Good or bad, your website design leaves no one indifferent. When done correctly, it can create significant returns from bringing in more revenue and strengthening your brand reputation. It’s important to understand the impact of web design since businesses of any size can reap the benefits of a great design at any point in time. Let’s look at five ways web design can significantly contribute to your business’ success.
1. Sets the right first impression
Design isn’t just about visual appeal. It’s about making the consumer relate to your product and engage with your content. In addition, your website acts as your storefront and should be a reflection of your business. An unprofessional website could compromise your credibility with your prospects and lead them to think that your business is outdated.
According to Google, it takes 50 milliseconds (that’s 0.05 seconds) for users to form a first impression about your website. If they have a poor first impression, they’ll bounce right away and leave for a competitor’s page. With the amount of time and effort put into bringing traffic to your website, you wouldn’t want users to leave without having the chance to explore what you have to offer.
2. Improves SEO & mobile experience
A well-thought-out web design can make your business rank higher in search engines, from mobile responsive design to loading quality content on your website.
Google measures a website by the quality of user experience and ranks it according to Core Web Vitals. The metrics that make up Core Web Vitals focus on three aspects of the user experience and their respective thresholds:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): the time it takes for a page’s content to load. To provide a good user experience, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading.
- First Input Delay (FID): the time it takes for a page to become interactive. To provide a good user experience, pages should have a FID of 100 milliseconds or less.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): measures visual stability or the amount of unexpected layout shift of visual content on a page. To provide a good user experience, pages should maintain a CLS of 0.1 or less.
Google measures and reports on performance based on these three metrics – which all can relate back to your website design. All of these factors can be controlled and improved by taking a user-centered design approach.
To do so, you should put the needs of your user first. You have to think about how to make your website more user-friendly. Elements to consider include how easy it is to navigate or view your website from mobile devices, how fast a page takes to load content, how quickly images appear or if your users’ needs are being met in an efficient time. These are all things Google is looking for in their top ranking pages and can be capitalized on by using design to improve these user experience aspects.
3. Makes you stand out from competitors
In a fierce marketplace where business entry barriers are less and less rigid and where you can have access to companies around the world with the simple click of a mouse, how do you stand out from your competitors? The answer is: with good design.
Design helps your customers perceive your brand more favourably. According to a report by Adobe, 59% of respondents will choose a product or service over its competitors if it has been well designed. This trend is even more pronounced with younger generations such as Millennials (66%) and Gen Z (65%).
In the same Adobe report, 46% of people responded, “I will not purchase from a brand if its website or mobile experience is poorly designed,” and 50% admitted to judging companies based on their marketing materials’ design quality. Design has a great effect on consumer purchasing behaviour.
When choosing a good design for your business, keep in mind that it includes everything from social media, advertisements, websites, interfaces, emails, etc.… All these elements work together hand in hand to make your brand easy to engage and memorable while providing value to the customer.
4. Builds strong consumer trust
Before purchasing from your business, customers need to be able to trust you. Building trust isn’t an easy task. Instead, it’s a slow and steady climb. However, a climb is worth the effort as trust builds loyalty in the long term and increases your customer’s lifetime value and repeat purchases, which in turn reflects on your revenues.
An efficient way to build trust is through design. A group of researchers in the United Kingdom conducted a study to evaluate the reason for mistrust of online health websites. Fifteen participants were asked to search the Internet for health information that was relevant to them. They were then asked to discuss their first impressions of the websites they visited. Of all the factors mentioned for rejecting or distrusting a website, 94% were design-related; and only 6% were content-related.
Specific design problems that led to rejection or mistrust were:
- Inappropriate name for the website
- Complex, busy layout
- Lack of navigation aids
- Boring web design, especially in terms of colour use
- Pop-up advertisements
- Slow introductions to a site (splash pages, slow-loading flash introductions, etc.)
- Small print
- Too much text
- Corporate look and feel
- Poor search facilities/indexes
Clearly, the look and feel of your website have a great impact on strengthening trust between your clients and your business.
5. Generates revenue & higher conversions
Design should be viewed as an asset to your brand’s success. It might be costly at first to redesign a website, but the benefits that you reap in the long term are much more valuable. Design keeps your users engaged across all the touchpoints on their customer journey, from initial awareness and research to conversion and retention. Every business should use design to optimize those touchpoints for conversions.
Another recent study from Accenture found that “’Design-alert’ businesses achieve a 125% return on their design-related investments.” Business design has proved to be a sound investment—one that has a direct bearing on an organization’s financial returns and therefore should not be considered a cost, but a means to bring in more revenue.
Bottom line
Web design isn’t just about pretty visuals. There are many reasons to invest in good web design. It’s a way through which your business can perform better on SEO and build a trusting relationship with customers. And trust goes a long way in driving customer interactions and purchasing behaviours which ultimately boosts revenue. Emphasizing good design in the development of websites and customer experiences should be a priority.
At Le Site, we are here to help you build from scratch or make incremental improvements to your website designs. Our CX designers and developers work in sync to create unparalleled cross-platform experiences. Feel free to schedule a call with a design expert to improve your website web design.