What makes a bad website?
31st May, 2021
By Elliot McHugh
There are many factors which make a bad website and this article will help to break down some of the common reasons a new website fails. Building a website isn’t easy, and there are many things to consider at the design stage. For example, if you are doing e-commerce website design, you need to consider the checkout functionality and integrations to ensure smooth delivery of products. You also need to make sure that all of the products are easy to find and categorised properly on your website.
As a web design agency based in London, the first big mistake that we see web designers make is that they do not pay attention to the site’s menu navigation structure. How can anyone expect to find things on your website if they can’t use the nav menu? Keep it simple and visible – a lot of web designers hide it away in the top corner, making it hard to find. Remember, when you build a website, build it for someone who has never used the internet before. That way, you can be sure you won’t lose precious traffic. For more details, check out our web design 101 guide which breaks down everything to do with website design.
Another mistake that a lot of agencies make is they put too much content on the page. We already know that 38% of people will stop engaging with a website if the content or layout are unattractive, but more importantly, people simply will not bother reading your page if there is too much content. Always break up the page with things like images, videos and graphs to keep the content engaging. It’s much easier to read a pretty infographic then to sift through hundreds of words to find what you are looking for. Check out the infographic below on digital marketing – the colours and illustrations make it engaging to read:
Another thing that makes a poor website is bad metrics. When designing a website, you need to carefully consider how it is performing. This means paying close attention to page load speed, the amount of plugins you are using and also things like bounce rate, which is the number of searchers who click out of your page after landing. You want to aim for a lower bounce rate so that Google knows your content is keeping people around on your site. Sites with higher bounce rates perform better in search results, generally. Of course, multiple factors come into play here. As a rule of thumb, a bounce rate in the range of 26 to 40 percent is excellent. 41 to 55 percent is roughly average. 56 to 70 percent is higher than average, although these are just guesstimates.
Poor sites are also not search engine optimised. You’ll be surprised at how many business owners have a website built, only to have it die a slow death in the search results – that’s if it makes it there. If you want your website to bring in leads or sales, you need to make sure that it’s search engine optimised. Our SEO services focus on a variety of different aspects of web design and online marketing, and we perform both on-page & off-page SEO. For example, we might build backlinks to your site or do guest posts that are niche-specific.
So that’s it – the principle factors which make a website perform poorly. You can always check out our web design guides in our blog section for more useful information all things web design.
