Are you losing clients because your website is not designed properly?

Losing clients is the worst nightmare for every business owner out there. In truth, there are many reasons you could be losing online clients. One of the leading reasons behind businesses losing clients is due to poorly designed websites.

Your company’s website is equivalent to a physical store. It needs to be welcoming so potential clients choose to trust your brand. Without a well-designed website, you run the risk of a high bounce rate (which also affects your google ranking), which spells disaster for your conversion rates.

The way your website looks, its simplicity of use, and user journey are all key factors that determine whether clients choose to stick to your brand. As a web design company near London, we understand everything there is to know about the way your website affects a client’s psyche. That’s why we’ve put together this blog to help you. In this blog, you will learn the following:

– What is a user journey?
– Why are user journeys important?
– Key website design errors people commonly make
– How to prevent losing clients over poor web design

Read ahead to learn more.

What Is A User Journey?

If your website is equivalent to a physical store, then your “user journey” is the very first step a client takes into your business. It determines whether your client will fully enter and browse what you have to offer, and potentially buy your services. It is the way a person navigates through your online business, and comes to a final conclusion – Do I buy this product?, should I contact this service?, etc.

To put it in more web-friendly terms, a user journey is the sequential steps a website visitor takes to accomplish their intended goal. For instance, a user might browse the “about us” page before going to the “products” page and ultimately making a purchase. To view how user interactions are currently flowing, each of these parts should be gathered and visually mapped.

Once the most common combinations of these have been compiled, a good designer can identify the problems or gaps that can be improved, allowing user objectives to be attained more quickly and effectively.

Why Is It So Important?

The three key performance indicators (KPIs) are (a) revenue, (b) client growth, and (c)retention. They are the lifeblood of any kind of organisation.

Understanding your customers’ journeys and their interactions with your brand and products throughout their lifetime is the key to unlocking each of these. By doing this, you may duplicate the techniques used to attract your best clients by reverse engineering the routes they take. Similar to this, you may reduce churn by determining when and why people leave your onboarding process.

You can also identify the needs, challenges, and goals of your clients using a user journey map. This supports the creation of stickier products that establish long-term ties with your business and greater client experiences.

Simply put, a good user journey = good user experience = more leads turned into sales.

Key Design Errors To Look Out For

Now that we’ve given you a better idea of a client’s user journey… here are a few common design errors business make that lead to losing clients:

-Cluttered Websites:

A website’s home page design needs to be tidy, understandable, and simple to use. Users frequently encounter home pages with an excessive number of links, making it challenging for them to find what they need.

One of the biggest web design blunders to avoid is cluttered website navigation. With so many items on one page, users will undoubtedly become confused. Naturally, users will have trouble finding the desired page and may leave. The page’s aesthetic appeal is also lacking. Such landing pages have poor conversion rates and reduce ROI.

– Jarring Text:

Your choice of font and font matter matters to your overall design. If you use fonts that are unreadable, or choose colours that don’t contrast against your background well… your website comes off as unprofessional. People like to opt for businesses that put in an effort. When your website looks outdated and hard to read, potential clients will quickly leave your website, increasing your bounce rate.

– Images, Videos & Other Visual Content:

Nobody likes a plain, boring page to look at. Most people engage better with visual content such are images, videos and infographics. If your website is all text, no visuals, people are likely to get bored and click away. Maintaining clients’ interest is key when it comes to sales. So, you’ll want to ensure you use good visual components as well as insightful information.

However, be aware that it is possible to use too many visual aids. This just makes things distracting. Try using visual components only where they add insight into your content. And make sure to optimise your media, which brings us to our next point.

– Un-Optimised Media:

High-resolution photos are frequently used by website designers to create aesthetically beautiful websites, but these images might slow down a website’s loading time.

Compressing or shrinking photographs is the best technique to optimise them in order to solve this problem. Use programmes like Adobe Photoshop to drastically reduce the size of image files, while WordPress administrators can use plugins like WP Smush.

– Slow Loading Speed:

Users using mobile devices anticipate websites to load instantly. This expectation was brought about by the regular use of social media, email, and search engines along with high-speed internet. According to contemporary design thinking principles, there are many chances that a user would leave a website as soon as it takes too long to load. For example:

• No user likes to wait for more than two to three seconds, subconsciously.
• Conversions can drop by 7% with a 1-second delay in page response.
• Not only is a slow-loading website one of the most common web design errors, but it is also a CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) problem.
• Google takes longer to crawl your website, which slows down your online presence in search results.
• When optimising your website design, Google Search Central advises that you address blocked JavaScript, CSS, unplayable content, mobile-only 404s, and broken redirects as soon as possible.

– Mobile-Optimisation:

Another big factor that can affect your client journey is whether your website is optimised for mobile or not. Nowadays, most people choose to use their phones for online transactions. In fact, many people solely use their phones when it comes to interacting with online businesses.

It’s important to optimise your website for mobile activity. This isn’t just because it’s better for your clients, but also because Google places huge importance on it as well. Google has made mobile-optimisation a must for websites that want to rank higher on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

So, ensure that your website is both desktop and mobile optimised and you should be good to go.

These are just a few examples of the many web design errors people make. The nuances of web design are so fine-lined that it’s hard to keep up. That’s where web design companies come into handy.

How Can You Prevent Losing Clients From Poor Web Design?

Now that you know a few of the key mistakes people make, you’ll know what to avoid. As we mentioned earlier, it can be hard to keep up with constant web design updates. The only true way you can prevent losing clients from poor web design is by ensuring your website is always up to date.

Business owners already have a lot on their plate, though. We have to focus on our larger business goals and don’t have time to get into the nitty gritty details of website design and digital marketing. That’s where Explosion Digital can be a helping hand and help you save on time and money. Our experts can lift your brand through strategic digital marketing and help you soar towards your business goals.

Contact us to learn more about what we can do for you.