Are you missing out on customers because of a poorly-built website? A poorly-built website can lose you valuable business.

In a world where beautiful design sells, the design of your website can affect your business success. Your website is probably the first thing that a visitor sees and this could influence their purchasing decision.

Think about how you research services nowadays. Even if we’re only doing preliminary research, we will turn to our smart phone and go visit somebody’s web site first before buying products in-store or online.

Now, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. How does your web site appear to visitors? Does your site invite them to approach and explore things further, or does it make people hesitant and unsure about what to do next?

The way your website looks is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many other factors than can affect your visitors’ perceptions and their decision to ultimately buy from you.

Can WordPress Fix Bad Web Design?

Here are just a few key design issues that can affect your site’s results:

Website Design Problems

Some common design issues that can impact a visitor’s perception of your site include:

• Color – Poor color schemes can impact on your website’s results. This also applies to your choice of text and background color. There are ways to select web colors correctly and even safe web color tools you can use to ensure that the colors you want to use will display consistently across various mediums. If in doubt, consult a professional web designer.
• Design Elements – Web pages that contain boring, outdated or just plain ugly images can easily result in visitors quickly losing interest in away from your website. Visitors can also be affected by careless inconsistencies in your design elements or excessive use of design elements.
• Layout – How you structure your pages can impact how visitors interact with your site. Layout considerations also include where your navigation items, links, and other guiding elements like search boxes are placed, where menus are positioned on your site, content columns, etc ….
• Responsiveness – Since online information is now accessed through various devices with different-sized screens and browsers, it’s vitally important that the design of your website be fully responsive. If your website does not display well on all devices, browsers, and platforms, you could incur significant loss of customers.

Functionality Issues

Some of the most common website functionality issues include the following:

• Frequent errors – A huge turn-off for visitors is arriving on a page where some links don’t work, videos don’t play and graphics are missing. Frequent site errors are no longer acceptable for any website, especially when you are trying to come across professionally. Your website is a reflection of your company. It’s important therefore, to make sure that all your hyperlinks, videos, and graphics remain working at all times. In some cases, these problems may be caused by things such as your web hosting, or they may even be unbeknownst to you, but it’s important to make sure that remain proactive and that you get issues addressed as soon as possible.
• Feature limitations – If your site offers users specific functionalities, then make sure that these functionalities are not limited. For example, if you want to sell goods or services online, make sure that you provide users with full e-commerce functionality that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, enter discounts, pay using a credit card or PayPal, receive purchase notifications, receipts, and email confirmations, etc.

Poor Web User Experience

Typically, where your business suffers most noticeably due to a poorly-designed web site is in the realm of the “user experience”.

An unsatisfactory user experience can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths and lead them to share their frustrations across social media, forums, review sites, comments, etc ….

Here are some common problems that can lead to a poor user experience:

• User-Friendly – Your site must be easy to use and effortless to navigate. Your product information should be easy to find. Your customers want user-friendly features and they want to find what they are looking for as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. Make your content searchable and if you plan to add downloadable files to your site (e.g. spreadsheets), make sure that visitors are given instructions on how to download and access your information.
• Organized – If your site content isn’t well organized and user-friendly, you run the risk of losing not only potential customers but also current customers. Features such as search engine-friendly links, product and service categories and clearly-defined sections where topic-related content can be easily found will help provide visitors with a good experience.
• Eye-Catching Web Site – Customers want websites that are easy to use, well organized, and that are eye-catching and stimulating. This means striking a balance between attractive, modern web design and compelling content that engages your visitors. For example, highlight hyperlinks that point to your product pages with great images alongside well-written descriptions. This can be very effective and can help improve not just the user experience on your site, but can also lead to more sales and conversions.
• User Engagement Features – Another area that helps to improve user experience on your website is providing interactive features that engage customers, like the ability to comment on, share, like, download and recommend your content, interact with your staff via a responsive helpdesk, support forum, live chat, schedule appointments, make reservations, etc … You also want users to browse quickly through your website and access your data without waiting around for pages to load, so having your site optimized for page loading speed is important.
• Compliance – One of the most important and often ignored aspects of creating a great user experience is to make users feel comfortable doing business with you online. To reassure your visitors that your company is credible, trustworthy, secure and professional to deal with, make sure that your web site includes legal pages such as a business information page, privacy policy, terms of use, security information, FTC disclaimers, etc.

