13 ways to improve your website design
In this guide, we’ll show you 13 ways to improve your website’s design and increase how users engage with your site. From design strategies to A/B testing. You can use the links above to skip to a section if one area interests you more than another or if you’re already familiar with certain areas of improvement.
Contents
1. Map the user journey
2. Think about structure
3. Keep your design clean
4. Utilise white space
5. Use colours to your advantage
6. Mobile friendly design
7. Implement attrractive CTA’s
8. Scroll vs Click
9. Link management
10. A/B Testing
11. Optimise page speed
12. Idenfity 404 pages
13. Focus on your SEO strategy
13 ways to improve your website design
In this guide, we’ll show you 13 ways to improve your website’s design and increase how users engage with your site. From design strategies to A/B testing. You can use the links above to skip to a section if one area interests you more than another or if you’re already familiar with certain areas of improvement.
1. Map the user journey
Content around design or design around content? It sounds obvious but it’s not uncommon to see a website design that’s been developed for the content to be added in afterwards. It may look nice but it won’t convert your visitors into customers, and that should be your main objective.
Don’t just start designing your website before you’ve mapped out how customers are going to get from point A to point B. The start of any good web design project is to map out the user’s journey first.
It’s sometimes easier to reverse engineer this process. Start at the end and work backwards. For example, if you’re selling products, your end goal is probably for your website visitors to add products to the basket and then checkout.
If your site is information-based, your goal may be for them to get in touch for more information or to book a consultation.
One way of mapping out your customer’s flow throughout your site is by using a board and sticky notes. Think about the path you’d like your customers to take and map it out visually. Start by writing down each step of the user’s journey and place it on a board so you have a visual representation.
To understand the user’s journey, you first need to identify the four types of search intent. This will help you when you’re considering the customer’s path throughout your site.
E-commerce sites will have different journeys compared to service-based websites and the user journey will differ depending on what type of products or services you sell. Before doing anything, map out the user journey.
2. Think about structure & navigation
You should consider this when thinking about the structure and navigation of your site. Keep it simple, keep it clean. In your main navigation (normally located in the header), you’ll want to have all the pages you consider to be most important.
For medium to large sites, you’ll have a lot of pages you want to be easily found. However consider placing the top priority pages in your main menu, and additional links in your footer. This keeps everything within a couple of clicks but ensures navigation remains simplified.
Ideally, try to use fixed navigation. Hamburger style, pop-out menus don’t have as much user engagement on desktops as they do on mobile.
3. Keep your web design clean
We live in a busy world. As technology evolves, people seem to have less time and are distracted far more easily. How often have you been watching something on Netflix to quickly get your phone out to Google something?
What makes a website clean? Some areas, like white space and colours, we’ll be covering shortly – but the main essence here is that less is more. Simplify your website design to get your message across clearly and declutter overcrowded pages.
Less is more. You don’t want a crowded site as it detracts from the user experience. When designing a website you want to keep a focus on usability.
4. Utilise white space
Choose a single colour and keep it consistent. Think of that picture you’ve got on the wall. Chances are it’s not surrounded by anything other than a single colour which brings focus to the picture itself.
However, a lot of clients don’t like this space as they feel it can be better used to advertise products and services. With that being said, a good website design team will always try and utilise as much white space as possible during website development. Studies show that the correct use of white space increases user attention and engagement.
It’s like we said above, less is more and when it comes to the design, that’s certainly the case. If your site is cluttered and messages are not easily read with a quick scan of the eye, user engagement rates will decrease.
It’s worth noting that white space in web design, doesn’t have to be white. When we say white space we are simply referring to a single colour around an element.
5. Use colours to your advantage
There’s a lot of psychology around colours and different colours evoke different messaging.
Whatever colour scheme you decide to go for, make sure you choose a palette that complements other colours.
Is your business within the creative industry? Maybe try Purple as your primary colour. Or are you trying to promote trust? If so, Blue is a good option.
A good colour resource to start with is the Adobe Colour Wheel. Are you looking for some inspiration or feeling a bit lazy? Try Coolors.
The point here is don’t pick a colour scheme simply because you like it. And once you do have a primary colour in mind, use free digital marketing tools at your disposal to create a palette that works well together.
Primary, secondary and accent colours are all you need, but often we’ve had requests for this element being one colour, and another element is another colour. For no reason other than ‘we like that colour’. Try to avoid this approach and plan according to your target market.
6. Make your site responsive and mobile-friendly
More and more users are turning to mobile as their primary viewing source. We’ve reached a point where more than half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices.
If you’re using Google Analytics on your website, you’ll be able to view a breakdown of which devices and browsers people use the most to view your site. For the majority, this will be mobile.
In 2015, Google rolled out its mobile-friendly update and announced that it was going to become a ranking signal. Simply put, if your site wasn’t mobile-friendly, it would impact where you appeared within search results.
“Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices.”
In March 2020, Google announced that they were moving to mobile-first indexing for all websites as of September 2020. That’s a big change in the way websites are crawled and indexed and now means its more important than ever for your website to be mobile-friendly.
While Google recommends not having separate sites for desktop and mobile as was once popular, you should look at your layouts, and utilise CSS to display/hide elements that may only be suitable for certain devices.
7. Implement attractive call to actions
CTA’s, AKA ‘Call to actions’ has a big impact on how users engage with your site and encourage users to go to ‘the next step’.
There are two key areas you’ll want to try to have a clear CTA. Above the fold (the area of the webpage before a user has to scroll down to see more) and at the bottom of the page to guide them to the next step of your journey.
A good example of an above the fold CTA is on the Adidas website. Product image, title, and a button. That’s it, and it works well.
CTA’s are psychology motivated. Colours, locations and even the text itself can have a big impact on your site’s conversion rates. This is a good reason why you should use A/B testing to measure and improve the results (More on that further down).
Google managed to increase its revenue by $200M per year by testing various shades of Blue within its ad results. A small change can make a big difference.
When creating CTA’s, try to remeber the following:
– Above the fold works best
– Use actionable text
– Use colours that stand out
– Use heatmaps to determine placements
– Measure the results
8. Scroll vs Click
We’re guilty of it, but accordions or elements that you have to click to view additional content simply don’t convert as well as scrolling does when it comes to web design.
Let’s take sliders as an example. They look good and normally have a nice transition as they move from one slide to the next. But studies show that most of the impressions (often as high as 90%) go to the first slide with the additional ones receiving hardly any views whatsoever.
It’s the same story for accordions, often used for FAQ pages. We use them ourselves, but you should have an understanding of why to use one over the other.
Long scrolling pages convert better than shorter ones filled with slides and accordions. If you’re doing the web design and development yourself, this probably isn’t a problem. If you’re outsourcing to a web design company, however, the budget may be a restraint.
When should you use slides and accordions over longer based pages where you have to scroll through the content? If you’re thinking about your SEO strategy (more on this later) then accordions can be worthwhile as they enable you to get extra information in your web designs whilst keeping users focussed on the areas that are most important to you.
If on the other hand, you’re trying to convey important selling messages to your website visitors, then scroll-based pages definitely win here.
9. Link Management
Placement can make a big difference to user engagement as it could start encouraging users to visit other platforms which probably isn’t what you intended.
Your website visitors may want to find out more about you, but they’ll find you even without those header links. That’s not to say you shouldn’t place social links on your website. Just consider their placement and positioning.
The footer is more suited for social links. Users get to the end of the page and it shows them additional links. Placement in the header could mean a percentage of your users never got this far.
The same goes for external links. Whilst it’s always nice to link to external resources, be sure to limit this, and when doing so, make sure these links open in a new window.
10. Use A/B testing
If you’re not A/B testing, you are throwing money away. A/B testing is the process of serving one element to one group of users and another version to another group of users. I.e. different coloured buttons. You then monitor how each version compares and which one performs better. Using this data you then implement the changes.
11. Optimise your page speed
Pagespeed is important for more than one reason. First, it’s a ranking factor used by Google. It also has a direct impact on your bounce rates and user engagement. Sites that take longer than 3 seconds to load, on average, will see more than a third of their users leave before viewing another page.
There are various ways to optimise the loading speed of your website. From making sure you use a solid web hosting provider to decluttering your site to reduce the overall page size.
You should also look at more in-depth ways of increasing your loading times such as correct use of imagery, caching, minification and lazy loading.
Alongside these easy to implement methods, you should then look at the technical approaches to improving page speed such as caching, minification and lazy loading for images.
12. Identify 404 pages
The longer you’ve had your site, the more chances are that you have broken links, either internally or externally. These are not the type of links you want to have as they create more than one problem for your users and your rankings.
Users clicking on a link that leads to your 404 pages are more likely to leave the site and look elsewhere. That’s a customer you could potentially lose.
For search engines, this means dropped pages from indexing which could have been pointed elsewhere. Identifying your broken links should be a regular activity that you perform and can be done as part of your website audits. (We’re covering this next). You can then do one of two things. Either fix the broken links or set up 301 redirects so the link juice flows to other relevant pages. This will help you reduce your bounce rate, and strengthen your brand positioning.
13. Focus on your SEO strategy
If you followed everything in this guide, specifically site audits and A/B testing, you should be in the fortunate position of having a ton of data to work with. Be smart and use that data to improve how your website performs for you.
If you outsource your SEO to an agency, follow their progress. if you manage all your digital marketing internally, then create a roadmap from the data you’ve gathered and monitor the progress. You may just be surprised at the results you can achieve.
