Checklist: 5 Common DIY Website Design Mistakes to Avoid

There are many DIY website design mistakes to avoid, but these are the most common we see and suggest you work on if you want to see results.

Keep the reading order of your website logical and include content that is going to provide the most benefit to your visitors. Too much information on your website page is overwhelming and will cause potential customers to leave. Make sure you format your text correctly and separate it into paragraphs using titles. Make good use of white space to make sections clear.

Mobile traffic accounts for half of web traffic worldwide so it’s important to make sure your DIY website design works on mobile as well as desktop. Understand how mobile design works and treat it with as much importance as desktop design.

People aren’t always in a position to listen to audio or videos. For example, many people will visit websites while on public transport and waiting for medical appointments or even in the office. If it starts playing automatically, the likelihood is your website visitor will leave and not return. Yes, video and audio can be very useful marketing tools, but don’t set them to play automatically. Your website will have a much better user experience if the user is able to decide when they hit play.

Nobody wants to visit a website that takes its time to load its images properly. Online conversion rates drop by an average of 4% with each additional second of load time between 0-5 seconds. To decrease your website loading time, reduce your images file size.

Potential customers should be able to find what they’re looking for easily. Having more than 7 menu items starts to overcomplicate things and overwhelm your visitors. Try to narrow it down to your homepage, your most important service pages and your contact page. You can simplify your menu by using a dropdown to categorise multiple products or services.

When someone lands on your website, make it as easy as possible for them to find the information they’re looking for or to complete an action. They should be able to get to where they need to be in no more than 3 clicks after landing on your website.

This ties in to the previous point. Many websites make the mistake of overcomplicating the navigation which makes it confusing for potential customers. Keep the menu items to a minimum (no more than 7) and clearly signpost your most important pages. 

Using clear call-to-action buttons are essential for your website to be successful. Use clear instructions for your website visitors such as “sign up”, “contact us” or “request a quote”. Make it obvious what you want your visitors to do.

With Pagio Website Builder, you can easily check how your website looks on a mobile and make edits to the mobile design in the website editor. The trick with mobile design is to treat the mobile version of your website as a separate website. If something works on the desktop design but not mobile, simply replace it with something that does work.

Your contact information should be visible on every page. We recommend adding a contact form to the bottom of each page to make it as easy as possible for your customers to reach you.

A website is one of the best marketing tools for business – 67% of the buying journey is now done online. If you’re not using it in the right way, you’ll be losing potential leads, sales and revenue.