11 Reasons Why Your Website Design Might Not Be Working

Even if you have a new website and your business is up-to-date with the latest in technology, there is a possibility that your website is not serving its intended purpose. Unfortunately, the primary reason behind failed web design and development lies in its creation. What helps, then, is looking at some of the common reasons that may lead your website design to not work as expected.

 

Once you determine what might be going wrong, you need to talk to a web design expert to have the problem/s addressed effectively. If you’re unable to identify existing website design issues on your own, getting in touch with a professional would be the order of the day. This is because design experts know how to find flaws in a website easily.

 

In any case, looking at common website design problems and solutions might help in the long run.

 

1. Cluttered Pages

If your website’s design involves cluttered pages, the homepage included, you may expect most visitors to leave without performing desired actions. This is bound to affect your website’s performance significantly. However, this does not imply that your website’s homepage or other pages should have limited things. What it means is you may have all the topics you want but you need to present them in an orderly manner.

 

This way, your visitors will find what they are looking for faster. The reason you have a website is to provide information about your business through the internet. When the website is not doing this, it has failed. Close on the heels of a cluttered website is one that comes with unclear signposting.

Consistency and Simplicity Win

Having ads all over, using random colors, or offering no sense of cohesion is not going to impress your website’s visitors. Besides, users need to know that they’ve not drifted away from your website, which is why your website must maintain consistency in its primary design. Bear in mind that the print media makes use of ample white space around different elements and the same needs to apply to web design as well. Without adequate white space, it’s only normal for the elements of pages to look cramped for space.

 

Bear in mind that overwhelming designs make it hard to communicate with website users. As a result, it’s best to go the minimalist way and do away with elements that don’t provide value or help guide users into performing desired actions. What’s important is for you to get your priorities right. Website pages don’t have to cram as much information as they can. Instead, they need to address your audience’s needs in a quick and effective manner.

 

2. Wrong Color Contrast 

Paying attention to color contrast is still as important as it was in the early days of web design, simply because this aspect has a bearing on the overall appeal of a website. Besides, this factor has an effect on optimum web accessibility. By maintaining stable color contrast across your website, you may expect improved responsiveness, especially for users who might have visual, motor, or cognitive impairments.

 

An important role of contrast in web design surrounds the effect it can have on visual hierarchy. While designers may use contrast in colors to good effect, they can also do so with shapes, sizes, and the use of space. In this case, highlighting differences between multiple elements usually depends on the degree of polarity that separates them.

 

3. Just Paragraphs of Texts

When your website is all about long paragraphs that have no visual breaks or very few images to break the monotony, it is highly unlikely that you will pass your message to your target audience in an effective manner.

 

Most users look for information they can scan through quickly and get an understanding of what they need. Simply put, blocks of text without any breaks or without some images are boring. Not many people will read through blocks of text and this limits your website’s potential.  Web design professionals will help you with the layout of a perfectly balanced website that will attract users and keep them hooked.

 

4. No or Improperly Placed Call to Action

Web design and development is all about driving your visitors to do what you want them to do. While you need to explain what your business has to offer, you also need to tell your visitors what to do or where to go next through a call to action (CTA). If your site does not have a CTA or if it is poorly placed, it’s a definite problem. When designing a website’s layout, it is important to give the CTA the attention it deserves.

 

5. Unresponsive Web Design

According to data released by Statista, the U.S. was home to 282.48 million mobile internet users in 2022, and the number is expected to cross the 300 million mark by 2026. Therefore, it is sad that one can still find several websites that do not format properly when accessed through mobile devices. If this happens to your website, it basically means that the design is unresponsive and you are losing out on a significant chunk of your share of the online pie.

 

When users must constantly zoom in and out, scroll right to left, or wait for content to resize, it’s fair to expect them to leave and head to a competitor’s website that performs well on mobile devices.

 

While having a responsive website helps improve user experience significantly, it also has a positive effect on search engine rankings.  If your website falters on this front, it’s crucial that you seek advice from an agency that specializes in responsive design.

 

6. Slow Loading Speed

With internet speeds getting faster, web users can find it annoying when a website takes time to load. Besides, slow loading speed can also prevent an otherwise-good website from achieving high search engine rankings. According to data collated by HubSpot:

• The first five seconds that a webpage takes to load has the biggest effect on conversion rates
• Each added second of loading time (from the first to the fifth) gets conversion rates to drop by 4.42%
• Page load times between one to two seconds result in the best e-commerce conversion rates
• Page speed affects the willingness of almost 70% of consumers when it comes to making purchases from online retailers
• While most web traffic has moved from 3G to 4G speeds, a number of mobile websites remain slow to load because of an abundance of elements

You may effectively address most website issues that lead to slow loading speeds, provided you know what to do. Here are a few simple measures that can help speed up a slow-to-load website.

