Website design can be both exciting and daunting even for the most seasoned marketer. A website is a combination of several little details such as the colour scheme, writing style and the photography. Despite how small these details may seem, you can easily stunt the traffic and conversions of your website by making wrong choices.
Factors that impact web users most
Load time
The Load time of your website plays a primary role especially when it comes to increasing traffic to your website and helping maintain visitors on your pages. The mean load time for a website is 2.078 seconds and 40% of web users will leave a page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. This is evident in the comparison between the growth rate of traffic and the page load time. For instance, websites that take less than one second to load experience a traffic growth rate of 4.6% whereas those that take between 1 and 2 seconds to load have a growth rate of 2.0%. Websites that take between 3 and 4 seconds to load experience a growth rate of 0.3% more than 4 seconds to load experience negative growth rate.
On the other hand, faster load time reduces the bounce rates. If a website takes 4 seconds to load, it has a 100% increase in bounce rate while websites that take eight seconds or more have a bounce rate of 150%.
Colour scheme
Your choice of colour affects the performance of your website. Websites that have dark colour schemes including blue, green and purple have a 2% growth while sites that have light colour schemes such as red, yellow and orange have an average of 1.3% growth.
Layout
Most web users look at web pages in an F-shaped reading pattern. A horizontally designed website encourages z-shaped pattern. Most visitors usually concentrate on the first two paragraphs. Additionally, most visitors only scan bullet points and the first few words of subheadings and paragraphs. 70% of web users will look at a list with bullet points and only 55% of web users look at lists without bullet points.
Trust
The design of a website can also determine whether users trust the company. 94% of internet users cite design as one of the reasons why they don’t trust some websites. You can improve your site by including links to relevant media coverage. Showcase your social media followers and display logos of some prominent clients. On the other hand, you should avoid pre-made templates and stock photography.
HTML5
Only 27% of websites use HTML5 but they account for 495 of all page views. Therefore, it is easy to double your site page views by simply switching to HTML5. HTML5 sites have a 2.3% growth and all other sites only enjoy a 1% growth.
Therefore, it is vital to know the right choices and their consequences. Learning the impact of various parts of website design can help you prioritise, optimise and plan your website properly.
