Having your business online is highly rewarding, but extremely competitive. If you get all the things right, you will experience an enormous amount of traffic, whereas, if your web design is poor, you will experience a decline in traffic. Hence, avoiding some common website design mistakes would help you develop the best website for your organization. Here are the top 5 mistakes to avoid during web development.
- Slow Load Speed
Often times we focus so much on various important aspects of the website that we forget one key element that matters the most to the visitors – the load speed of a website. If a website does not load within 3 seconds, it is very likely the visitor would abandon the website. Not just that, the fast load speed of a website is also important for SEO. As Google always wants to provide a better user experience, it ranks a website low if the load speed is slower than the industry benchmark. Ideally, a website should load all the elements within the first 3 seconds.
- Having PDF Files on the Website
It is a fact, no one likes to read PDF files; they break the flow. Not to mention, users have to go through the painstaking task of downloading or printing the PDFs. The layout of a PDF is designed for a sheet of paper, so the format does not suit portable devices. Hence, avoid PDFs on your website. There was a time when PDFs worked; however, with the popularity of portable devices, PDFs have become the CDs of online text.
- Website isn’t Mobile Friendly
A huge amount of internet users rely on mobile devices to access websites. If your website does not adjust to various screen sizes, you may be missing out on a lot of traffic. Going by statistics, 52.4 percent of all traffic originates from mobile devices. Hence, it is essential that the design of the website should be mobile responsive, meaning the website should be fully-functional across various screen sizes. WordPress websites does not require you to add any extra code for mobile responsiveness as the platform is designed to adjust to various screen sizes. Google also rewards websites that are mobile-friendly. It recently rolled-out mobile-first indexing, a move in the direction of promoting mobile-friendly website. The company has acknowledged, website that are not responsive or mobile-friendly will rank lower than a website that is mobile friendly in the same industry.
- Overly Literal Search
Overly literal search on the website makes it difficult for the user to find what they are looking for. The search should be able to display results after adjusting to typos and errors. If a user does not find something on your website, they would move on to the competitor. It is even more important for an online store to incorporate a highly functional search that displays search results adjusting to typos, hyphens, and plurals.
- Outdated Information
The internet is very competitive and there is a wide range of options for what you are offering. If you are offering information that is outdated, it will negatively impact your website traffic. Not to mention, it will also impact the SEO of your website. Google ranks unique content. If you are offering the same things others are offering, you will not make an impact on the organic search.
There are millions of websites on the web, to differentiate yourself from the others, you need to eliminate mistakes others are making. We have highlighted 5 common mistakes that most websites make. Eliminating these mistakes will allow your website to perform optimally.
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