14 website design best practices you don’t want to miss

An attractive website can be called the heart of everything we do to attract customers to our business. Customer’s efforts to understand your business and become a customer—all take place on a website.  

Getting a website up and running is not important, nowadays you can do it easily but making the website a well-optimised one is what matters if you want your website to be successful. 

The design of the website plays a crucial part in the success of your website. Do you wonder how? 

Your visitors just need 0.05 seconds to get an opinion about your website and decide to stay on your site or leave. Just 50 milliseconds. And this make-it-or-break-it decision is taken based on the design of your website. The design also impacts the credibility and conversions of your website. 

88% of your customers will never come back to your site after a bad experience on your site. According to a recent study, 77% of agencies say that poor website design is the main drawback of their clients. 

There are various factors involved in designing a website. These are the 14 best web design practices to keep in mind in 2022.  

1.    Create a design that fits your business

Your website design must match your business goals. People are going to judge your business by your website and its design has a huge saying on how people perceive the standard of your business. Always, a simple and modern design is the best choice.  Too many elements can distract users from your content and hinder conversion.

Another factor you must remember is to keep your design consistent throughout your site. This will provide your users with a positive experience.

Incorporate eye-catching photos and videos, focus on readability, and create standout CTAs. Your design is the one that is going to help your users to interact with your site. On each page, you must think about what kind of action you want your users to take and plan and work out minute details accordingly.

2.    Opt for simple navigation

Your visitors must be able to get the information about your products or services as easily as possible to make quick decisions. They should not struggle to get the necessary information which will result in them leaving your site frustrated. This means your navigation must be as simple as possible so that they can traverse smoothly.

Having the navigation bar across the top of the page with simple categories is a standard thing. You should group your information logically so that it is easier for your visitors to reach out to a particular piece of information.

Add more categories as drop-down menus and allow your visitors to find any information in not more than 3 clicks. Divide your main headings up by product type, services, locations, or another logical category type that makes sense for your business. 

You can also add relevant information in the footer so that the user doesn’t have to scroll up to find information.

3.    Minimise text

Understandably, you need to talk about your company, brand and your products and services to your website visitors but the beauty lies in how you tell them. You can tell your story in a few sentences. Don’t use massive blocks of text. Make it short and sweet.

4.    Emphasise on visual

Which one do you think is more effective? Explaining a product using a huge chunk of text or just posting a beautiful picture of the product with a small description? I am sure, using a picture will have a better impact on the visitor.

Visual elements add beauty to a website. It is interesting to browse a page with graphics and photos because they are more engaging than pure text.

Try not to use stock photos as they are generic photos used by everyone else. Using photos of your staff, your work and your products will give your visitors an authentic feel for your business. You may also work with a designer to create custom graphics or infographics to be used on your website.

Another option is to use videos in appropriate places.  They are one of the most effective forms of visual content. A video on a page can improve conversions by 86% which is a great reason to add them and increase engagement and your website’s performance.

Videos are 53 times more likely to end up on the first page of Google results since people tend to remain on sites longer to watch videos than they do to read text.

5.    Use short sentences

Short sentences are easier to read. Don’t drive away your visitors with big chunks of text. They won’t be able to digest your content or have enough patience to read a lot of text. Moreover, breaking it down into smaller paragraphs brings you SEO benefits also.

6.    Use short paragraphs

It is best to keep your homepage paragraphs to a few sentences. Also, make sure each paragraph has new information so that a reader can quickly browse through and decide which paragraph to skip or read. Avoiding unnecessary text avoids clutter and draws the user to calls-to-action by making CTAs prominent.

Another way to reduce text is to use lists with bullet points. Studies show that using bullet points in lists increases readability as they allow you to highlight the important points.

7.    Pick colours to resonate with your branding

You need to choose your colours wisely because the brain processes colour before it processes words or shapes. Your visitors will like or dislike your page within 1 ½ minute and the colour of your website plays a vital role in this aspect.

Your colours should match your logo and the overall brand image. For example, Mc Donalds uses a red and orange colour concept on its website which matches its logo. The colour red is stimulating and associated with being active. The colour yellow is associated with happiness and is the most visible colour in daylight.

8.    Write clear and strong Calls-To-Action (CTAs)

You may have the most engaging page and despite that when the visitor reaches the end of the page, they are going to leave if there is no call-to-action on your page that tells them what to do next. CTAs direct your visitors to the next step towards becoming a customer.

Through a proper CTA on each page, you can tell visitors what the next step is. It may be to ask them to visit another page, sign up for an email list, or contact your business. Thus CTAs give your business the power to guide your leads in the right direction.

CTAs are essential for turning visitors into customers. Get creative with your CTA designs. You can include attractive buttons that stand out and entice visitors to click on them and take an action.

9.    Make your design mobile-friendly

Majority of the population access the internet via mobile devices including tablets, and smartphones. This emphasises the fact that you should optimise your website for mobile devices if you want your business to be successful. 58% of all Google searches are done from a mobile device.

