14 Website Design Best Practices to Follow in 2023

Easier is better. One of the web design best practices is to make communication between your company and client simple and flawless. No one wants to make a call or fill in the form with multiple questions. Customers want immediate answers and control over the conversation. Therefore chatbots exist. This is a chat interface programmed in such a way that a website visitor experiences a conversation in a human-like manner. Visitors get the answers immediately, so they can quickly get the information they wanted to figure out. you may choose between simple chatbots (that respond to pre-written words and commands) and advanced chatbots (with the help of AI they can understand basic language and communication). 

Obviously, corporations will be able to save money on recruiting managers and focus their efforts elsewhere as a result of this. By way of example, a couple of the tasks that the AI chatbot accomplishes are:

• Enhance navigation and make it more entertaining, mostly like taking a guided tour across the website, as virtual assistants who will converse with visitors to the sites.
• Obtain and analyze the data from individuals who engage with the chatbot in order to enhance offerings and advertising strategy.
• They handle sales inquiries focused on frequently asked questions and specific responses. This will enable the collection of leads that can be transformed based on the data supplied.

#4 Simple Navigation

What are you most likely to do if you can’t figure it out on an apparel website? You will close it and open another one. Simple navigation is one of the determining factors of visitors’ interaction on your website. Simple headings divided into logical categories usually followed by the dropdown menus below are the prerequisite of a pleasant user experience. Having scanned the main page of the website, a visitor should immediately understand where the category they were looking for is located. To organize the information on your website in the best possible way, try on the shoes of its visitor. 

 It needs to take no more than three clicks to reach your solution. The navigation and icons on the website must be straightforward and apparent so that visitors can discover it easily. There are several options for accomplishing the above:

• Make Use of Simple Language. 

In your navigation, basic phrases like "Home" and "Contact& Support" are more efficient. Employ unique terms only if you want to stand out, as this may cause confusion among your visitors.

• Use Breadcrumbs. 

Breadcrumbs keep track of a user's location on a website and show it. These make it simple for a user to go back to a prior page by retracing their steps. Breadcrumbs can be particularly beneficial for e-commerce websites.

• Customize Your Navigation. 

If you have a website with minimal content, you may just require a few search functions. Further sophisticated navigation may be required with heavy material. If there is a lot of content accessible, informative giant menus provide a direct roadmap for your consumers to get the information they require.

#5 Prioritized SEO

Search engine optimization stands for increasing both: the quality and quantity of website traffic. Knowing what people are searching for and in what words brings you endless possibilities to bring them solutions that your website offers. Most people have the wrong assumption that social media and paid advertising bring the lion’s share of traffic. Though the greater part of online traffic is driven by search engines. Only 2,8% of people searching online in the US click on paid advertisements. And while advertisements require continuous funding, SEO can increase your traffic over time without any additional costs. 

The following are a few extra techniques for improving your site's search engine optimization:

• Suitable Title Tag (H1)

A page's headline or a post's title will be the header tag. Because search engines look for keywords in H1 tags, assure your title contains the most important details.

• Reasonable Title and Meta-description Tags

Appropriate title tags and meta descriptions assist search engines in comprehending and indexing a page's material.

• Use Descriptive URLs that are Brief and Easy to Remember

Keywords are frequently included in simple URLs that are accessible by people (rather than a large string of integers).

#6 Color Scheme

Visitors make a judgment about your website in less than a minute. And a large part of their first impression belongs to the choice of colors you have made. The color scheme will represent your brand and evoke associations in customers’ cognition. Think about Coca-Cola, for example. The color combination that comes to your mind is red and white. You won’t be surprised to know that red is the main color of their website too.

By the way, designers recommend choosing from 1 to 4 colors, including base, accent, and neutral.

#7 Speed Optimization

More than 40% of visitors will leave the website that takes more than 3 seconds to download. The more complex the page is, the longer the loading time the website visitors will experience. Your website should fly. With Google's 2021 algorithm upgrade, speed is now more vital than ever for SEO. The above reflects consumers' increased demands for loading speed, as 53% of visitors will quit a website that takes longer than three seconds to open. The days of patiently waiting for loading screens are gone forever. The best way to ensure your website functions at great speed is by hiring the right developers who will take care of file compression, prefetching, removing unused CSS and JS, video and image optimization, etc. What is more, the services Lighthouse and Google PageSpeed Insights may be used to evaluate your website system performance. If you are interested in the matter, we have an article about it.

#8 Text Minimization

It’s funny to mention it in a blog, but loads of text make people bored. Your website content should be readable, targeted, and aesthetically put. Opening a web page, people don’t absorb the whole text, they scan it, jumping from one paragraph to another. The study held by Nielsen Norman Group shows that people read from 20% to 28% of the website information. So, make sure you get straight to the point in your content with the right font size and lines between 50–60 characters.

#9 Usage of Human Faces

People are perceiving the information about the world by looking for something familiar and referring to their previous experience. When someone sees a face, they automatically get triggered to feel something or to emphasize with that person, so faces can add a human touch to your website. Also, faces can be used to visualize emotions people may have while using your product. Emotional expressions are the same in every culture. People around the world understand what it feels like to laugh or cry or worry — and what that means. Sometimes, a single photo may be much clearer and more convincing than a few sentences of descriptive text.

#10 Design Optimization for Mobile Devices

The majority of mobile owners use their devices to surf the Internet at least once a day. As a result, Google has been recently trying hard to ensure that all websites are mobile-friendly. In 2018, they officially announced going for mobile-first indexing. Top Google results always belong to mobile-friendly websites, while others are penalized with a 50%+ traffic reduction. Therefore using auto-adjusts website content and text that is easily readable on a smartphone are definitely among the best practices for website design.

#11 Continuous split testing

Split testing is also known as bucket testing or A/B testing means the comparison of two variants of the webpage. How does it work? Different segments of website visitors are shown different versions of the webpage in order to figure out which of them drives more conversions. Gratefully to A/B testing business owners can find visitor pain points, reduce bounce rate, and favorably redesign their website.

#12 Clear CTA

Does your website fall into the category of websites that CTA can’t be spotted within three seconds? Bad news then. Effective CTA button is one of the pillars of conversions. People won’t get back to your homepage to convert, they want a big, visible, and colorful CTA button in front of their eyes.

#13 Show, don’t tell

This is the best practice of web design of e-commerce websites. People are unlikely to read long descriptions of leather red/black/white designer bags, for instance. They want to see it in red/black/white color and choose which one appeals to them. No need for lengthy descriptions.

#14 Don’t offer too many choices

Website visitors don’t need to see ten different options on your homepage. The more you offer, the more time they need for thinking. This notion is frequently called “analysis paralysis”. That’s the process when an individual or a group of people start overanalyzing the situation which in most cases leads to paralyzing the action. Showing one product is enough, in the beginning, they will discover more themselves.

Building a nice-looking website is cool. But every person with a marketing savvy will tell you for sure — it’s not enough to turn website visitors into customers. Implement those website practices into your business to ensure bringing joy and satisfaction for your customers and make them stay longer on your website. If you need help to implement them — we are ready to help! Feel free to contact us.