7 Reasons Why Your Website Design is Killing Your Branding
Is your website undermining your efforts to promote your brand? The sad reality is that even with the most effective marketing in the world, your lead generation won’t mean much if your traffic hates the time they spend navigating your pages.
Ensuring a great first impression is everything when it comes to your website. As much as 94% of first impressions on websites are design-related. Additionally, 38% of users will only engage with your website if the layout is attractive.
These figures can be particularly concerning for SMEs or businesses that operate with silos between marketers and web developers. You must develop a unified approach to your website to ensure that your marketing and branding efforts have the desired impact.
Factors like a lack of communication, negligence, fears over cost, and insufficient resources can all push brands into the pitfall of undermining their overall branding with their website design. With this in mind, let’s explore seven key reasons why your website may be killing your branding and how to overcome them:
Table of Contents
1. You’re Copying Your Rivals
Yes, it’s quick and easy, but you should never look to plagiarise the website designs of your competitors. This can have severe consequences for both your bounceback rates and your SEO.
While picking your favourite competitor's design and adapting it to your brand can be tempting, you risk blending in rather than standing out.
Emulating your competitors' websites can make it difficult for leads to determine who to choose from. Given that 81% of retail shoppers conduct research online before making a purchase, operating a website that’s too similar to a rival will immediately drop your chances of being picked to 50/50 and is more likely to make them suspicious of taking any further action with either brand.
Another pitfall that commands attention is Google’s views on plagiarism online. If Google or any other search engine determines that your content has been ‘scraped’ from another website, it could categorise your website as spam and punish you by lowering your SERPs.
There’s certainly nothing wrong with looking at your competitors for inspiration. Looking at what elements work and what do not can ensure that your website design is the best for your industry. By taking some elements from your rivals and actively improving them with a more creative and original twist, you can ensure your website is better optimised for organic search and usability.
This can improve your chances of being chosen ahead of your competitors for research-savvy consumers comparing the market.
2. Your Website isn’t Memorable Enough
Another issue many brands can fall victim to is the fear of taking the wrong steps to build a memorable website for leads.
Building a functional website that fits in with the rest of the industry can be enough for more risk-averse businesses. However, this approach means you’ll fail to offer a memorable on-site experience for your customers.
The average visitor to your site will be heavily drawn to your pages' visual and superficial aspects before they reach your content's business end or call-to-action (CTA).
Regardless of your brand voice and consistency, research suggests that a site's design and visual aspects heavily influence consumer trust in your brand, and investing in the design of your pages can be an essential factor in preventing bouncebacks.
While some online brands like Ling’s Cars have famously created a memorable experience by creating eccentric dotcom boom-inspired websites that are hard to forget, you must build memorable pages that complement your brand and how you want to project it to consumers.
It’s also worth avoiding complexity in favour of a design, layout, font, and colour scheme that complements your branding. It helps make your business instantly recognisable to anybody navigating your website. If your leads don’t know whose pages they visit within a second of arriving, you’re doing things wrong.
One example of a website that’s undoubtedly memorable is Revolut, which has converted its homepage into an opportunity to showcase the best of its branding. Featuring an unmissable tagline for a heading, Revolut’s homepage encompasses dynamic elements to command attention while underlining the challenger bank’s best features.
You don’t need to hire costly web designers to make a functional website more memorable. Despite its smaller size, Trivago has successfully blended usability and branding to make its bright, colourful logo unmissable. It immediately presents visitors with its price comparison service without any further action required.
The website also lets its service talk when using images to add character. Adding tourist destinations can inspire more on-site bookings while improving the overall aesthetics.
3. You Haven’t Built Your Website for Your Target Audience
If you’re not using what you know about your audience to shape your website, you’re already setting yourself up for failure.
Tracking user behaviour as a part of your website performance is imperative, and tools like Google Analytics can be perfect for offering actionable insights into how your audience uses your site.
