Are you losing customers because of a poorly-built site? Regardless of how professional your company is, a poorly-built website can lose you many new customers.

In a world where attractive design matters, how your web site looks can affect your business success. Your website may be the first thing that your visitor sees and this can influence their decision to use your services.

We typically do things online. Even if it’s only just preliminary research, we will typically turn to our mobile phone and go visit a site before taking the next step.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s position. How does your web site appear to online users? Does it invite them to come and explore things further, or does it make them hesitant and unsure about where to go next?

What web visitors see “above the fold” (i.e. what you first see on your screen) is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your web visitors’ thoughts and their decision to proceed with you.

Can WordPress Fix Poor Web Design?

Let’s take a look at some key design problems that can affect your web site’s results:

Site Design Issues

Common design issues that can impact your visitor’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Poor color combinations affect your results. This also applies to text and background color. There are ways to specify web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to make sure that the colors you want to use will display consistently across different systems. If in doubt, consult a web design professional.
• Design Elements – Pages that contain visually uninteresting, outdated and just plain hard to read fonts can easily turn visitors off your site. Visitors can also be affected by design inconsistencies or overpowering use of design elements.
• Layout – The way you structure your pages can impact the way visitors navigate around your site. Layout considerations also include how your navigational items, links, and other useful objects.
• Responsiveness – As information is now accessed through a range of devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be responsive. If your web pages do not resize automatically to work on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you will lose business opportunities.

Web Site Functionality Issues

Common website functionality issues can include:

• Too many errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where hyperlinks don’t work, videos don’t play and images are missing. Subpar functionality is not acceptable, especially when your goal is to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your organization. It’s vitally important therefore, to ensure that all your links, videos, and images are running smoothly all the time. In some cases, these problems are caused by things such as your web hosting, or you may not even be aware of it, but it’s important to ensure that you’re consistently proactive and that all issues are repaired as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your website offers users certain functionalities, then make sure that these features are not limited. For example, if you would like to sell goods or services on your site, make sure that you provide visitors with full e-commerce features that allow them to select and add items to a shopping cart, apply coupons, complete purchases with a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, invoices, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor User Experience

Typically, where potential buyers suffer the most due to a poorly-built web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

Anything less than a great user experience can leave a bad taste in visitors’ mouths and lead them to share their disappointment across social media, forums, review sites, commenting sections, etc ….

Here are just some common issues that can create a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your website needs to be user-friendly. Information about your products and services should be easy to find. Your web visitors want user-friendly features and they want to find things quickly and with no hassle. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable information to your site (e.g. forms and documents), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your files.
• Organized – If your website isn’t organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential buyers but also existing clients. Features like descriptive URLs, product and service categories and clean sections where topic-related content can be easily found can provide users with an enjoyable user experience.
• Eye-Catching Site – Customers stay longer on sites that are user friendly, easy to navigate, and that provide them with eye-catching options. This requires striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling website copy that engages your visitors. For example, draw attention to links that point to product pages by inserting eye-catching images alongside well-written product descriptions. This can be very effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also help you get more sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your site is to provide interactive features that engage customers, like allowing them to leave comments, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive help desk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to be able to navigate quickly around your website and access your information without waiting around for content to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Trustworthy Website – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to ensure that users feel comfortable interacting with you online. To reassure your potential customers that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your website includes legal pages such as a business contact page, privacy statement, terms and conditions of usage, security information, financial disclaimers, etc.

(Site design problems)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business success online. If your web site is poorly constructed, you run the risk of not only losing potential clients but also your existing clients as well.

Now … what if you have arrived found this post because you currently have an existing site with design issues that may be affecting your business?

First, be aware that getting a website overhaul can take some time and can also be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of website you currently have, especially if it requires rewriting code.

If you are researching the process of getting a new website developed or redesigning an existing site, then we suggest that you consider using the WordPress web management platform.

(WordPress can help improve your website results!)

We currently share a lot more articles about the benefits and advantages of WordPress on this site, but here are just a few of the things to keep in mind about why you should consider WordPress:

Themes – Customizable Web Design

WP themes are unique web site design templates that let you easily modify the look of your website in minutes.

There are thousands of great-looking themes available that can be downloaded. Many themes are either free, or are extremely affordable, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WordPress Themes)

Most themes built for WordPress nowadays are responsive and provide site owners with flexible and customizable options for changing your site’s design such as color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, layouts and more. Themes are just part of what makes WordPress such a great tool for helping you create a design for your website that ultimately works for your business.

Learn about WP themes here:

• Understanding WordPress Themes

Plugins – Modular Features

Another compelling reason to choose WordPress is that WordPress provides you with expandable features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WP plugins, like themes, integrate with your site to provide you with virtually unlimited new functionality.

Earlier we discussed areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly built web site could lose you money.

Plugins can help you overcome these issues and limitations quite inexpensively. If there is a feature that needs to be added to your site, just install a WP plugin that will do what you need your website to do.

Need a plugin that will notify you immediately about any issues on your website such as hyperlinks not working, videos not playing, images that aren’t displaying or even tell you if your whole site has gone down? No problems … there are plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can correct these immediately!

Need a plugin that will turn your website into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce system? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive WP plugins that will help you sell goods or services on your site and provide your users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to easily select and add products to a cart, apply coupons, purchase with credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, invoices and confirmations, etc.

And just like themes, there are thousands of great plugins for WordPress that you can download and install on your site free of charge, or that are extremely well priced and will save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars on the cost of web development.

(WP Plugins)

You can learn more about plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your Blog With Plugins

WordPress – An Immediate Website User Experience

In addition to being able to correct problems caused by a poorly-designed website, WordPress can also help you provide web visitors with a great user experience.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and functional plugins that allow visitors to contact, engage and interact with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WordPress themes, plugins and great content, you can create a very rich user experience that will keep people coming back to your website.

As we’ve previously stated, consumers nowadays do research online before they make purchasing decisions. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, they will not return and simply move on to another business that does provide them with a better website.

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you expand your business business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please see other posts we have published on this site.

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