions can quickly derail your project.
Combat this issue with a clearly outlined minimum viable product (MVP) that will allow the project to launch. Without a clear expectation of deliverables and a timeline to produce the site, you’ll inevitably end up over budget and late for going live. Produce an MVP, and you can iterate the details later.
2 – Hiring the Right Web Designer
An efficient website design starts with finding a professional web designer — a designer who is confident about making your website work for you. From clean search engine-friendly code to user-friendliness to high-converting design and a fully functional website, he will take care of everything.
The professional website designer knows how to make beautiful designs and how you can get maximum returns from the site. He will pay attention to the finest details to convert a beautiful design into a successful website.
Coding best practices, following the design and coding standards, high converting call-to-action areas, on-page optimization for search engines, and website optimization for speed and performance. The right designer knows the right way of doing things. He will take care of your website so you can take care of your business.
But finding one is one of the common website design challenges! Please avoid cheap service providers; they do more damage than good. A functional website is not the same as a well-behaved professional website. Also, look at their portfolio and experience and talk to their previous customers.
3 – Choosing the Right Platform(s) for Your Website
A domain name, web hosting, and content management system are the founding pillars of the business website. Start with choosing a professional domain name for the online identity of your business, get a reliable web host, and pick a flexible content management system.
All this will require you to do some thorough research. Or if you have a good designer, you can trust him.
Domain Name Registrar: Find the best domain name registrar to buy the domain name for your business. I use and recommend GoDaddy as my go-to domain registrar.
Web Hosting Provider: Cloudways and WPEngine get my highest recommendation. Other than that, our WordPress clients prefer Blue Host and Kinsta. But, again, the choice is all yours. Based on this post outlining different website hosting options, you can weigh the various hosting providers.
Content Management System: Websites can utilize plain HTML or advanced programming languages like PHP, ASP, etc. But for a business website, I rule out these options because a business website needs a flexible, extensible, and future-proof professional content management system.
You can go with WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, SquareSpace, etc., but WordPress gets my highest recommendation owing to its ease of managing the content. Content creation in WordPress is as easy as composing a mail in Gmail.
4 – Meeting Mobile User Expectations
More and more regularly, people use their phones and tablets to access websites and buy from businesses. And one common web design challenge you may encounter is ensuring your site works well on such devices.
Mobile site performance is paramount for meeting users where they are: Nearly half of the people said they feel frustrated when visiting a site that isn’t mobile-friendly. In addition, over half of users added that a bad mobile experience made them less likely to engage with a company.
A mobile-first strategy is a method in website development in which designing a site for mobile devices takes priority over desktops. Web designers developed this tactic years ago to solve a significant user pain point. Users wanted to complete the same tasks on their smartphones as they could on a desktop. This approach relieves this pain by creating a mobile version first without sacrificing content or functionality.
To accomplish this, a web designer will build the site for a mobile platform and then improve it for desktop use. Mobile-first design is the opposite of a desktop-first strategy, where a website is made and its non-compatible elements removed to create a mobile site.
The power of mobile-first design is that it allows businesses to interact with their consumers more efficiently and meaningfully. It utilizes technology specific to mobile users — like GPS and built-in cameras — to create unavailable features for desktop users. This level of convenience and interconnectivity helps make smartphones invaluable and fosters greater engagement among website visitors.
Suppose a better user experience doesn’t convince you to consider a mobile-first approach. In that case, there is this statistic: 57% say they won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed mobile site. The fact of the matter is mobile users have less patience these days. They know what they want, and they want it now.
5 – Brand Identity — Standing Out from the Crowd
There is a lot of competition in the online space, and to stand out from the rest, you need to be unique and the best on all fronts — the design, your brand identity, and your voice — all count.
So picking up a free website / WordPress theme will not cut it. Instead, you will have to invest in a custom website design that builds a brand identity for you, defines your product & services, and puts you ahead of your competitors.
6 – Scope Creep
Scope creep occurs when you start with a plan for your web design and have a clear idea, but the project begins to change over time as you or your team add new ideas and features. These changes can cause the original vision to deviate and disrupt your web design timeline. It may also lead to added costs, more bugs, and significant difficulties for your development team.
An excellent way to avoid Creep is to set out a straightforward web design strategy right from the start and stick to it. It’s also wise to try and keep your website as simple as it can be.
7 – Alignment on Design
Design is subjective, but it’s essential; three-quarters of customers will judge your credibility based on your web design. To make things more complicated, stakeholders will have varying opinions about how your website should look, and the closer they are to the brand, the more invested they’ll be.
Expect your well-developed wireframes to get torn to pieces by executives, but stand your ground on the big-picture ideas. Of course, details can change, but making foundational alterations often means going back to square one.
8 – Well-Organized Site Architecture
The key to a successful website is to present the required information to potential clients in an intuitive and easy-to-navigate way. Therefore, including an about us page, contact page, services page, portfolio page, etc., in your site architecture is critical.
Also, consider including the necessary information about the site in the footer. You can take an opportunity to engage your visitors by including interactive elements in the site footer. Including details like your company’s primary pages, links to your policies, contact info, location on the map, etc., help you build your site visitors’ trust.
9 – Creating Valuable Content
Along with a great design and a fully functional website, you will have to build valuable content for visitors to interact with your site and for search engine bots to index your site. Integration of the weblog is a good idea to move in this direction.
