7 Web Design Mistakes That Can Cause a High Bounce Rate

As the internet exponentially grows, the rules and trends of its users are changing as well. Just a couple of years back, quite a lot of all big companies that didn’t care much about having a website. Today, there’s a saying – if your business isn’t on the internet, it doesn’t exist. This may be a bit exaggerated, but it’s not far from the truth. If you really want your business to get noticed, and if you really want to expand it, you need a website.

You must keep in mind that you don’t need just a website; you need a professional representation of your business or yourself. The internet is flooded with bad and outdated sites, too complicated or too simple pages that do more harm than benefit to the businesses they represent. This is why you need to pay attention to your web design.

Web design mistakes are common; they happen to everyone. Knowing that most of your customers get the first impression of your business through your website, it’s completely understandable why you need to make it as perfect as possible. So, here’s the list of the most common web design mistakes you can avoid from the beginning.

Poor Navigation and UX

When monitoring your site’s performance, you will come across the term ‘Bounce rate.’ This information gives you detailed insight on how many people are leaving your site. Bounce rate should be as low as possible, and once you see it elevating, you know there’s a problem with your website. One of the most common mistakes in modern web design and the one that affects the bounce rate quite a lot is creating a website with bad user experience and poor navigation.

Following some basic principles, you should always make your website user-friendly before anything else. All main pages should be three clicks or less away from one another. You should never consider the back button in the browser as the part of your UI. Avoid using too many CTAs and pop-ups as they tend to turn people away from your page. Change things in small iterations and monitor the results to get the best possible solution.

Not Having a Responsive Design

With a number of mobile visits surpassing those from desktop PCs, it is perfectly clear that your website has to be adapted for mobile users. If your website design is not mobile-friendly, you can be in trouble. When unresponsive websites are accessed from mobile devices, the content of the website can’t be shown as it should. Images and text can’t be displayed properly, and some websites can’t even be accessed from mobile devices.

If you already have a website that’s doing well, consider adapting it for mobile versions. There are various responsive frameworks which you can use to your advantage. Talk to your web designer and think about how your content can be improved for mobile users. You can even turn your existing design responsive, with some smaller modifications. Don’t miss out on the mobile market as it can cause extremely high bounce rates.

Broken and Blank Pages

One of the major factors that elevate the bounce rates is broken links and blank pages. If you notice that people are spending an extremely short amount of time on your website or on some of the pages, it usually means the page is blank, or it’s not loading properly.

Check which visitors had the most trouble, and which devices and configurations reported the worst experience. Replicate the conditions and try to pinpoint the problem that way. Addressing such an issue is very important as it both turns away your potential customers, and it can make Google drop your page from the search if it’s unresponsive for a period of time. I will recommend you to use check broken links after a small gap.

Picking Wrong Font Families and Sizes

A pretty common mistake in the world of web design is to choose the wrong font family or improper font sizes for your content. This content may look amazing to you, but if any of your visitors have problems with reading it, you will get quite high bounce rates.

There are some trends and practices that are common in web design, so you may consider them, or make your designer consider them when adapting your website. A minimum of 16 pixels for the main text and 30 pixels for headings is somewhat of a standard. There are some font families that look smaller, so don’t be afraid to use higher spacing and line height.

Outdated Web Design

As we’ve mentioned before, the first impression is what’s really important. You wouldn’t believe how many people get that first impression from your website. That’s why you need to make sure it’s fresh, user-friendly and done for the modern audience.

In the words of ProWebdesign.Sydney experts have stated, using flash, low quality or overused stock images, inappropriate links and heavy bordered tables, multiple fonts and colors are all things of the past and can be considered as the web design mistakes these days. You should try to keep your website clean and simple, with very clear functionality.

Using Too Many Different Colors

In the last few years, we’ve witnessed the expansion of minimalistic trends among web designers and websites. However, there are still those that think there can never be too many colors. Using more than five main colors can be overwhelming for visitors, and it can make your website look childish or unprofessional.

There are some simple rules to follow when picking your website’s color scheme. You can do a bit of a research and see what your competition has to offer, you can always see how the bigger, more popular sites managed to deal with their colors, and there are loads of free tools you can use. For example, there are some great color scheme generators that can help you understand which colors work with each other, and which shouldn’t be combined.

Using Too Much Text

When your visitors enter the website, and they’re greeted with the wall of text, there’s quite a high possibility most of them will simply leave the website. You should constantly revisit the content, and you should try to keep it clean and simple, but that doesn’t mean you have to re-write everything.

If you use visual elements, like images or videos, to break the text-heavy parts of your page, you will get a much more appealing look. Another neat trick is to highlight important phrases and make it look spacey. These small tricks will keep your visitors’ attention, and you will still deliver all the content you wanted to.

Wrapping It Up

These web design mistakes are just some of the most common ones. Although these mistakes can be fixed quite easily, they affect your website’s bounce rates, and they affect your business as well. The best solution to all of these problems is to talk with your web development team regularly and address the problems in advance. Hopefully, some of these tips will come in handy when you do.