7 Reasons Why Bad Website Design Can Ruin Your Business
The Importance of a Good Website for a Business
In today’s digital age, it’s not enough that you have a solid, reliable business that delivers. It’s not even sufficient to have an online presence, either.
Your company needs a responsive, immersive, visually appealing website that ranks well and provides exceptional usability and functionality. It may sound daunting to create and maintain one, but you cannot escape the reality of the online world.
Surprisingly, there is still a lack of awareness and concern about the importance of user-centric web design among site owners. But budget limitations and insufficient technical knowledge can no longer be used as excuses for bad website design.
If you don’t have a well-designed website, your competition doesn’t even have to try hard to win over your potential clients. Your bad website design will drive them away.
Bad Website Design is Unprofessional
According to research, 75% of all consumers have stated they judge the credibility of a business by evaluating its website design. Therefore, a business website requires a significant amount of ongoing attention.
This effort helps ensure that it stays up-to-date and is in line with all the current trends. Also, this helps ensure that you meet your customers’ expectations. Failure to keep up with your design processes could lead to your business developing an unprofessional image.
It does not matter if you are in the process of launching a business or if you want to expand your current business. An online platform where customers can discover your products or services is critical to your success.
Unfortunately, many of today’s businesses have lean budgets and limited time. Both result in extreme difficulties when it comes to creating a professional appearance. If you fail to emphasize your website design, your business is sure to come off as being an unprofessional one.
Do not allow yourself to fall into this trap. Instead, you should aim to stand out among others in the same market, even if it takes a little extra time and money.
What Makes a Bad Website Design?
Several factors contribute to a poorly designed website. Here are just some examples of what makes a bad website design.
- Slow loading speed, which results in a high bounce rate
- Poor Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) implementation
- Non-responsive website design that’s not mobile-friendly
- Difficult to understand or navigate, creating a bad user experience
- Unattractive website layout design, images, colors, and fonts
- Poorly written website content with minimal or no calls to action (CTAs)
- A disorganized or incomplete web design and marketing strategy
How to Avoid Bad Web Design
When creating a website for your business, it’s crucial to understand how bad website design affects your users’ experience and, therefore, your credibility.
Although your business might be rock-solid in reality, having a poorly designed website can give users the perception that your brand is low-quality or untrustworthy. When someone visits your website, they seek affirmation that you’re credible and an expert in your field.
And when the web page design that is the face of your business does not reflect this image, you could lose out on sales and damage your brand’s reputation.
So, what makes a great website? In summary, a successful website is discoverable on search engines like Google, loads quickly, holds attention, is visually appealing, simple to navigate, and encourages users to take action, thereby converting sales.
How a Poorly Designed Website Impacts Your Business
1. Lack of Credibility and Customer Trust
When someone lands on your website, they will form an opinion about your business within 50 milliseconds – that’s 0,05 seconds! Moreover, even if you keep their attention for longer, your website’s look, feel, and overall attractiveness will still influence their opinion of you.
38% of users will leave a website if the layout or content is not appealing. For example, suppose you have any spelling errors or poor design elements. In that case, they will discount you and leave before taking any action, which is the whole point of having a website.
Perhaps it’s not fair, but potential customers will immediately judge your company, product, and service based on what the audience sees on the page. Over three-quarters of visitors make this connection, whether consciously or not. Unfortunately, they also link the page design to the perceived level of your company’s overall professionalism.
For example, suppose your website offers them a poor user experience, lack of content, and unattractive visuals. In that case, they may assume you put little effort into various online and offline business activities. Consequently, their level of trust in the company’s abilities and professionalism lowers.
2. Loss of Potential Clients
For a business to grow, you need a constantly evolving audience. But let’s face it – current and potential customers are demanding. Even me and you, no matter how tolerant we believe we are.
Do I want to spend precious time digging through a cluttered website with no explicit content hierarchy when I can buy something from another company in several clicks? Not if I have a choice. I came to the website to fulfill specific needs, and I want to achieve my goals as quickly as possible in a few easy-to-understand steps.
Visitors frustrated with their online experience (be it a slow-loading site, broken links, or unattractive content) will probably leave and never return. As many as 88% of users won’t return to a website after having a bad user experience.
