Have you ever noticed a decrease in your ecommerce website sales? Your target audience may be reaching your homepage, but there isn’t much activity from other parts of your site. Why? Your web design might need some work.
Web design must give a website visitor a great first impression of what your business is about. Why? Because it only takes a few seconds for visitors to decide if your site is worth their time. Customers want a website that accommodates user needs, provides appealing visual elements, and offers high website speed.
Good web design should help with digital marketing. It should improve a website’s credibility, help websites rank higher on search engines, and generate customer leads and sales while effectively communicating a business purpose. But many businesses still make common web design mistakes that drive away website visitors and keep prospective customers from buying.
Along with the 7 ecommerce website design mistakes to avoid, our web design experts are sharing tips on how to create a professional online store that stands out and engages customers.
1. Cluttered design
One of the biggest web design mistakes website owners make is overwhelming their visitors with visual content.
Today’s ecommerce websites must be clean and simple, with good visual elements at the forefront. If your website is too cluttered with photos, irrelevant pop ups, different font styles, or a jumble of colors, visitors will be looking at a messy web page.
Direct viewers’ eyes to where you most want them to go. Avoid irrelevant images and unnecessary content with different-sized elements on the home page.
A study done by EyeQuant, a design analytics company, found that cleaner websites have lower bounce rates. It’s important to remember, visual clarity impacts about one-third of a person’s decision of whether to stay or leave a site.
Pro Tip: When it comes to website design:
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Make sure to follow the basics of color theory, like using analogous or complementary colors.
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Stick to three colors: a primary color, a secondary color, and an accent.
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Only use two fonts at most to achieve a visual hierarchy.
2. Not mobile friendly
Everybody is browsing and shopping through their mobile devices. If your ecommerce website isn’t mobile-friendly, you’re going to lose significant sales.
A website design should be “mobile-first”. The reason? Elements that work on mobile devices generally translate well to desktops, but the opposite isn’t.
Images need to have at least 1200 x 1500 pixels. If you want an image to stretch from end to end, then it should have at least 1800 x 2000 pixels. While it’s easy to make large images smaller, it’s hard to make small images larger without losing quality. So, it’s important that your images are large enough to scale without impacting quality.
3. Lacking information about products
Customers want to know every detail about products. But minimizing website clutter doesn’t mean compromising the information about your products. One of the most common web design mistakes is not putting enough details about what you offer in your web design.
Generic description no longer works. Elaborate product details in a way that builds an emotional connection to whoever reads them. Aside from that, you must also include product dimensions, shipping size/weight, materials and any valuable information that helps potential buyers decide.
A well-designed landing page sells more and attract more customers. Now, how do you reconcile the need for detail while avoiding clutter? For good web design, keep the initial information minimal but use dropdowns, or tooltips, that customers can expand to check further details when needed.
Pro Tip: We recommend putting buttons instead of inline text links for your Call to Action (CTA), such as “Buy Now” or “Shop Here.” Doing so encourages online shoppers to take further actions that direct them to relevant web pages. Links in button form either on the header panel or throughout the site draw greater attention than those embedded on text.
4. Poor product photos
Product photos are a key element of an ecommerce website design. Grainy and low-quality images just won’t cut it these days. Good website design includes multiple, high-definition photos of products from various angles, and provides the ability to zoom in to see detail. Also consider adding videos to better showcase your products and services.
Pro Tip: When you put videos on your website, make sure they are not on auto-play. Videos on auto-play give visitors a negative experience, especially those on a mobile phone or viewing your site in a public place.
5. Customer service information is hard to find
Web designers recommend your contact details be visible to visitors. Forgetting to put a contact page is a website design mistakes you should never make.
Ensure your business’ phone number is visible on your site. You can also add chat tools and customer service email address for easier communication.
Most customers also want to know the shipping costs and return policies before making a purchase. So, information about these should be visible and accessible.
Pro Tip: Keep a simple horizontal navigation header. Vertical navigations or menus on the left-hand side of a website are outdated. While you can continue to do this on your website, it’s important to not be super fancy with the navigation. Most visitors today expect the navigation to be listed horizontally at the top of a page. So, it’s best to not stray from that.
6. Poor search feature
Make the search bar accessible for quick searches. There’s nothing more frustrating than searching for a product that exists on your site but can’t be found.
Beyond basic search, giving customers the ability to filter and sort products helps improve your sales.
7. No security certificates
According to Google’s Transparency Report, 89% of pages loaded in Chrome were served over HTTPS in January 2021. The “S” in HTTPS stands for security and websites that have HTTPS offer secure communication over a computer network. You need an SSL certificate to ensure you have that “S” in your URL.
In the same report, 93.2% of the browsing time on Chrome also shows that it is spent on HTTPS pages. Clearly showing that people leave unsecure web pages.
Unsecured websites also result in customers being less likely to place an order. Especially when they don’t feel confident that your ecommerce website is keeping their data safe. Get customers to trust your website through security certification, such as your SSL Certificate.
Pro Tip: We recommend adding reCAPTCHA to your website, a free service from Google that distinguishes human users from bots and protects websites from spam and abuse. By adding reCAPTCHA, automated software can be blocked while allowing easy entry for legitimate users. You can try it out at https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api2/demo.
Get a Professional Ecommerce Site
A working and efficient ecommerce site is what business owners need, but not everyone has the time to tend to every nook and cranny of their website. Professional ecommerce design services created by expert web designers are perfect for any business. Leave your website in the hands of the experts.
With Web.com’s professional services, business owners can focus on their business needs while experts tend to the website. But if it’s still not within your budget, or if you prefer to do it yourself, there are many ways to create DIY websites. Just make sure to follow the best practices for website design building and stay away from the biggest web design mistakes listed above.
Image Credits:
- Header: Shutterstock
- Image 1: Shutterstock
- Image 2: Screenshot of Web.com
