Whether your business has a physical location or is entirely online, 97% of consumers will research online before purchasing your product. That means that your website plays a significant role in driving sales. Having cluttered, slow, and unappealing web design for your Wirral business can cause most customers to look for what they need anywhere else.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at five specific ways poorly-executed web design can hurt your company.
Damages Credibility and Shakes Visitor Confidence
First impressions matter. Your website has less than a second to give visitors an excellent first impression, or you lose their interest entirely.
Suppose your website has multiple pop-ups, errors, or navigational menus that are not user-friendly. In that case, you are almost guaranteed to make a bad first impression, causing customers to lose confidence in your brand. The Stanford Web Credibility Research Lab found that 75% of users judge a company’s credibility on its web design, which can negatively impact your sales.
Negatively Affects Your Bottom Line
Poor web design can cost you customers, which means it also costs you those all-important profits! If a visitor leaves your website out of frustration caused by broken links, display issues, or counter-intuitive navigation menus, it is likely they will avoid your company in future. Instead, they’ll find a competitor with functional and aesthetically-pleasing e-commerce web design.
High-quality content or beautiful product photography might draw visitors to your website, but good web design is essential for converting visitors into customers. Your site needs to be easy to navigate, with intuitive contact and checkout pages, to ensure you don’t lose customers’ interest forever.
Low Conversion Rates
One of the most significant recent web design trends is tailoring websites to their target audiences. Poorly-targeted web design prevents you from connecting to your customers and results in low conversion rates. Your website may have 100,000 visitors a month, but that means nothing if frustrating web design issues keep your conversion rate at 0.01%.
Your website should be optimised for conversions and customised to cater to specific audiences. For example, if you are a photographer, your website will favour beauty over functionality. However, an e-commerce store that sells mobility products for the elderly should keep their website layout as clean and straightforward as possible.
For a website’s design to be considered brilliant, it needs to reflect the nature of your business and highlight customer preferences in order to maximise conversions.
Slow Websites Ruin Your Reputation and SEO
A fast loading speed is characteristic of good web design. If it takes more than a few seconds for your website to load, visitors will return to their search results and look for a faster-loading site. On top of losing that sale, slow loading speeds result in 79% of shoppers avoiding that business in future, and 44% of customers will share the disappointing experience with their friends.
It is worth noting that if your website is designed in a way that creates painfully slow loading speeds, Google will rank faster-loading sites ahead of yours. This extends to your site’s mobile version, which often accentuates clunky and slow web design practices.
Buries Your Website In Search Rankings
If you want to be visible within search results in this mobile-first age, your website needs to work correctly on mobile devices. Mobile searches take an increasing percentage of all search traffic, and poor website performance on mobile devices can doom your business from the get-go.
Mobile-friendliness has become one of Google’s top ranking signals. If you want to retain your business’s spots in search engine results pages, be sure to optimise your Wirral website’s web design to adapt to the wide range of mobile screen shapes and sizes (sometimes called a “responsive” format).
Stop Poor Wirral Web Design Practices From Hurting Your Business
At Ctrl Alt Create, we understand that excellent web design is crucial to your company’s success. Let us provide you with gorgeous web design which produces industry-beating conversion rates and brilliant SEO performance. Because web design is so closely linked to your business’s personality, we will take the time to get to know your organisation and its goals.
Don’t get left behind by competitors, and don’t let rubbish web design hold your Wirral business back. Contact us today to find out how we can serve you!