A negative website experience can be a huge letdown for potential customers. In my case of holiday shopping, if I had a frustrating experience with one online store, I’d simply find the product in a competing store and purchase it there. And if I’m doing that, I guarantee almost every other online shopper out there is doing the same.

Don’t let a negative website experience chase away your customers. Stay on top of design trends and avoid these common mistakes to set your site up for success for the next holiday season.

Failing to Use Responsive Design

Responsive design enables your website to be viewed properly on any device, which is extremely important considering that the majority of online searches are now done on mobile and tablet devices. In addition to being a frustration for your users, Google also now penalizes non-responsive sites in mobile searches, so failing to use this type of design will affect your SEO and rankings as well.

A Slow Website

If a website takes more than a few seconds to load on whatever device I’m using, I’m out. As previously discussed, people are impatient, and when they want information they want it now. The online world is very competitive and if users have trouble accessing information in one place, they’ll simply find it in another. Google itself aims for pages to load in under half a second, and they recommend a 2 second threshold for ecommerce sites.

Outdated Design

If your website looks like it was last updated in the 90’s, it will be a big turn off for your visitors. In my experience, if I come across an outdated website it makes me wonder “if their website is so old and unresponsive, how are they going to process my ecommerce order and ship it to me in an efficient way?”  An up-to-date, functional website can help build trust with users, as an efficient front-end usually assumes an efficient back-end as well.

Check out our list of design trends that are top of mind for 2017, and see if you can incorporate any into your website redesign plans.

Broken Links

It’s really annoying to click a link for a product or landing page and instead get a “page not found” message staring back at you. Your Crawl Errors section of Google Search Console can give you a list of all site and URL errors so that you can stay on top of them and avoid these errors throughout your site. We recommend going through them at least on a monthly basis, as this will mean any errors found can be consistently acted upon.

Too Many Options

Less is more. People don’t want to visit a website and be overwhelmed with a ton of different navigation options. Instead, be thoughtful and intentional about using fewer navigation links, and this will help you to “point” your visitors in the direction you want them to go (ie: to a certain landing page or other page waiting with a call to action).

Constantly Reviewing Analytics

The best way to measure your website’s success is to review your website analytics. Changes in your analytics data can quickly point out issues with your site setup or with some of your landing pages. The best online experiences come from websites who are always running tests with their site design, measuring results, and then making further optimizations…and repeating that whole process over and over to ensure they are constantly improving.

These are just a few of the most common website design traps that a lot of businesses fall into. How many are you guilty of? Our introductory guide to Growth Driven Design can help you find out why you’re not getting top results from your current site design, and what new models you can use going forward. Download a free copy and don’t be trapped by poor website design!