Every time a customer navigates away in frustration – because of broken links, complex forms, or too much navigation – it is unlikely you will see them again. If your competitor offers the same services in an intuitive website design, your loss is their gain.
It would be a great shame to dedicate a significant part of the company’s budget to marketing activities and still fail to attract clients because of bad website design.
3. Frustrates Your Target Audience
Bad website design can potentially create problems in terms of usability for internet users. For example, according to research, up to 53% of all business websites lose their visitors because they find it difficult to explore using the navigation menu.
User experience is critical in website design. To optimize this, you must prioritize the overall functionality of your website. To create a truly functional site, you must emphasize the behavior of your target users, implement a highly effective UI, and know what actions will result in solid results in your business. In addition, you must ensure that every single component of your business is working correctly.
Users have a specific goal when they visit your website. If they have problems achieving their goal, they will abandon your website entirely. Do you know where they go afterward? Your target consumer heads over to the website of your competition. Your website design must be systematic, highly logical, and easily interactive.
When creating objectives for your website, they must be clearly outlined and defined for those that visit the site. You should ensure that all pages are clearly titled and accessible and that the navigation system works quickly and correctly.
4. Provides a Bad User Experience
90% of users leave a website because it is poorly designed. Even worse, they will not give your badly designed online presence a second chance. So, your website is the place to start if you want recurring visitors to build a loyal customer base.
Bad website design often includes design elements that are distracting to users. Even worse, your potential consumers may have a negative experience while visiting your site or online store due to any of the following:
Too Cluttered
Most professional websites only have a few elements. These may include a value statement, a picture, and a call to action. If your website is too crowded, it appears less credible and professional. It should have an ample amount of white space. Simplicity is more appealing than an overloaded website.
Bad Mobile Experience
One of the most important aspects to consider regarding your user experience (UX/UI) design is responsive web design that will display correctly on all screens, particularly mobile. For example, 57% of users say they will not recommend a business without a good mobile website design. In addition, 85% of users expect a company’s website to look as good on mobile as on their desktop.
Your website’s users expect it to adapt seamlessly to every screen and contain relevant information that is easy to access and scan. Hubspot recently conducted a survey in which over 75% of respondents said that an essential characteristic of a website was its ease of use.
A bad website user experience will tell your audience that you either don’t know them or don’t consider them a priority. You want to ensure that the user experience aligns with what your target market would appreciate.
Too Much or Too Little Animation
If done correctly, animations can appear professional on your site. On the other hand, if you use too many or utilize large files, animations may result in many complications. These include making it difficult for users to find what they seek, slowing page loads, and making the site too overwhelming for the average visitor.
5. Declining Sales and Revenue
A website’s purpose is primarily lead generation and conversions. You want potential customers to find you, take action, interact with you and ultimately make a sale. You’re losing sales and revenue if you don’t get users to do any of these things.
So, you have a site; you paid someone to build it and invested in website hosting, updates, and maintenance. If the efforts to put the product or service online do not lead to conversions, it’s money down the drain. The website should serve its purpose – attracting customers, encouraging them to interact with the content, and convincing them to purchase. But if they run away because your online offer scared or bored them – you’re likely to experience a loss in sales and revenue.
Bad website design will cost you sales. Period. 85% of customers search the web before making a purchase decision. Every time a potential customer navigates away in frustration (because of broken links, clutter, or confusing navigation), it is unlikely they will ever return. If your competitor offers the same products or services plus an intuitive website design, they will win the business you could be getting.
6. Lower Rankings on Google (SEO)
A business or product brand must create a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy when it decides to go online. You can have a stunning, modern-looking site, but if you don’t optimize it, there is a chance you will be the only one admiring its beauty. So SEO is the way to go if you don’t want your website to remain undiscovered.
But remember that SEO must go hand in hand with the quality and clarity of the design. Google analyzes many factors – from page loading speed to proper grammar to content value and site architecture. If your website is unappealing and users leave within seconds, it will sabotage your efforts.
When your bounce rate increases, that is an indication that your website is not of good quality or relevant to users. As a result, search engines like Google will deprioritize your website on their results pages.
You must consider all these elements and many more to score high in search rankings. For example, outdated websites not only give a wrong impression to the customer and make the company seem out of touch, but they also suffer in rankings.
