In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, website performance and user experience are paramount. Every decision you make about content delivery, design, and functionality can either draw users in or drive them away. From homepage carousels that dilute your message to hidden testimonials and poorly placed social media icons, these common pitfalls can sabotage your website’s success. This article explores why these outdated website design practices are harming your website’s performance and offers actionable solutions to help you create a more engaging, user-friendly, and search-optimized online presence.
Homepage Carousels, “Everything is Important!”
Content prioritization is important, and a rotating image carousel, above-the-fold achieves the exact opposite. Your audience expects to move quickly. Rarely do they sit and wait for content to appear; the search for information is on their own terms. It’s like driving on the freeway and you see a digital billboard. Lots of ads queued up, switching every 10-15 seconds. You glance up and keep driving. The same approach applies with homepage carousels. No one waits around. User engagement dramatically drops off after the first slide. According to research from Notre Dame, 84% of clicks are on the first slide, meaning the remaining slides receive just 16% of the total clicks combined.
Recommendation: Prioritize. Pick your most important campaign and run with it. Drive this home with a solid ATF (above-the-fold) section on you homepage. Then leverage a content calendar and rotate your hero campaign as priorities shift throughout the year. Splash yourself with ice water if you consider a carousel.
Testimonial Page, “Hoarding The Wealth”
Another popular trend in website design from 20 years ago, like the homepage carousel is organizing all of your customer testimonials on a single page. Your testimonials or social proof is one of the most valuable assets on your website. You spent time and energy collecting each of these, don’t hide them on a single page. Very few clients are going to go to your testimonial page. Instead, take those valuable nuggets and spread them throughout your entire website. Think of the various decision points, where customer may be teetering between your call-to-action (e.g., making a purchase, making a donation, contacting you). This is where you add the reinforcements.
Recommendation: Share the love. Place your social proof throughout your website, focusing on placement around critical decision points or conversion events for viewers. No hoarding!
Social Icons, “Exit Ramps For Your Website”
A common and unintentional practice are social icons placed in prominent places on your website; one of the fastest ways to rid yourself of visitors. Social media icons are not necessarily bad, they are actually helpful for your digital presence, but where they’re placed on your website is critical. Many websites make the mistake of placing these icons in the main navigation bar or near the top of their website, it’s essentially putting an exit door right next to the entrance.
Recommendation: Push those social icons down the page, never above-the-fold, preferably in the footer.
PDFs, “undermining Accessibility, SEO, and User Experience, all at once”
Recommendation: If your content is important enough to be on the web, invest the time and create a webpage to house the information.
PDFs offer you a very quick way to get information up on the web. Unfortunately, it is one of the worst ways to share information on the Internet. Here are just a few reasons:
PDFs Are Not ADA Compliant:
One important issue with PDFs is that they are not inherently accessible to people with disabilities. By default, PDFs are not optimized for screen readers, which can make it difficult for visually impaired individuals to access the content. Additionally, PDFs do not offer the option to include ALT text for images, a crucial feature that provides descriptions for users who rely on assistive technology.
PDFs Hurt Your Search Performance:
Google and other search engines are unable to effectively crawl the content within PDFs. This means if you’re relying on PDFs to share important information on your public website, that content is essentially invisible to search engines. As a result, information may not appear in search results, significantly reducing your visibility and diminishing your website’s overall performance. To ensure your content is searchable and accessible, it’s better to use HTML or other web-friendly formats that search engines can index.
PDFs Are Not Mobile-Friendly:
Although they will technically adjust to fit the screen size of your device, they are not truly responsive. Unlike modern web pages, PDFs don’t adapt to different screen sizes and layouts, forcing users to pinch, zoom, and scroll awkwardly to navigate and find the information they need.
Recommendation: If your content is important enough to be on the web, invest the time and create a webpage to house the information.
Unoptimized Images, “The Easiest Way to Break Your Website”
Bloated imagery, such as images taken directly from your phone, a stock website, or a professional photographer, often come in large file sizes. When unoptimized images are used on a website, several negative consequences can occur:
- Slower Load Times: Unoptimized images are often larger in file size, which significantly increases the time it takes for web pages to load. This can lead to a poor user experience, particularly for users with slower internet connections.
- Higher Bounce Rates: When a website takes too long to load, visitors are more likely to leave before the page finishes loading. This increases the bounce rate, reducing user engagement and negatively affecting conversion rates.
- Poor SEO Performance: Slow-loading pages due to unoptimized images can hurt your site’s search engine rankings. Search engines like Google prioritize faster-loading sites in their algorithms, so unoptimized images can result in lower visibility in search results.
Recommendation: Prep your images before you upload them to your website.
Your website’s success hinges on its ability to deliver a seamless, user-friendly experience while keeping visitors engaged. Outdated website design practices like homepage carousels, hidden testimonials, poorly placed social icons, reliance on PDFs, and unoptimized images all negatively impact your site. By implementing the recommended fixes you will enhance your website’s functionality, boost engagement, and create a more streamlined experience for your users.
