7 Website Design Mistakes That Can Hurt Your Online Sales

People who design websites should be trained in digital marketing. This is because websites, however pleasing their design may be, are often a tool to achieve a marketing goal of more leads and sales.

While you may not have the time to earn a marketing degree, you should at least familiarize yourself with a few basic principles of how online marketing works. It can be a good idea, for example, to look for basic mistakes from a marketing perspective, and learn to avoid them. Even if you decide to hire an eCommerce SEO company, it’s important to know the basics of optimization and conversions so you can work well with an outside agency. Knowledge is power!

Not Appreciating the Finer Points of Using Images

Many web designers remember reading that it’s important to use images to make their pages more attractive, and use random stock images to spruce them up. Studies reveal, however, that people can get so used to stock images that they no longer pay attention to them.

Businesses have found that replacing stock images with custom images of their actual company and their employees or properties can help improve conversions. Custom images give people the feeling of having seen the company at work.

There are other points to keep in mind, as well.

• Your custom images can be more effective when they contain representations or information about the product they are intended to promote.

• You should give your visitors the option to expand your images to view them at twice the size. It makes your images more trustworthy.

• If your image shows a person, your visitors will direct their gaze at the point where the person in the image looks. If you have people in your image, you should make use of their gaze to direct your visitors’ eyes to an image of the product.

Not Making the Call-to-Action Stand Out

Important elements of your webpage like the call-to-action need to be a color that is noticeably different from the theme of the page. If they are the same color as several other elements on the page, your visitors’ eyes won’t distinguish them from those other elements. The brain quickly gets used to repeated stimuli and tunes them out. If you want your visitors to pay attention to the call-to-action, you need to make sure that it looks different.

Not Making Use of the Bandwagon Effect

When people see lots of other people act a certain way, they are often inspired to follow their lead. Jumping on the bandwagon is a kind of behavior that people are programmed for. It’s important to cater to the bandwagon effect when you design a website. You need to make sure that you remind your visitors how many customers you’ve served, and make user reviews a central part of your website experience.

There is research that proves that more than 90 percent of online shoppers look for reviews before they buy, and conversions improve nearly threefold when user reviews are displayed on a website.

Making Big, Sudden Changes to Your Website’s Design

When the big social media companies make significant changes to their user interfaces, usually, they face a backlash. Users bitterly complain about how nothing seems right, and wish the old interface would come back. There’s a lesson to learn from their experience.

If you want to make big changes to your website or app, you need to make sure to introduce those changes incrementally, with only a little bit going live each week. If you make major changes all at once, your users will not be pleased.

Also, consider the SEO impact. If you redesign your website correctly, you may improve rankings. If you don’t, you could end up with a huge SEO issue on your hands and a major loss of traffic. Be sure to avoid major SEO mishaps in the redesign process.

Not Giving Your Visitors a Mid-Level Product Choice

It’s important to always give your visitors a minimum of three pricing levels of whatever product or service you offer. When people have only two options, one high-priced, and one cheap, they simply choose one of the two. When there is a choice available in the middle, however, more people who would have otherwise chosen the low-end product, go with it. Middle-ground choices tend to bring in a better return on investment than products on the low end, and also to attract more customers.

Not Offering Vsitors a Default Option

When you offer your visitors a number of choices and pre-select one as the default choice, chances are that your visitors will let the default selection stay. Whatever choices of product or plan that you may offer, you want to think carefully about the option that you select by default. Most of your visitors will go with what you choose for them. When you neglect to offer them a pre-selection, you give up an important conversion tool.

Not Showing Your Visitors That Buying Is Free of Risk

Three out of four people who add a product to their cart abandon the cart. In other words, three out of four people respond to every sales cue along the way to the checkout page but change their minds at the last moment. Studies reveal that trust is an important reason why they change their minds. It’s important to offer reassurances to customers every step of the way.

• Prominently display trust seals by known authorities like the BBB, an antivirus company and an SSL provider to demonstrate that your website is safe to do business with. One study indicates that close to half of all visitors to e-commerce websites will not trust a site that does not display trust seals.

• Make the credit card section of a payment form appear especially secure by displaying seals, and plenty of fine print.

• Make it clear that visitors can reverse their decision to buy at any point by clearly offering an easy return policy, and the ability to delete an item from the cart.

The tweaks suggested above aren’t complicated to implement. Yet, they can truly help you boost conversions. It’s important to avoid these design mistakes, and create webpages that visitors trust and feel confident buying from.