Web design represents an essential element to the online presence of a small business.
Having great web design fosters better engagement with a company’s target audience.
But how can a small business determine what design choices to make?
Let’s look at some relevant web design vitals to make a website more appealing for a target audience to achieve better engagement.
User Experience
The buzzword “user experience” (UX) has been used interchangeably with “graphic design” and “web design” for several years now.
User experience talks about how a user interacts with a website to make it an overall pleasing interaction. Web design with great user experience in mind generally makes links easy to follow with a user journey that moves from Point A to Point D with relevant conversion points along the way.
Small businesses should consider several web design vitals that enhance a user’s experience:
- Varied and multiple conversion points (click to call, form fill, chatbot, shopping cart)
- Reviews embedded in the site
- Easily navigable and categorized services and product pages
- Educational blog posts
- Links to social media
- Embedded videos
- Original imagery
- Intuitive main navigation bar
Mobile-Friendly
Not all small businesses cater to people performing research on a cellphone.
However, every website should be mobile-friendly, even if a company is B2B.
Google’s algorithm favors mobile-friendly sites with its mobile-first indexing in Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
B2B businesses generally receive more clicks from desktop computers because another business researches the company while at the office or work.
However, sometimes a business owner researches a vendor at home or on a business trip. What if the person is working from home? How about when a business owner is at a job site?
Companies need a mobile-friendly site no matter what.
Core Web Vitals
Google made a big deal about core web vitals in late 2020 and early 2021 when it announced that by the end of the summer of 2021, page speed would be a ranking factor for websites trying to show up higher in Google search engine results pages.
Core web design vitals are all about page speed.
In essence, Google has a development tool that allows anyone to measure the speed of a page. It then grades each page on three main factors to produce an overall score, graded 1 to 100.
The higher the score, the better the page speed.
- First contentful paint, or when the first visual element of a page loads.
- Time to interactive, or how long it takes for someone to be able to interact with a page.
- Largest contentful paint, or the time it takes for the largest visual element on a page to load.
The faster these elements load, the better the overall score.
Page load time matters when it comes to conversions.
- Consumers generally make a first impression about a website within the first five seconds of interacting with it.
- For every second a page doesn’t load, the odds of a conversion drop by 4.42 percent.
- Nearly 70% of web users say page speed times affect their willingness to buy from an online retailer.
First impressions make big impressions on people looking to engage with a company’s online presence.
How can a UX expert make a website load faster?
- Reduce image sizes with a plugin like Smush. The more memory an image takes on a website’s CMS, the longer it takes to load.
- Decrease page response times by limiting the amount of JavaScript that needs to frontload. JavaScript is a programming language that improves a website’s usability, but it can be unwieldy. Plugins for WordPress sites can switch up JavaScript to make it load last instead of first to improve page load times.
- Keep animations and moving images to a minimum. These often make a page slower to load.
Small businesses have a few options to deal with slow load times. They can add plugins to make loading more efficient or choose to completely redesign a website with less HTML or Java-heavy programming.
Clean & Simple
Web designers must keep the pages clean and simple by making some relevant choices.
- Does a website really need this element?
- How does this element actually help a user?
- If the design element goes away, will users miss it?
- Does this particular design element help a user reach a conversion goal faster?
UX designers can still create fantastic websites that stand out from the competition. Developing a website that speaks to a target audience should be the key to starting with any website design.
Web Design Services That Convert
Vervology can create a beautiful website for your small business that runs well, looks clean, and engages with your target audience.
Our team takes into account the best practices for modern web design vitals to give your business a great headquarters for your web presence.
Contact our team today, and we’ll talk.