(Website design issues)

As you can see, there are many areas that can contribute to a poor user experience and impact your business results online. If your site is poorly designed, you run the serious risk of not only losing potential paying clients but also existing customers too.

Now … what if you have arrived here because you currently have an existing website with design problems that you feel are affecting your business?

First, understand that getting problems corrected on an existing website can take some time and can also be quite costly depending on the problem and what kind of site you currently have, especially if the work requires editing web code extensively.

If you are currently in the process of getting a new website built or redeveloping an existing website, then we suggest that you seriously consider building or redesigning your website with the WordPress web site publishing platform.

(WordPress can help you improve your website results!)

We currently share a lot more in-depth articles about WordPress on this site, but here are just some of the things to keep in mind about why you should seriously consider using WordPress:

WordPress – Flexible Website Design

WP themes are unique website design template systems that allow you to completely customize the look of your website in minutes.

There are literally thousands of professional looking themes for WordPress available that can be easily downloaded. Many themes are either freely available, or they are extremely well priced, saving you hundreds of dollars on the cost of web design.

(WP Themes)

Most themes designed for WordPress nowadays are fully responsive and provide site owners with customizable options for changing the design on your site like the color, template elements like headers, footers, menus and styles, page layouts and more. This is just one of the many things that make WordPress an ideal tool for helping you create a design for your website that works for your business.

You can learn about WordPress themes here:

• WP For Business – An Introduction To Themes

WordPress – Powerful Expansion

Another great reason to build your site using the WP website management software is that WordPress provides site owners with powerful features through add-on applications called “plugins.”

WordPress plugins, like WordPress themes, integrate easily with your website to provide you with almost unlimited new functionality.

Earlier in this article we talked about problems in areas like subpar functionality and feature limitations as part of the reason why a poorly constructed website can end up costing you customers.

Plugins can help you overcome these problems quite easily and inexpensively. If there is a functionality that needs to be in your site, just install a WordPress plugin that will get what you need done.

Want a plugin that will let you know about any problems with your website like hyperlinks not working, videos not streaming, pictures that are missing or even tell you if your whole site is down? No problems … there are WordPress plugins that can help you fix that, or let you know about issues so you can take immediate corrective action!

Want a plugin that will turn your site into an online store or provide you with a complete e-commerce solution? Again, no problem! There are several inexpensive plugins that will help you sell goods or services online and provide your customers with full e-commerce features that allow them to choose and add items to a shopping cart, enter coupons, complete purchases using credit card or PayPal, receive notifications, receipts and email confirmations, etc.

And just like WP themes, there are literally thousands of fantastic WordPress plugins that can be easily downloaded at $0 cost, or that can be purchased for a relatively inexpensive cost, once again, saving you thousands of dollars on the cost of website development.

(WordPress Plugins)

Learn more about WordPress plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins To Extend Your Web Site’s Capabilities

WordPress – An Interactive Web User Experience

In addition to being able to address issues caused by a poorly-designed website, WordPress can also help you create a great user experience for your visitors.

WordPress provides beautiful, professional and visually-exciting themes that cover all kinds of uses and applications and plugins that allow visitors to connect, engage and interact online with you. With the right combination of a WordPress-driven site, WP themes and plugins, plus great content, you can create a very a highly interactive and engaging user experience that will keep them returning to your site.

As stated earlier, consumers nowadays will do research online before they make a purchasing decision. If your website isn’t designed to provide your visitors with a rewarding user experience, they will simply move on to another business that does offer them a better website.

Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress platform please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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