10 Website Design Mistakes to Avoid

You’ve bought a domain and hosting and spun up a website. You’ve even picked out a theme – Kadence Blocks, we hope – and are ready to build your next website.

But before you get started, what should you not do? If you think about some of these all-to-common website design mistakes at the onset of a project, it is a little easier to avoid them as you create the perfect website for your blog or business.

If you already have a website and have made one of these mistakes, don’t worry. Most of them are correctable with a little time, patience, and effort.

1. Dead-End Content or No Call to Action

Pages should always have a next step. A user should never get to the end of a piece of content and have nothing more to do.

2. Unclear or Unfamiliar Navigation

Another website design mistake to avoid is confusing navigation. It can frustrate users and lead to higher bounce rates. There’s a reason that many websites have similar styles for navigation and menu items.

3. Slow Load Times

Slow-loading pages can drive visitors away and negatively impact your search engine rankings. The solution is not an animation to distract users that the website is slow.

4. Auto-Play Anything (Especially Sound)

Avoid having audio or video that automatically plays when a user visits your site. It can be disruptive and annoying, especially if users are in a quiet environment.

5. Too Many Pop-Ups (Or Ads)

Be cautious with the use of pop-ups. This can be an easy website design mistake to make. While pop-ups can be effective for certain purposes, excessive pop-ups can be intrusive and annoy visitors.

6. Ignoring SEO

The most well-designed website in the world won’t mean anything if users can’t find it. Don’t ignore technical search engine optimization best practices because this will come back to bite you.

7. Forgetting Security and Privacy

A secure and identity-friendly website is more than a nice-to-have; it’s a requirement. In addition to being important for users to know you are transmitting data securely, they also want to know what you are doing with their information, and in some places, there are legal requirements you must adhere to.

8. Inconsistent Design Elements

Inconsistency is another website design mistake to avoid. It can make your site look unprofessional and confuse users.

9. Ignoring Accessibility

Avoid using overly small or fancy fonts that are difficult to read. Make sure there is enough contrast between text and background colors. Use a tagging structure that makes text readable by screen readers … and the list continues. Quite simply, you want your design to be something anyone who visits it can understand.

10. Missing or Hard to Find Contact Information

Nothing makes a business look fake like no contact information. (It has also hurt in terms of local SEO.) Contact information should be readily available on your website and match any publicly available listings for your business, such as Google or Yelp.

Bonus: Failing to Conduct User Testing or Looking at Analytics

Do you know how people are using your website? Is it what you expect? User testing and analytics are the best ways to have a good idea of what is and is not working with your design.

Wrapping Up

Always keep these top ten website design mistakes in mind as you create your next website. A little research goes a long way toward avoiding some trouble down the line. You want to make sure that when people are searching for your content, they can find you and see what you are about.