By Nick Brown

We’ve come a long way since the early days of the internet, in regard to different web design trends. Yesterday’s dos are today’s don’ts and nobody knows for sure what the future will bring.

But what we know for certain are web design turn-offs and things virtually no one likes to see on the internet of today. This is a highly competitive place, and you don’t want to risk anything by having an off-putting design of your website. What you want is to provide users with delightful surfing experience. It’s the only way you can hope to retain each hard-won customer and eventually make your company profitable.

That’s why, in this article, we’re going to give you 5 things you simply need to avoid if you don’t want users to leave your website in frustration.

It Takes Ages for the Website to Load

This was maybe ok in the 1990s when we were all using dial-up connections to surf the web, but in today’s day and age, it’s almost a sacrilege to have a slow website. No user likes to see when the page takes ages to load. In fact, today’s users are much more likely to try somewhere else, if a search result they click on sits on a blank page loading for three seconds or more.

There’s also a report by BBC from 2018 which illustrates nicely just how important it is to load your pages fast: every additional second that people have to wait for the page to load will cost you around 10% of your users. To further emphasize just how huge this is in internet terms, this would mean that by the time the first 10 seconds are up, you’d lose all your website traffic.

If you think this is an exaggeration on BBC’s part, Google also did their fair share of research with similar results. More than half of mobile users will be gone if a site takes more than three seconds to load, and if it takes six seconds you can bid farewell to all of them.

Too Many Popups Will Kill Off Your Traffic

How many times have you visited a webpage and it felt almost impossible to get to the actual content you were looking for because of all those annoying popups? We know the answer to this question is ’too many’, so it’s every webmaster’s job not to let this happen.

Losing users and customers because of the popups makes you think if they actually defeat their own purpose. On the one hand, some designers and advertises swear that popups lead to improved conversion rates. On the other hand, the statistics also show that 70% of people find them annoying.

If you want to be absolutely sure that your web page makes the best out of both of these researches, consult reliable professionals from Orion Creative, for instance. That way you’ll be certain that you’re actually utilizing popups and not overly irritating anyone. If the popups are done badly, they don’t respond to the user’s needs, or there’s just too many of them at once – you’re bound to lose traffic. At the same time, if done properly, you can actually gain profit.

Not Catering for Mobile Users

It may be strange to see that there are still many mobile-unfriendly websites out there, but it’s a sad reality that we’re all unfortunately witnessing.

The fact that it’s still not uncommon to see sites where items are misaligned, overlapping, formatted strangely, and so on is almost disheartening. Not only does this mean that you’re not following the latest trends that say that more than 50% of all internet traffic happens on mobile phones, but you’re also neglecting the fact that a low-quality mobile site will almost definitely affect your SEO performance negatively.

Going All-In On Animation

Sure, everyone likes to see a professionally-designed and trendy website, and there are few things that scream this louder than smooth transitions, transforms, and appearances, or well-deployed animation. All these things can be pretty vital and make a huge difference in comparison to the otherwise static and sterile layout.

But what you want to avoid at all costs is too much animation. Just like with popups, you need to use them sparingly. In any other way, they’re a distraction that simply no one wants or will tolerate – rest assured that the users and customers will jump ship if they get heavily distracted by your aesthetic presentation.

Autoplay Media

This was always a big no-no, and one of those irritating web design faux pas things that you have to avoid at all costs.

We’re not saying that there aren’t ways to do this tastefully, but it’s much more frequent than you’ll see (and hear) something which irritates and annoys you so hard that you’ll want to click that ’close’ button as fast as you can.

A word to the wise: don’t incorporate autoplay media to your pages unless you’re absolutely positive that it won’t interfere with the user’s ability to concentrate on the content she or he came for in the first place.

Wrapping Up

Essentially, all these 5 examples we’ve discussed in this article stem from bad UX design and lack of research. If you want to have a website that helps you attract more users and also retain the old ones at the same time, you’ll definitely try to do your best to avoid these 5 problems and issues. Ideally, you want to anticipate the user’s needs and treat both their time and attention with utmost respect.

By Nick Brown

“Nick is a blogger and a marketing expert currently engaged in projects for Media Gurus, an Australian business, and marketing resource. He is an aspiring street artist and does Audio/Video editing as a hobby.”