• Enable caching
• Get rid of resource-heavy add-ons and plugins
• Optimize images to reduce file size without compromising on quality
• Replace Flash content with HTML5 alternatives
• Minimize HTTP requests
• Clean up your code
• Use a content delivery network (CDN) service
• Check server response times
• Use the lazy load feature for images and videos

 

7. Outdated Web Design

The time to use stock images, hero sliders, autoplay, Flash, and scores of other once-popular features has come to an end. If all your website has is a header, a sidebar, and a whole lot of information crammed into the center, it’s time to think about making some big changes. Depending on how your website looks and functions, it might make do with a few simple tweaks or require a complete redesign. You’ll need to pay attention to various aspects if you’re thinking about redesigning your website, which is why it’s ideal that you partner with a digital agency that specializes in this realm.

 

8. Not Enough Knowledge/Data About Your Target Audience

Target audiences typically consist of people from specific age groups. They tend to have similar expectations, beliefs, values, motivations, preferences, as well as consumer experiences. When web designers take such parameters into account, the websites they create come with the potential to have low bounce rates coupled with high engagement levels and conversion rates.

 

Designing a website by keeping target audiences in mind requires:

• Creating buyer personas
• Looking at what your competition is doing right/wrong
• Setting personal preferences aside
• Using typography that speaks their language
• Choosing appropriate color schemes
  
• Providing useful, relevant, and up-to-date content
• Presenting content based on visual hierarchy

 

Remember that the better you get to know your target audience, the simpler it is to create a custom website to meet its requirements. As a result, it’s crucial that you pay due attention to researching your target audience first.

 

9. Not Addressing the Need and Preferences of Your Target Audience

No matter how good your website looks and how well it functions, it will fail to produce desired results if it does not provide the information your target audience seeks. The top web design agencies always address these questions before starting the design process.

 

• What information does your target audience seek?
• What fonts and colors does it find most appealing?
• What type of visual imagery does it prefer – images, videos, or animations?
• What’s the most important factor that helps prospective buyers turn into paying customers?

10. Hard to Find Contact Information

Is it easy for users to find the information they seek, be it an email address, a phone number, or a form? While this should be the case, it’s common for even some big companies to falter on this front, with Amazon.com and Microsoft being perfect examples. Users of these websites have to scour through a number of generic pages before they can actually seek human support. While this might be okay with big businesses, it’s definitely not the case with small ones.

 

It’s important that consumers should be able to find your contact information easily, and you might also benefit from using a live chat option, even if you make it available only during business hours. This way, you may look forward to increasing conversions by turning inquiries into sales.

 

11. Poor Integration and Sharing Options

It’s normal for businesses to promote themselves on various social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. However, it’s fairly common to find websites that do not link to businesses’ social media pages.

 

Ideally, visitors to your website should be able to get a glimpse of what your customers on social media have to say about your products or services on your website’s homepage. In addition, you should also give them the ability to get to your social media pages in an easy manner. Remember to feature your customers prominently in this aspect because they’re rather effective in spreading the word about what you have to offer.

Not giving your target audience an easy way to share your content can have a detrimental effect when it comes to increasing exposure in the online world. You need to view visitors to your website as a marketing resource that is capable of providing free advertising.  What you can do is ensure that all your website’s pages and posts come with easy-to-find sharing buttons.

 

Conclusion

The list of website design problems and solutions discussed in this post is, by no means, exhaustive, because there are other solvable web design issues that may lead to problems. Poor navigation, for instance, counts as a major reason that causes users to leave websites quickly. Providing low-quality or inconsistent content is a definite drawback that you may fix by hiring an experienced digital agency.

 

Certification problems and security issues can also be a cause for concern for your customers and business alike, which is why it’s important that you stay on top of this aspect at all times. For instance, designers who use WordPress to create websites need to upgrade their plugins to the latest versions at regular intervals. Getting an SSL certificate is a simple yet important step.

 

At the end of the day, if you think your web design is not working properly, getting in touch with a professional web design company might be in your best interest.