11 Website Design Best Practices for 2022

Your website’s look and feel can influence how visitors perceive your brand. Often, it’s their first point of interaction with your business, so you want to make a good impression. That can be achieved with top-notch web design.

An effective web design scores high on form, aesthetics and functionality. If you want your website to succeed in 2022, better follow these website design best practices:

1. Consistent Branding

If you’ve developed a strong brand identity but failed to sustain it across all customer touchpoints—website included—you’re failing in the consistency department. Make sure to stay consistent with everything from your brand voice and value proposition to your website’s messaging and visual elements. It’s an excellent way to garner customers’ trust and loyalty.

2. Clean, Professional-Looking Design

Don’t play with your visitors’ cognitive load by bombarding them with a dizzying combination of visual elements. Instead, use a simple design so it’s easier to digest and make your content scannable. Here are some ways to do it:

• Make good use of white space

• Use a simple page layout

• Use a limited colour palette

• Focus on content

• Use bullet points, headings and images

• Make your paragraphs shorter

• Make sure each design element has a purpose

3. Simple, Intuitive Navigation

Organise your website in such a way that visitors will find it easy to locate specific pages or information. Put yourself in the visitors’ shoes. If you can’t easily spot the navigation menu or if you’re not too keen on seeing a surplus of dropdowns in one page, you’ll probably move away. Here are a few things to consider if you want to have simple, intuitive navigation:

• Make sure it doesn’t take visitors three clicks to reach their destination.

• The navigation and icons must be visible.

• Use breadcrumbs, which are text paths that indicate where a visitor is on the site.

• In the navigation, use simple phrases like ‘Home’ and ‘Contact Us.’

• Tailor your navigation to your content (i.e., limit your navigation links if you have limited content).

4. Effective Storytelling

Make a connection with your visitors by telling stories that humanise your brand. That emotional impact is what you want to go for with your brand storytelling. For this, you need to write inspiring content and share real-world experiences, create compelling videos and images and use a relatable web design. 

Be sure to talk more about your customers’ needs and problems. After all, these are the very reasons why they landed on your website.

5. Clear, Direct CTAs

Make sure you have powerful CTAs (calls-to-action) that are placed prominently on the website. CTAs drive visitors to convert, so you want to be sure your CTA buttons are visible and to the point.

6. Engaging Visuals

People on the internet typically have short attention spans. In fact, the mere sight of a page with text-heavy content can put some people off. This is why you should incorporate visual elements like images, videos and illustrations into your website. Sometimes the right visuals can tell a story better than lengthy paragraphs.

7. Fast Page Load Time

According to a study, 53% of visitors would abandon a page that takes more than three seconds to load. That’s quite alarming if you imagine all the potential conversions you may have lost. Note that a page with a lot of design components will load slower than one with less, and that’s why you want to make sure all your design elements serve a purpose. Moreover, Google now considers page load speed as a huge ranking factor. 

8. Optimised for Search Engines

Do you follow SEO (search engine optimisation) best practices? Make sure you do to rank high on search engine results pages. As mentioned earlier, page load speed is a big factor. So are using relevant keywords, appropriate header tags, descriptive URLs and more. With a sound SEO strategy, you can improve your ranking and attract more visitors. 

9. Mobile-First Design

The growing number of people that use mobile devices for internet traffic is reason to make your website mobile-friendly. Users interact differently on smartphones and tablets than on a desktop, so be sure to adjust your web design to ensure a consistent user experience.

10. Web Accessibility

Is your website accessible to people with auditory, cognitive, neurological, physical, speech and visual disabilities? Well, you’d certainly want your website to be available to everyone. Web accessibility also covers seniors with changing abilities, people with temporary limitations like a broken arm and more. Here are some ways to ensure your website is accessible:

• Make sure the structure of your content is organised

• Enable keyboard navigation

• Use contrasting colours

• Add descriptive alt text for images

• Use descriptive anchor text

11. Continuous Testing

With A/B testing, you’re comparing two versions of a page to see which one performs better in respect to your goal. You can conduct an A/B test for CTAs, headlines, even entire web pages. Ultimately, it can help you increase user engagement and conversion rates and reduce bounce rates.

Web design is fundamental to building a successful website. If you’re not following the web design best practices mentioned above, you could be missing out on potential gains for your business. Let our experienced web designers show you what a top-notch web design looks like. Schedule a consultation today!