In the digital age, your website is the first impression and virtual storefront for your business. An effective web presence is essential for reaching and converting potential customers online. However, even the best designed websites can suffer from common mistakes that create poor user experiences, costing you leads and revenue.
As a website testing expert with over 10 years of experience, I’ve seen these web design pitfalls trip up businesses time and again. Read on as I reveal the top 10 most widespread mistakes and how you can avoid them with a user-centered design approach and smart testing strategies.
Mistake #1: Not Optimizing for Mobile First
Let’s start with a key fact: 58% of all website traffic now comes from mobile devices. Yet over half of small business websites are still not mobile-friendly, according to recent surveys. Failing to optimize for mobile is handicapping your business since the majority of your potential customers are on smartphones and tablets.
The impacts of a poorly mobile-optimized site include:
- 60% of users will leave a site that hasn’t loaded after 3 seconds
- Pages with a poor mobile UX see 300% higher bounce rates
- Non-responsive design hurts your SEO rankings
To avoid losing mobile visitors, you must make mobile optimization a priority. Follow mobile-first and responsive design principles so your site resizes fluidly across all devices. Conduct thorough mobile testing on both iOS and Android phones to catch any responsiveness or compatibility issues. Tools like BrowserStack enable you to quickly test your live site across thousands of real mobile devices to deliver an excellent mobile UX.
Mistake #2: Cluttered Navigation Menus
On desktop sites in particular, businesses have a bad habit of cramming too many navigation links and menus on one page. But overloaded navigation overwhelms users, makes key pages harder to find, and results in high exit rates.
The best navigation strikes the right balance between breadth on information architecture without confusing users. Follow these tips:
- Audit your site IA and cut unnecessary pages
- Separate primary, secondary, and footer navigation
- Use mega menus to remove top-level nav items
- Test your navigation on mobile to ensure streamlined menus
By simplifying navigation, users can easily self-serve to find what they need. Testing navigation menus across desktop and mobile will help you achieve that clarity.
Mistake #3: Sluggish Page Load Times
Today’s users expect websites to load instantly. With 40% of visitors abandoning sites that take over 3 seconds to load, slow pages can cripple conversion rates. Moreover, site speed impacts search engine rankings – landing pages that fully load in under 2 seconds result in better Google rankings.
To optimize speed, follow performance best practices like minification, compression, caching, and using a CDN. Test regularly with tools like Lighthouse or WebPagetest to catch any slowdowns, then address them promptly. With page bloat being a common culprit, continually audit your site and trim unnecessary code weighing down performance.
Testing site speed across various connections and devices using emulators gives you accurate insights on real-world loading times. By delivering lightning fast experiences, you’ll convert more visitors and keep Google happy.
Mistake #4: Burying Your Call-to-Action (CTA) Buttons
Calls-to-action urge visitors to take your desired actions, like signup for a free trial or place an order. But too often, businesses bury these CTAs at the bottom of pages where few visitors scroll. Or the CTAs blend in instead of standing out.
To maximize conversions, place visible CTAs like buttons above the page fold to capture attention fast. Follow CRO best practices in your CTA copy, design, and placement – clear, action-oriented text with high-contrast colors.
Cross-browser testing also comes into play to check your CTAs render properly across devices. Buttons that are too small or low contrast on mobile will fail to convert. Use emulators and real devices to catch such issues.
Mistake #5: Bloated Images Slowing Down Sites
Visually appealing product photos, graphics, and hero images do boost engagement. But high resolution, unoptimized images come at a cost – they drastically slow down load times.
To balance visual design with fast performance, optimize images by:
- Compressing file sizes without losing quality
- Resizing images to proper dimensions
- Lazy loading offscreen images
- Serving responsive images to serve right sized images
Test site speed regularly to catch any image bloat issues. View your site on mobile to check images size down correctly without pixelation. Optimized images allow visually rich sites without the performance penalty.
Mistake #6: Poor Integrations with Popups and Overlays
Popups, overlays and modal windows can be effective conversion tools when used judiciously. But too many, overly intrusive pop ups that obstruct content do more harm than good in annoying visitors.
The key is implementing popups, overlays and alerts selectively in a user-centered manner. Best practices include:
- Match styling with your overall site design
- Display popups only after page scrolling, not instantly on page load
- Make overlay close buttons obvious to avoid user confusion
- A/B test popup style, content and offer variations
With smart implementations that balance value and annoyance, floating elements can convert visitors without hampering UX. Verify popups function and display correctly across browsers and devices with testing.
Mistake #7: Inconsistent Branding and Messaging
One common branding mistake is conflicting brand imaging and messaging across your web properties. For example, using different logo designs, color schemes, or voice and tone on your blog, website, and social channels.
These inconsistencies water down your brand identity in customers’ minds. To strengthen branding:
- Audit branding across touchpoints for alignment
- Create cohesive brand style guides to unify visual language
- Stick to defined voice principles like active voice across channels
- Test end-to-end customer journeys for harmonized messaging
With unified web branding and UX flows, you’ll boost recognition, professionalism and conversions.
Mistake #8: Neglecting Accessibility Standards
With over 1 billion people globally having disabilities, ensuring website accessibility is both a moral and business imperative. Failing to meet accessibility guidelines puts your business at risk for ADA lawsuits and excludes segments of customers.
To avoid exclusionary design:
- Build sites to meet WCAG 2.1 AA compliance standards
- Conduct automated and manual accessibility testing regularly
- Check color contrast, alt text, ARIA landmark roles, and captions
- Ensure logical keyboard and screen reader navigation
Designing inclusively opens your brand to more potential customers and shows you value diversity.
Mistake #9: Cross-Browser Incompatibilities
Did you know 31% of web users still rely on old browser versions daily? When you don’t test across browsers, CSS/layout failures, visual glitches, JS errors and more can slip into production undetected.
To catch cross-browser bugs, you must test actively across diverse browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Safari and legacy versions common to your users. Real browser testing surfaces rendering differences, quality loss, crashes and compatibility issues that impact site visitors.
Tools like BrowserStack’s online browser testing grid make this validation efficient by testing live sites instantly across 3000+ browser-OS-device combinations. Identifying and remedying cross-browser defects pre-launch protects all your users and avoids embarrassing defects.
Mistake #10: Not Usability Testing with Actual Users
While expert reviews catch many UX issues, nothing beats validating designs directly with users. But shockingly, over a third of companies still don’t usability test their sites.
To avoid blindspots, work ongoing user feedback into the design process:
- Recruit 5+ participants matching your user demographics
- Conduct moderated usability test sessions
- Identify pain points and improvement areas
- Feed insights back to designers and developers
Armed with real user insights, you can refine designs to best meet visitor needs. Usability testing provides the voice of the customer for shaping better experiences.
Working these practices into your design, QA and release processes will help you craft engaging, user-friendly websites that also achieve business KPIs. By avoiding these all-too-common pitfalls, you’ll boost customer satisfaction, conversions and loyalty across channels.