7. It Gives the Impression You are Out of Business
The worst thing that could happen is if your website gives the impression that your business doesn’t exist anymore. If the site’s design, functionality, and content are outdated, someone can easily assume that it’s just a digital remnant of a company that was on the market once.
In addition, an outdated website tells your customers you are behind the times, or worse, that you don’t care about what your customers want. Visitors could assume you’re out of touch with advancements in your industry and may also think you’re neglecting other areas of your business.
Don’t be your worst enemy – it will only take seconds for the visitors to decide whether they will turn to your competition instead.
Checklist: Is Your Website an Example of Bad Web Design?
1. When Last Did You Update Your Website Content, Images, and Design?
If you haven’t looked at or touched your website in five years, it’s time to take a long, hard look. Outdated content and design will make you look like you could be out of business. According to surveys, 94% of website first impressions are design-related, so start there.
Ask someone else to go through your site and give you notes. For example, do you have way too many pages, or are your pages hidden away in the footer? Do you have an overwhelming amount of pages in a dropdown menu nested in yet another dropdown menu?
3. How Long Does it Take to Load?
You can check your current website’s speed online here. Always keep a close eye on this. There are a couple of ways to improve it, and an easy way is to start by resizing the images on your site.
4. Can Consumers Understand What You’re Selling?
Does your copy adequately describe what you’re selling, and is it more focused on what customers can get than what you offer? Website copy must be customer-centric and focus more on the benefits they can get than your product or service features. The site must also have plenty of calls to action (CTAs). Unfortunately, research suggests that 70% of small businesses don’t have enough website CTAs.
How to Fix Bad Website Design?
What if you already have a website, and you know people visit it to check out your products but never hear from prospective clients? Is all hope lost? Good news – it’s not! These are the things you can do to improve the website design and ensure the success of your business:
- Make the purpose of your site clear
- Present professional, modern, and aesthetically pleasing design
- Arrange elements in a logical way
- Fix navigation
- Remove unnecessary content and broken links
- Use readable fonts, white spaces, and balanced colors
- Ensure the website’s compatibility with every device
- Display contact information, publish FAQs and testimonials
- Check loading speed
- Optimize the content
- And, most importantly – update frequently.
Don’t settle for amateurs. You want to ensure that you work with a professional website design agency for your website to avoid having to redo everything again. The benefits of a good website design outweigh any costs it might incur. And it could be one of the most valuable investments you make in your business.
From the content writer, designer, developer, and SEO specialist – it takes a village to create a high-converting, beautiful website. But if you partner with the right agency, it will be a breeze and save you money in the long run.
Building and maintaining a website is a holistic, complex, and multi-layered task, which should become a crucial element of the business strategy. Yet businesses often do not connect their websites to the results of their online marketing activities. As a result, many companies still struggle to justify the expense of professional website design.
Look at it this way: You have spent countless hours dedicated to your business’s success. Is your company’s first impression – your website – worth extra time and effort? If you struggle to convert new leads, your online presence may be a problem.
Even though you feel inclined to spend less on web design or take the do-it-yourself approach, consider how the polished, visually attractive site can influence organic traffic, conversion rates, and sales.
Addressing the problems with your website’s design can help you meet your business objectives and bring in new customers. In addition, realizing that bad website design may cause real damage to your business will hopefully encourage you never to neglect this issue again.
As an experienced web design agency, we understand that trusting someone with your brand image can be difficult. With hundreds of growth strategy and web design projects under our belt, we’ve built the frameworks to make your web redesign a simple process.
If you’re ready to create a website that will increase your visibility on search engines, help market your brand, and lead to sales, we are here to help. Let’s talk!
Do You Need a Better Website?
Are you looking to redesign or update your website or online store for your business or product brand? Are you unsure how to avoid web design mistakes? 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.
Has Bad Website Design Affected Your Business?
Did you recognize any of these mistakes on your website? If so, how did you eliminate them? If not, is finding a reliable web design partner a major stumbling block for you? Do you have other tips for avoiding bad website design?
Please leave your comments below so our audience can benefit and grab our feed so you don’t miss our next post! And help your audience with their website by sharing the benefits of professional web design!
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
