9 Things That Ruin Your Website’s User Experience
The designing of a website should always be done keeping in view the perspective of users. It is one of the key UX principles that stands valid for all types of websites. If the user experience of any website isn’t up to the mark, then its chances of holding incoming attention are said to be very minimal. It is therefore advised to design websites carefully and avoid mistakes that are detrimental to their layout. There are a few specific things that often ruin the user experience of a website. These mistakes should be strictly avoided so that you can build a user-centric web design effectively.
In this blog, we will point out all those things that can negatively affect the user experience of your website. By keeping these things in mind, you will be able to design websites that are visually appealing having zero UI/UX errors. Let’s take a look at them in detail below.
Key Mistakes that Affect the Website’s User Experience
There are some specific things that often bring a negative impact on the user experience of a website. Due to not being overly prominent, they aren’t noticed by web designers most of the time. If you don’t want to ruin the experience of your website due to these mistakes, pay attention to the points defined below.
Disappearing Menus
Dropdown menus that disappear quickly often make people frustrated. This usually happens when your cursor quickly hovers in and out from the dropdown menu. Feature like this should be avoided in the web design, because people want to see the whole menu options briefly. If they keep seeing the menu disappearing frequently, they will become irritated and might leave the website quickly.
So, try to create dropdown menus for the website with better response time. These menus should also display sub-page names clearly, so that people can easily understand all the options defined in the menu.
Slow Loading Images
When a user comes on to a website, he generally wants to see everything on the landing page quickly. This is a normal experience that should be provided to the people who are visiting the website to get some information. If somehow, the images on the landing page will take time to load, then visitors will perceive it as a slow-loading website. This will create a bad impression that will force people to leave the website.
The problem of slow image loading can happen due to a variety of reasons. It is best recommended to find those fixes quickly, so that people can stay on your website for a brief period of time.
Irritating Pop-ups
Using pop-ups on the main landing page is a good strategy to showcase your core offerings to the visitors. But, if these pop-ups keep appearing on every page, then they become a bit irritating for the people. It is therefore recommended to strike a balance while using pop-ups on the website, because no one wants to see sudden promotional alerts on every page.
When using pop-ups on the website, make sure to design their banners creatively. You can use different shades of blue or any other color to design these banners, keeping in view the core theme and branding identity of your company.
Unwanted Advertisements
When a user comes on to a website, he wants to explore every required information smoothly. While scrolling down, if he sees any irrelevant advertisement displayed in the middle of the page, then his attention will be quickly distracted. It can build a negative impression of the website in his mind, which will force him to leave the website in frustration.
So, always try to keep your website clean and free from all sorts of irrelevant advertisements. They can not only distract the visitors’ attention but could also spoil your web content flow pretty badly.
Broken Links
If someone is coming to your website to find a specific set of information, make sure to facilitate him properly with the right info that can become useful for him. Creating your website with proper internal links is termed very important in this regard. Always make sure to check these links from time to time, so that it can be confirmed that they are working properly.
Websites with broken or invalid links always present a bad impression of the overall platform. It irritates people when they click on the broken links, as they don’t perform any kind of action. So, keep a practice of checking your links regularly, as that will allow you to fix broken links timely.
Non-responsive Layout
Due to the convenience and flexibility, many people prefer to use smartphones instead of desktops to surf the internet. This is the core reason why many websites are continuously witnessing surging traffic from mobile devices. To manage such traffic on your website, you need to create a responsive layout that can facilitate the mobile app user experience.
If your website is built with a non-responsive layout, then it will lose a huge chunk of traffic that is coming from the mobile channel. So, try to create a responsive layout for your website, as that will make your platform accessible to everyone.
Broken Search Bar
Another thing that presents a bad image of the website is a broken search bar. Whenever a user wants to search for anything on the website, he always heads over to the search bar. If that search bar is broken and unable to process queries, then people will immediately leave the website. They get the impression that the website does not have the relevant information, and hence it is pretty useless.
To avoid having such a situation, try to regularly check the working status of the search bar. It should always work properly as per the best practices. The time to process such requests should also be monitored smartly so that users won’t have to wait to see the required results.
Continuous Scrolling
It is generally noted that websites with precise and to-the-point information always score more conversions. People these days don’t want to waste time reading irrelevant content. They need crisp and accurate information, one that could drive their final decisions. If they have to scroll a lot more on the website to find specific information, they will certainly feel annoyed after some time.
This is a small but important point that is often ignored by web design companies. They need to understand that too much scrolling on the webpage only ruins the user experience. This thing should be precisely avoided by keeping the page small with to-the-point user-centric information.
Excessive Call to Actions
If you place too many call to actions on your website, it will confuse the visitors. This is one of those mistakes that often increases the bounce rate of a website. It makes the visitors confused about where they should click next because there are a lot of CTA banners being displayed on the website.
Ideally, a website should have one big call-to-action banner describing the trending promotion or discount offer. It makes the decision-making process simple, giving visitors exact knowledge of where they should go next to find the required information.
Final Words
That brings us to the end of this blog in which we have discussed different factors that ruin the user experience of a website. Having a clear understanding of these things is pretty important because they often break the overall impression of the platform. It is best recommended to avoid these mistakes by designing the website with the right UX strategy. These little mistakes can cause a lot of harm to your website, so always make sure to address them correctly by working with the correct layout optimization methods.