Engaging and updated content will help you have a one-to-one conversation with your online visitors. But on the other hand, it will help you establish your authority as a brand. Building valuable content is nonetheless a challenge in itself.
Before churning out the words, you must identify your keywords and plan the content accordingly. This process is the key to ranking better than your competitors for the selected keywords in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).
10 – Growing the Right Audience
Getting a good design and an efficient website up and running is not good enough. You will have to spend quality time promoting your website through various channels as a website owner. Marketing channels include a company blog, social media, email signature, word of mouth, imprinting the name of your website on the business cards, and building an engaging audience online.
Of all the sources, social media engagement plays a crucial role. So along with the website, you need to have active social media profiles — a Facebook fan page, Pinterest pin board, or Twitter account for your brand, whichever works best for the nature of your business and your niche.
11 – Selling Your Products & Services Online
While having an essential business website is good, you can take your business to the next level by selling your products and services on your website. A business website is all about generating more revenue online.
With WordPress or any CMS as the foundation for your business website, you can employ the e-commerce feature anytime. However, running a successful online store requires a lot of dedication and resources.
Understanding your audience, building the catalog, appropriate pricing techniques, and competitive research are some of the many that come to mind.
12 – Optimizing Website Performance
As the website grows in content and visitors, you will need to assess its bandwidth and see if it can efficiently handle the requests. In addition, from time to time, it requires you to review your web hosting plan and upgrade the plan or migrate the hosting environment as per the website requirements.
Nineteen percent of respondents say, on average, they will abandon a web page that takes longer than 2-3 seconds to load, while 8% will leave after one second. Twenty-five percent of online shoppers will abandon a page that doesn’t load within 4-6 seconds.
If you have a dedicated server, you don’t need to worry about upgrading the plan, but you need to ensure that you have regular backups of the site. And if your web server is slow, you need to migrate to a better hosting provider.
To ensure optimal website performance, you will need to tweak and tune the website’s performance. For example, page speed optimization includes enabling caching, optimizing images, and investing in a responsive website design if you don’t already have one (all these features affect the site’s search engine rankings).
13 – Driving Business Value
Even with a fantastic new site, you need people to visit your landing pages to see an impact on your business. If you have visitors, you’re a step ahead, but your work still isn’t done. Monitor conversion points closely and test different CTAs and layouts. If phase one is about getting your site live, phase two is improving and optimizing.
Establishing a website testing environment isn’t always easy for a new business, so you’ll need to lean on loyal customers and leading stakeholders to get the feedback you need. At the same time, aim for the most significant budget possible.
Websites are expensive, but without the right resources, you’ll make mistakes that cost even more in the long run. I’ve launched websites with high investment levels and others on a shoestring budget. However, you’ll reap significant benefits when you test early, regardless of your resources.
14 – Generating Website Traffic
Remember that famous line from Field of Dreams: “Build it, and they will come.“? Unfortunately, your website and “Field of Dreams” are different. Building it does not necessarily mean they will come.
You must include elements in your launch plan that will help you amass an audience, such as social media, a pay-per-click campaign, and email marketing. In addition, optimize your landing pages for important keywords.
Ranking for SEO takes time, but it’s worth the investment when done right. 70% of online marketers say that SEO is better than PPC for generating sales. Not an SEO expert? There are plenty of firms out there that can help.
15 – Ongoing Website Maintenance
Website development is a one-time activity, but to get the ball rolling, the website owner has to maintain the site on an ongoing basis keenly. Updating content, uploading graphics, maintaining video channels, resolving minor design issues, experimenting with colors, fonts, and other design elements, and building landing pages as and when required are some things involved in maintaining the site.
You can hire a website design agency for ongoing maintenance services and pay for it monthly, or you can train your staff members to take care of the issues involved in site management. You must manage your online presence just as you look after your physical store.
Solving Common Website Design Challenges Will Help to Create an Effective Website
Common website design challenges will inevitably arise when you build your business website or try to improve your site’s existing design. However, no matter what problem you face, there are always solutions to help – use these common web design challenges to navigate you through the web design process.
A website is like an employee who works for you 24 x 7 and caters to customers worldwide. Your website is a perfect salesman who knows everything about your company, works around the year, meets thousands of people daily, and helps you grow your business exponentially.
Always remember that the best-designed website is the one that satisfies the user’s expectations, is user-friendly, solves problems, and meets the objective of the brand and its owner, whether it’s an individual, organization, or business.
A website is an investment to secure the future of your business. Tap into that opportunity today. We are here to help.
Do You Need a Website for Your Business?
Are you looking to redesign or update your website or online store for your business or product brand? Are you unsure how to overcome common website design challenges? Our team of WordPress experts will be happy to help you with this. But first, look at our portfolio and read our case studies.
Then, if you believe we are a good fit for your business web design needs, let’s talk! We offer a full range of consulting and design solutions for businesses and product brands.
If you are unsure how to build a website to support your business objectives, let’s talk! Our team will listen to your concerns, evaluate your needs, and create a website design to keep you ahead of your online competitors.
Did You Overcome Website Design Challenges?
Did you build a website for your business? Did you encounter any of these common website design challenges? If so, how did you overcome them? Did you run into any other website design challenges?
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For more content relevant to your business or product brand – check out the range of articles on our web design blog. (This one, explaining the importance of user experience in web design, is an excellent place to start!)
Thank you! We appreciate your help ending bad business websites, one pixel at a time!
By Gregor Saita
Co-Founder / CXO
@gregorsaita
