Importance of a Good Website Design for Business
Most consumers perform in-depth online research on products and services before making purchase decisions. A study by the eCommerce Foundation shows 88 percent of buyers will search for product information before buying it online.
By CHRISTIAN KRUSE
Such a purchase behaviour stresses the value of a content-rich, professionally designed website for a business. What’s more, consumers spend more time on beautifully designed sites than they do on plain and basic ones. Here are 10 ways a good web design impacts your business.
1. Serves as Your Business’ First Impression
Potential customers get their first impression of your company by checking out your website. They form an opinion about your business in a matter of seconds. So you should focus on leaving a lasting positive effect on your audience within these few seconds by ensuring your website is appealing, user-friendly, highly responsive, and has a fast loading speed.
A site that appears unattractive or old-fashioned sets a negative first impression of your brand. It wards off potential customers and drives them to your competitor’s page. But a decent website design helps maintain your audience on your page, which improves leads conversion.
2. Boosts Trust and Brand Consistency
As mentioned above, your website design determines how most people judge the integrity of your business. Trendy and professional website designs tend to promote trust. Outdated and unprofessional web designs, on the other hand, make users doubt your credibility. Brand consistency is another notable way that a decent web design encourages trust. Consumers recognize prominent and successful brands by just looking at things like their colours, logos, or styles. So it’s important to ensure things that your customers identify your business with are reflected in your website design.
Ensure the outline, styles, and fonts are the same throughout every page on your site. If every page has a different design, your site will appear unattractive and unprofessional. Building brand recognition will also become a hassle because your target audience won’t easily identify things that represent your brand.
3. Enhances Usability
A good design allows visitors to effortlessly access what they’re searching for from your website. According to a 2015 web usability report, 86 percent of website visitors are looking for information about your products or services, 65 percent search for contact details, and 52 percent look for your business’ About page. Good web design makes these things extremely easy to find. Otherwise, your visitors will have a bad user experience and will spend less time on your site.
Your website may work well, but a bad design may make visitors feel that it’s difficult to use or locate what they want. Users are likely to enjoy using an aesthetically-pleasing site more than a dull site even if the two websites are identical when it comes to functioning. That means a good website design enhances usability along with the perception of usability.
Due to the complex nature of web design, consider partnering with a professional design agency. In the same breath, hire a reputable agency for translation services, to help you offer insightful and consistent product messaging that resonates with your global customers, in any language.
4. Eases Navigation
A high-quality design makes your site easy to navigate. Many professional designers usually apply Hick’s Law when it comes to website design. This law basically states that the duration taken to make a decision is proportional to the number of choices available. If you’re provided with many choices, you’ll take longer to make a decision, and vice versa.
When professional designers build website navigation with Hick’s Law in mind, they want to simplify and reduce the number of options so that visitors can easily decide what action to take or where to go. Make your site easy to navigate by reducing the number of options to five or less. Take a look at your product menu and merge similar options into a single option. That way, visitors will find your website easy to navigate and easy to use.
5. Fosters Your SEO Strategy
Various web design components and techniques have a huge impact on your site’s content publishing capability, which in turn influences how top search engines crawl and rank your page. That aside, some web design components can hurt your SEO strategy. Sydney SEO Agency says that one of the most common mistakes that businesses make is prioritizing design over functionality. In 2021, with more than 58% of users choosing mobile as their primary search device, having a fast, responsive website is imperative to SEO.
To enhance the visibility of your page, make use of SEO-friendly web-design elements and techniques. If you strongly feel that this is not part of your expertise, you can always hire a competent SEO company that will optimize your website for search engines and drive organic traffic to your site, and enhance your online presence.
6. Improves Website Loading Speed
A well-designed site tends to load quickly on all devices, including tablets, smartphones, and desktops. A page loads in a matter of seconds due to the fluid grids and high-quality, responsive visual media. A visitor is more likely to stay longer on websites that load faster than on those that take ages to load. In fact, one study found that 53 percent of mobile users will leave a website if pages are unresponsive or take a significant amount of time to load (more than three seconds). The same study revealed that sites that load quickly keep visitors engaged for a long time and realize an uptick in conversion rates.
7. Reduces Bounce Rates
Bounce rate refers to the percentage of users who visit a specific website and abandon it after checking out only one page. As stated above, a well-designed site with a fast loading speed means users will interact with your website longer and that will lower your bounce rate. By spending more time on your site, visitors will be more likely to open other pages on your website, learn more about you and your business, check out your products, and perhaps make a purchase.
8. Improves Conversion
A good website design gives you power over your audience’s eyes and allows you to direct them to where exactly you want them to check. Leveraging this capability, you can drive traffic to special offers, promotions, and calls to action. You can also help both new and current customers discover buttons and other clickable facets with ease. That way, you’ll enhance the user experience for your visitors and realize higher conversion rates.
Another reliable way to improve your conversion rate is by making your site mobile friendly. Remember smartphones register a 64 percent higher conversion rate than desktops. So having a mobile-friendly website is a must.
9. Gives You an Edge Over Your Competitors
If you want to outperform your competitors and attract more customers, you must make your website design a couple of times better than theirs. Identify things that will set your business apart from the rest and have them incorporated on your site. The goal here is to show potential customers why your products or services are better than those of your competitors.
10. Enhance Customer Service and Satisfaction
Your audience can get an insight into how you treat your customers by just checking your website. If you don’t invest in the design of your page, your target audience assumes you won’t deliver value for their money. Make your business look open and welcoming by investing in a bright, up to date, and eye-catching website design. Most importantly, ensure it has simple yet smart navigation that can give your audience an enjoyable experience every time they visit.
The Parting Shot
Your website design can mean the difference between your business’ success and failure. It influences how your audience judges your business or brand. As such, ensuring your website design is aesthetically appealing, user friendly, and mobile-friendly can go a long way in improving the conversion rate, which results in more earnings and successful business. Last but not least, find ways to get in touch with international media and expand your target audience.