By leveraging this data, you can set your pages up to complement your website design perfectly and refine it to align with the perceived preferences of your audience and their on-site behaviour.
Catering more directly to your target audience can play a significant part in the design process of your website. Factors such as the average age of your audience, gender, location, lifestyle, values, interests, and even political affiliation can help guide how to design your pages and the tone of voice to use on-site.
Again, insights from Google Analytics and HubSpot Analytics can help you to listen in on your target audience and build a comprehensive customer profile.
It’s also worth incorporating A/B and multivariate testing into your website design strategy to fine-tune your on-page elements and drive more insight into the preferences of your leads.
Much like A/B testing, multivariate analysis swaps different on-page elements around to explore in greater depth what visitors are most receptive to and what’s causing the minor engagement.
4. You’re Neglecting Your UX
All too many times, brands decide to build a website that works and then just assume it will always carry on working for visitors.
If you fail to analyse your website’s metrics, you fail your leads. To ensure that your marketing efforts are operational, you must continually measure the success of your strategy and act decisively if improvements are needed.
According to Forrester Research, a robust user experience (UX) can grow conversion rates by nearly 400%. But how can you incorporate UX design into your pages?
Operating a good UX is built on maintaining a level of usability, efficiency, and good housekeeping. This means constantly checking platforms like Google Analytics to ensure your links are working and making quick adjustments if anything doesn’t run as smoothly.
If specific pages receive a higher volume of bouncebacks or carts are getting abandoned at the same stage every time, look at the problem pages and check that all the elements are working as they should.
Data suggests that one in three consumers would stop using a business if they had just one negative user experience with them, and you should be working relentlessly to ensure that every aspect of your site is working as it should.
Fortunately, the emergence of artificial intelligence is actively helping to clean up the UX of websites long before issues are reported. Confident website builders, like Hostinger, offer AI-powered page and blog generators and artificial intelligence heatmaps to ensure that all content and elements are as functional as possible throughout the design process.
5. Nobody can Navigate Through Your Pages
The golden rule of website design is that visitors should be able to find what they’re looking for in less than three clicks. You must create a menu system where everyone can navigate from one side of your site to the other with as little friction as possible.
However, some designers can find this core facet of UX tricky to implement. If your business model encompasses multiple industry niches, creating a dropdown menu that’s easy to navigate can become convoluted.
While it’s unlikely that your business is set to offer as many diverse products as Amazon, it’s worth looking to leading eCommerce stores to see how their navigation can remain simple and smooth despite the vast range of products and services on offer.
Amazon’s menu operates entirely within a box on the left-hand side of the page. Different options are compressed into categories, and users can click to expand their chosen departments or features to see a more extensive, focused menu.
By looking to emulate this level of functionality, you can mitigate the pain points of your leads and build a website that’s easy to navigate in a frictionless manner.
6. You Haven’t Made Room for Social Proofing
Has a customer shared a positive review or product testimonial recently? Good! Ensure the world can see the great things being said about your brand.
We’re living in the age of social proof. If you’re not utilising the positive sentiment shared by your customers, you’re missing out on a golden opportunity to build brand advocacy and trust.
About 75% of consumers search for reviews and testimonials before buying something, and 69% will feel optimistic about a business if a review describes a positive experience.
Every business should be tricky at work to ensure that all customers have a positive experience with the brand. This will help to build trust through strong Google reviews and Trustpilot performance. However, adding testimonials to your website is an excellent way of ensuring organic search traffic can see how great your brand is for themselves.
Moz knows something about good SEO and has used the bottom of its homepage to share its recent accolades and reputable testimonials from critical clients.
Positioning positive reviews and testimonials at the foot of your homepage is an excellent tactic because if a lead has scrolled to the bottom, they’ve likely read your content, CTAs, and USPs and are leaning towards making a purchase decision. Adding social proof can help to push them in the right direction at the right time.
