In my previous article, I talked about optimizing tips which help in increasing website traffic. If you haven’t checked it out yet, then surely go through it at SEO hacks.
Today my main focus will be on web designing mistakes that can make an unexpected impact on any website. In this online world, your website is as precious as your business.
I would say, it has become the backbone of your business that supports the business for what it is.
Am I Right?
To be an asset to the business, a website needs to be perfect in all aspects whether its by design or functionality.
Here is the gems from Jared Spool
Intuitive design is how we give the user new superpowers.
So keep up with the users and providing them superpower should be your ultimate goal. So, you have to design your website in a way that can deliver the best of your business.
But when it comes to designing or redesigning your website, the designer requires to make sure to avoid little mistakes like the search ranking, as it can ruin the entire process. So, to obtain a strong SEO, one needs to be certain of the changes that are made.
As a site visitor, we always go parallely with the latest trends of web design and our expectations change every time. Everytime we need something compelling and interesting.
So, some basic web designing mistakes can cause certain risks from the SEO’s perspective. If these issues are ignored then there would be a possibility that Google will no longer view the website pages as authentic answers to relevant queries. Nobody wants that for sure! Ideally, you want a website that looks modern yet up to date with fresh designs that also bring an extensive SEO value.
In today’s article, I’m going to show some of the common web designing mistakes that can harm SEO and how you can avoid them with much ease? Just flow with it because knowing the potential omissions can help you not to make those kinds of mistakes again.
Forgetting about Mobile-Visitors
There are still many designers who don’t give a primary place to mobile devices, maybe they just forget about mobile visitors, Which is sad! I have seen many websites which look spectacular once opened on the desktop but more than worse on the smartphones.
As we all know, since 2015, Google has made a massive change to the way it ranks websites. So, If your site isn't fully optimized for mobile devices, you are likely to see a downfall in your ranking on Google searches.
However, you don’t need two different URLs to visit the same website. The viewer is a layman who will use only one URL to surf the site on every device. So, your website should adopt all screen sizes at all times
So, once your website is designed, test it several time in different screen sizes and browsers. If you don’t give it a test time, then you might miss some serious issues. Just make sure, your site is cross-compatible with all the major browsers and looks perfect on every device be it mobile or desktop or tablet and beyond.
Ineffectual Page Titles and URLs
If you have already hired a designer to design or redesign your website then don’t leave the essential things up to the developer or the person handling your content, such as a name of your page, titles, and URLs.
While designing a new site, you have to create a solid strategy or program that addresses/labels the keywords associated with the site page content. Because of the URL, title and meta description ought to relate the page and differentiate from all the pages. Add informative content on every page with related keywords.
There is a possibility that you already own a website and want to give a twist to it. So, either you start working on it on your own or hire another person to do the same for you. Just make sure that the person understands SEO too. Never give your site entirely in hands of someone who is new to the process.
There are some factors that can drop your ranking such as
- Changing the name of the images
- Changing URLs and titles that don’t provide SEO value
Not Prioritising the Page Speed
Page speed is one of the most important factors when it comes to SEO. It’s utterly important to optimize a website for the search engine and user experience.
Not giving much attention to the page loading speed can be the biggest mistake that might not only harm the search ranking but give a bad user experience. If your site is taking more than four seconds to load then you should definitely work on that.
Learn more about How speed affect your website.
Neil Patel once said in his post, The slower the site, the more likely a user is to bounce.
Here what you need to do, optimize assets (images, CSS, JS), leverage browser caching etc.
If you want to check your website page speed, Use Pingdom and GTmetrix
Analyse and Measure Performance
Once your website is live and people are engaging with the content, you need metrics to assess how your site is performing. Connecting Google analytics to your website can give you insights to take action towards increased customer traffic and retention.
However, make sure that the site designer has set up Google analytics properly. As I mentioned above, your website is like your business asset, so you should think of it as an investment. So, one of the crucial thing you should do is measure and analyze the success of your site.
You can easily track every metric you want to check via Google Analytics which is absolutely free. This cutting-edge tool gives all the information and enables you to set your goal
Conclusion:
Create an effective website design required a lot of consideration which isn’t as easy but important at the same time. So avoid these above mistakes to be a hero in the online world. Do tell us if I miss something major, Suggestions would highly be appreciated.