Search engines recognise this and reward mobile-friendly sites. 70% of the first page results on Google are optimised for mobile devices.  No matter what device the visitor uses, they must be able to navigate through your website freely and have the best user experience.

The best way to do this is with responsive web design. Responsive design ensures that your website adjusts to the screen size the visitor uses, automatically. This makes sure that your visitors get the same level of experience on all the devices.

A website consists of small buttons and links for navigation and when the site is shrunk to be viewed on a mobile device, these elements will not be readable. With responsive design, this is not an issue. Responsive design will adjust the whole website to fit the screen of the mobile device so that every element is readable.

10.    Focus on readability

Readability is something website owners tend to ignore.  You may have tons of information on your site but what is the use if the visitor finds it hard to read your content? It is essential to make the content easily readable to your visitors.

Make sure your text stands out from your background. This is possible by choosing the right colours for your background and the fonts. Make sure to select fonts that are easy to read. Your font selection has a great impact on how easy it is for your readers to read your content and skim through the information. Use a clean font that is easy to read.

Avoid the temptation to use fancy fonts. They are hard to read. If you are particular about using them, confine their usage to the headings only. Use simple, easy-to-read fonts for the body copy. Don’t use more than 2-3 fonts for the body, too many fonts in the body copy will make it look cluttered and unappealing.  Next, choose the right font size so that it is readable.

11.    Include social media buttons

If you are involved in social media marketing, adding social media buttons to your site is an effective way to earn followers on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and any other platform you use.

You can place the social media buttons in your header, footer, navigation, or anywhere else you think is appropriate.

You need a way to keep your customers engaged and social media is a great way to do that. By including social media buttons, you provide your visitors the option of checking your social profiles and connecting with you on various platforms.

Moreover, if you publish content on your blog, you need to have share buttons on your blog posts that make it easy for people to share your content on their social accounts. This is a simple step but will bring huge benefits in terms of social visibility and reaching and accumulating more customers.

12.   Prioritise SEO

Having a beautiful website is great but you need to understand what factors make a website great. If you think aesthetic beauty alone will make your website great, then you are wrong. A website needs to be able to be found by visitors when they are searching for a product or service you offer. To be found by the search engines your website must have been optimised for the Search engines, which is a scientific process. This process of optimising a website for search engines to increase visibility is known as Search Engine Optimisation or SEO.

There are several strategies and techniques you can follow that can increase the likelihood of ranking.

However, if you don’t get the basics right, like your on-page SEO, your chances of ranking on page one of Google are minimal. 

By following SEO best practices recommended by sites like Google, you can lay the groundwork for your site to increase its visibility in search. Once you have laid the groundwork, you can start focusing on more advanced keyword research and link-building strategies.

According to HubSpot, 75% of searchers never go past the first page of search results — the reason why it is so essential to rank on the first page of Google. According to Google, SEO best practices are techniques that will “hopefully make it easier for search engines to crawl, index, and understand your content.”

Some of the most important SEO best practices are as follows.

• Align your content with search intent
• Write a compelling Title Tag and Meta Description
• Optimise your images
• Optimise your page speed
• Build an internal linking structure
• Improve user experience
• Make URLs SEO-friendly
• Earn authoritative backlinks
• Create useful content

13.   Your page loading speed is important

If your pages take too long to load, it’s going to be a huge problem. Slow loading times lead to high abandonment rates. You can’t ignore this.

Furthermore, 25% of people abandon websites that take more than four seconds to load. Most visitors expect a page to load in two seconds or less. Some of the things you can do to reduce the loading time and increase the speed of your website are:

• Reduce the file sizes of your images
• Take advantage of browser caching tools
• Reduce HTTP requests
• Improve your TTFB (time to the first byte)
• Minify and combine your files

There are lots of tools available online to help you accomplish these things. For example, the Page Speed Insights tool from Google helps you monitor the loading time of your website.

14.   Continuously run A/B tests

Website design isn’t about just setting and forgetting it. There is more to this process. No website is perfect. There are always ways for you to improve your design. That’s why you need to run A/B tests. These tests allow you to test out elements to see what works the best and, more importantly, what isn’t working at all and make regular improvements to your website.

Almost every element of your site design can be A/B tested. For example, you could create two different landing pages with different CTAs keeping the rest the same. If one landing page performs better than the other, it means that its CTA is the cause.

These are the most commonly tested elements of a web page:

• Headings
• Sub-headings
• Images
• The location of different elements
• Calls to action
• Offers
• Opening paragraph
• Hyperlinks
• Submit button
• Colours

Get your dream web design done by Faye Digital

Are you ready to start designing the website of your dreams? Faye Digital can help. We’re a full-blown digital marketing agency based in Melbourne with years of experience in creating attractive, results-driven sites for our clients. We’ll create a personalised website tailored to your needs, designed to educate and convert qualified leads.

Ready to start?

Contact us or call us at 03 7046 4688 to speak with a web specialist.