Common Web Design Mistakes That Lose Customers

This is the most expensive and most frequent mistake. A visitor arrives, sees a clever headline about transforming realities and a photo of a smiling team, and five seconds later still does not know whether you sell software, training or consultancy. They leave, and in analytics that shows up as one more bounced visit.

The fix is unglamorous: state on the first screen what you do, for whom and what problem you solve, in your customer's words rather than your industry's. A literal headline converts better than a creative one almost every time, and it can be verified in two weeks.

• What you do, for whom and what you solve, on the first screen
• The customer's words, not the industry's jargon
• A literal headline before a clever one
• Test: show the homepage to an outsider for five seconds
• If they cannot say what you do, the headline is wrong

Most traffic to a local business site arrives from a phone, yet nearly every design is approved on a large screen. The result is menus that cover the content, buttons too close together for a finger, tables that force horizontal scrolling, and forms where the keyboard hides the field being filled in.

Designing for mobile first is not a fashion: it forces you to decide what is essential, because not everything fits. What survives that filter is usually also what works on desktop, and not the other way round.

• Test on a real phone, not just by resizing the browser
• Generous, well-separated tap targets
• No tables that force horizontal scrolling
• Forms with the right keyboard type per field
• Check one-handed and with the screen in sunlight

A carousel of full-size images, three externally loaded typefaces, a background video and four third-party scripts leave the homepage weighing several megabytes. On a desktop connection nobody notices; on 4G in motion, the visitor leaves before seeing the design that was paid for.

What removes the most weight is almost always images: serving them in modern formats, at the size they are actually displayed, and lazily below the fold. It is dull work and usually worth more than any sophisticated optimisation.

• Images in modern formats at their real display size
• Lazy loading for everything below the fold
• One or two typefaces at most, with a system fallback
• Review every third-party script: each one costs speed
• Measure on mobile and a slow network, where it hurts

A phone number that cannot be tapped, an address inside an image, a form with twelve mandatory fields and no indication of when anyone will reply. Each of those details costs enquiries, and together they turn a site that attracts visits into one that generates no business.

The short version: ask for the minimum needed to reply, offer more than one channel and say when you will answer. A three-field form with a line promising a reply within 24 hours converts far better than a complete one with no promise at all.

• A tappable phone number and email as text, not an image
• The minimum mandatory fields needed to reply
• State explicitly how quickly you will answer
• More than one channel: form, phone and email
• A visible confirmation on submit, not a blank page

Light grey on white looks elegant in the design presentation and is unreadable on a phone in sunlight or for anyone over fifty. The same goes for twelve-pixel text, form fields with no visible label and links distinguished only by colour.

Accessibility is not only a legal matter, though in Spain it is that too for certain sites: fixing it improves the experience for everyone. Sufficient contrast, legible text, a visible focus ring when navigating by keyboard and image descriptions cover most of the problem.

• Sufficient, verified contrast between text and background
• Body text legible without holding the phone closer
• Visible field labels, not just placeholder text
• A visible focus ring when navigating by keyboard
• Alt text on images that carry information

The mistake that encompasses all the others is redesigning on taste. The whole site is replaced because the old one "looked dated", without knowing which pages brought traffic, which converted or what the arriving visitors were looking for. Sometimes the redesign improves the aesthetics and worsens the numbers.

Before touching anything you should record where traffic comes from, which pages generate enquiries and what the ten search terms bringing visits are. And when migrating, redirect the old URLs: changing structure without redirects throws away ranking accumulated over years.

• Record traffic and conversions before starting the redesign
• Identify pages that already work and do not touch them blindly
• Redirect every changed URL with a 301
• Compare figures after two months, not after a week
• Change one thing at a time if you want to know what helped