Websites are so important that 75% of consumers judge a business’s credibility by its website.
Bad website design can mean the difference between flourishing and failing. This is a startling statistic but one that needs more explanation. In what exact ways does a bad design harm your business, and how does that work?
Let’s take a look at 7 ways that bad website design could be limiting or harming your business.
What Is Bad Website Design?
To get details about how a bad website design hurts a business, let’s first determine what a bad design is:
- Slow loading times
- Not mobile-friendly
- Difficult to navigate or use
- Poorly written or ineffective content
- Disorganization
- Poor choice of fonts, colors, and images\
- Lack of optimization
This is often due to poor or lacking technical SEO optimization. Consider hiring a professional who understands technical SEO to assist your business.
Now let’s move on to the impact that bad website design will have on your business.
1. Customer Trust
It should come as no surprise that having a bad website design can destroy customer trust. There are a lot of threats and dangers in shopping online. Modern consumers know this well.
The more professional and easy-to-use a website is, the more trust customers will have. They form this opinion less than a second from the moment they visit the site. Your website needs to grab potential customers from the moment they land.
If a website doesn’t seem well put together, customers will leave. They won’t be willing to spend money on a product or brand that seems unsafe or out-of-date.
2. SEO and Ranking
You could have the best on-page and local SEO efforts in the world. They won’t do you any good if your website isn’t well-built. The goal of SEO is to direct people to your site, and if they leave as soon as they arrive, you’ll begin to lose ranking.
Google modifies the algorithm all the time to ensure customer satisfaction. Sites that people don’t stay on don’t please their customers. A high bounce rate is due to poor design, and that can lower your ranking.
This means that any money you spend on SEO and content marketing was for nothing.
3. Lose Mobile Customers
People who surf the internet on their mobile devices expect quality websites. In fact, they want them to look as good on the phone as they do on the computer. Not optimizing for mobile traffic dooms you to lose out on over 62% of website traffic.
Imagine if you had a brick-and-mortar business and sent away over half of your customers when they entered the door. That is what poor website design does for a modern business, whether it is e-commerce or not.
Mobile traffic is growing every year as well. The impact of not having a mobile-friendly web design will only increase. Well-designed websites must take this into consideration.
4. Out of Touch With Customers
Having a bad website will make your business seem archaic and out of touch. This will convince people that you don’t care about your customers. They won’t feel a connection to your brand, and personalizing your brand is a goal of all modern marketing.
This undermines any effort or investment you make in marketing, digital or not. People want to feel like a business puts them first. That means their time, energy, and their wallets get reserved for businesses they connect with.
This also leads to the fact that website design has changed over the last 10 years. Looking out of date can make your website look like poorly designed websites. Load times may also be slower with older layouts and design features.
5. Marketing Efforts
It doesn’t matter whether you invest in digital or traditional marketing. A bad website will hurt both and curtail any efforts to grow your customer base. For digital marketing, a great deal depends on the performance of your website to even get started.
Content, landing pages, and other hallmarks of digital marketing won’t help a bad website. Marketing will attract customers, but a bad website will chase them away as fast as they arrive. This will leave you with investments that can’t bring any return back to your business.
6. Frustrating Customers
Nothing will get under a customer’s skin like a bad website. The delay in surfing the internet drives people crazy. No one wants to sit there staring at their phone, and modern customers are far more demanding when it comes to loading times.
A website that is difficult to navigate is as bad. If someone wants to get around your website or look at content, it must be easy to do. The longer and harder it is, the fewer customers will wait around.
This also highlights the importance of the color scheme in web design. Customers won’t tolerate a website that is hard to see or read. Sometimes the difference between good and bad website design can come down to color choices.
Customers aren’t forgiving when it comes to businesses that wasted their time. A reputation for poor design will develop as social media will allow customers to vent their frustration.
7. No Second Chances
There are many things that a business can do that customers will forgive. A lot of people are willing to give second chances if they believe that there’s a good reason. This gracious attitude does not extend to negative experiences with websites.
A majority of customers, in some studies over 80%, will not give a second chance to a bad website. There’s no margin for error when it comes to website design. The importance of web design can’t be overstated.
Bad Website Design
All your hard work, investments, and time can will get destroyed by bad website design. Chasing customers away that won’t come back is a death knell to many businesses. Few customers will tolerate a bad website, and you don’t want to get limited to the ones who will.
If you want to improve your technical SEO and website design, contact us.