7. Your Site isn’t Mobile-Friendly
The world is becoming increasingly mobile. 95.8% of users access the internet on mobile phones, while 62.9% use laptops or desktops. In the first quarter of 2023, global internet users spent 56.8% of their online time on mobile phones, representing an increase over the 54.7% of users during the fourth quarter of 2021.
This indicates that mobile browser usage is only growing and that your brand should look to cater to smartphones just as much as it does for desktop browsers.
You can adapt your websites to cater more towards mobile users in many ways. Many SEO analytical tools offer mobile responsiveness tests so designers can check all pages and elements across various mobile browser emulators.
You should also ensure that no bulky images could slow down page loading times. As a rule of thumb, always compress your website images before adding them to your pages. Platforms like Optimizilla can help quickly lower the size of images without damaging the overall quality.
Key Takeaways
- Like the Sagrada Família in Barcelona, excellent website architecture is never finished. You should constantly audit your pages and ensure visitors enjoy a seamless experience as they navigate through your pages.
- Platforms like Google Analytics can be an excellent tool for studying how users interact with your pages and adjusting to possible emerging pain points before they begin to turn away your leads.
- When done correctly, your website will complement your branding and serve as a relic of the convenience, care, and complementary user experience you offer. If you suspect your pages are killing your branding, you should take action immediately before it’s too late.
Killing your Branding? (FAQs)
How does an old website design affect my brand?
An obsolete design might indicate that your brand needs to catch up, thus irrelevant. This may drive away potential clients because they associate outdated visuals with poor quality or lack of innovation.
Why is colour consistency important in website branding?
Using different colours throughout your site can confuse visitors and dilute their understanding of who you are as a company. They won’t know what to think, so they will likely not think anything about your brand.
How do slow loading times affect my brand perception?
Slow speeds frustrate people; they don’t care why loading takes forever and just want to leave. And when they do go, be assured that inefficiency has become synonymous with (your) business name.
Why is mobile responsiveness crucial for branding?
A responsive design enables users on different devices to have similar experiences when accessing a website, which shows professionalism for any organisation. When a company lacks this feature on its site, mobile users will feel disrespected and even ignored by such companies, hence viewing them as less serious about their needs than others, leading to a decrease in the percentage of the audience visiting the websites represented by those brands.
What does cluttered design do to brand messaging?
Super busy pages scare people off but fail at communicating what (your) business stands for… or anything else! You could put up anything, and no one would understand where you’re coming from or going with this whole thing called life, let alone the products/services offered under that name.
How does poor navigation break trust in a brand?
If someone can’t find their way around your website easily, then doubt about their competence would arise more, so reliability levels may drop too dramatically, putting all services provided under scrutiny and ultimately resulting in loss of customer trust, thus affecting overall sales volume realised per month against set targets by top management team members responsible for overseeing achievement these objectives with specific reference to this company size.
What is the relationship between inconsistent typography and brand recognition?
Using different fonts on various parts of a web page can make text look disjointed, which makes it harder for visitors to create an accurate image of what (your) organisation does or stands for in general terms… let alone specific details about any given product line offered by that particular brand represented through such communication materials.
Why are high-quality images important when it comes to brand perception?
Authenticity drops significantly when low-resolution stock photos are used as main visuals throughout someone’s site. We know there must be some truth behind everything, but if everything looks fake, nothing would appear natural! So why should anyone believe anything said here? Exactly – no reason, affecting how consumers perceive individual products and their overall worth.
How does a lack of white space impact brand sophistication?
Not using enough blank areas within layout elements could make the design feel overcrowded, lowering perceived quality levels and leading customers to think less carefully about whether having anything more to do with such brands.
Why does outdated content affect brand relevance?
The world is rapidly changing, and businesses must change or risk becoming irrelevant. However, when people come across stale information on your site, they may think you have stopped growing/evolving as a company, which could mean one thing only – going out of business soon – hence losing touch with current trends and needs among the target audience segments over time.
