Top 7 Web Design Mistakes That Hurt Your SEO and How to Avoid Them

Your website is like your business’s digital storefront, representing your brand to the world. Yet even the most beautifully designed sites face challenges in visibility because they don’t follow best practices concerning SEO. A poorly designed website will drive away both users and search engines, ultimately undermining your business’s online success.

The following article identifies seven of the most common web design mistakes that hurt SEO, along with actionable solutions to help you improve your ranking and user experience. You will find that these tips become helpful if you want the best results from both web design and SEO.

1. Slowness of Page Loading

The pace at which a website loads has gradually become an important aspect in the arena of SEO. Search engines like Google have begun giving great prominence to page load times for search rankings. In fact, Google’s algorithm already incorporated page load speed as a ranking factor, and slow-loading websites are often punished in the form of poor ranking and reduced traffic.

Why Page Load Speed Matters?

A slow website results in a poor user experience. Very often, users are in a rush, and if a page takes time to load, they may leave even before it loads completely. This increases the bounce rate, hence signaling to Google that your site isn’t providing a good user experience.

To put it into perspective, researchers estimate that 40% of users will abandon a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. If your website is slow, both your users and the search engines will suffer from reduced engagement and rankings.

How to Fix Slow Page Load Speed for Your Website

Following are some useful ways to improve loading time on your website:

Identify performance issues: Use services such as Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to analyze your site’s performance and get actionable recommendations for improvements.

• Compress images: TinyPNG or ImageOptim both greatly reduce file sizes without affecting quality, which can help speed up loading.

• Minify: Removing redundant spaces and comments in code in CSS, JavaScript, and HTML reduces the size of the files and thus helps with page loading.
  
• Allow browser caching: This allows browsers to store certain files locally. This means users will not need to reload some of those files from your website each time they load a web page.
  
• Use the power of a content delivery network (CDN): These distribute various pieces of content across numerous servers all over the world. This results in lower latency and faster page load times, no matter where in the world those users are located.

2. Poor Responsiveness on Mobile

With modern trends, more than 50% of web traffic comes from mobile devices. Therefore, having a responsive website is no longer an option—it’s an unwritten rule. If your website does not work correctly on either smartphones or tablets, then it will surely miss a great percentage of customers and perform poorly in SEO.

How to Check for Mobile Responsiveness

The best way to confirm the friendly status of a website towards mobile phones is the Google Mobile-Friendly Test. You will get a clear analysis of how your site works on mobile phones.

How to Optimize Mobile Responsiveness for Your Website

To ensure that your website offers an excellent mobile user experience, here are some possible ways to achieve that:

• Apply responsive design: Use responsive design methodology through which the website will automatically adjust itself to different screen sizes and resolutions.
  
• Make touch elements easy to use: Buttons, menus, and other interactive elements should easily be clickable on small screens.
  
• Avoid horizontal scrolling: Your website should be optimized so users will not have to scroll sideways to view content.

3. Lack or Poor Heading Structure

Headings are important both for search engine optimization and usability. They give your content structure, clear for both search engines and users, which also presents a hierarchy of information in the content. Poor or missing heading structure can confuse users, and it might also lead to inaccuracies when search engines index the content.

Why Are Headings Important for SEO?

Search engines use headings to understand the structure and relevance of the content on your page. Proper usage of headings will pave the way for search engines to crawl and index your content more effectively and, hence, provide a greater chance of ranking high in the search results.

Best Practices for Headings

• Use only one H1 tag per page: This tag should define the main topic of the page.
• Use clear hierarchy: Use H2 tags for main sections, use H3 tags for subsections, etc. This will give a very clear view of the structure to users and also to search engines.
• Use keywords in your headings where relevant: This will give a hint to search engines what your content is about—especially if you use your target keywords in your headings.

How to Fix Heading Structure Errors

• Audit your headings using Screaming Frog and make sure your headings are structured correctly.
• Correct any heading structure that should contain just one H1 tag per page, with H2 and H3 tags in logical order.

4. Publishing Images with No Alt Text

Search engines can’t “see” images like a person could. They must rely on alt text to know what the image is about. If you are not writing alt text for your images, you might be passing up an opportunity that could further enhance your site’s SEO and make it more usable for visually impaired users.

Why is Alt Text Important to SEO?

Alt text is best used to describe to search engines what’s on a page. It also describes the image for a user utilizing a screen reader. Well-thought-out alt text benefits both accessibility and SEO by allowing your content to surface in relevant image search results.

Best Practices for Alt Text

• Describe the image concisely: Use short phrases that are descriptive enough to relate to the content of the image.
• Include target keywords in alt text, where possible: Using keywords within alt text is a good practice but keep in mind not to stuff too many keywords. Too generic descriptions will not cut it either. Bad examples of alt text descriptions include naming conventions like “image123.jpg” or “photo1,” as they do not add anything to either search engines or users.

How to Add Alt Text

• Make sure to scan your site for pages with missing alt text using Ahrefs or SEMrush.
• Add alt text to all the pictures on your website. If you have a lot of images, make sure each one has its unique description.

5. Navigation Not Intuitive

Friendly navigation is a must to have a good user experience. Users will leave your site in search of a competitor’s page if they are unable to find what they want faster. This means that it’s a signal to the search engine that the site is not friendly, hence affecting the ranking negatively.

How to Fix Navigation Issues

• Create a clean, intuitive menu: Make use of simple, clear categories with subcategories.
• Use internal linking to tie together related pages: This helps users find more content and enables search engines to spider your site more efficiently. Run broken link checkers regularly, using online tools like Broken Link Checker, to scan for dead links on your website.

6. Not Having HTTPS Encryption

HTTPS is important for a safe web and the protection of user data. Aside from security, HTTPS is also a ranking factor. Google labels any website that doesn’t have HTTPS as “not secure,” and this will keep visitors away from visiting and thus damage your credibility.

How to Implement HTTPS

• Get an SSL certificate. Most hosting providers offer SSL certificates that enable HTTPS on your website.
• Force HTTPS on every page: This means not only the homepage or checkout pages, but all pages of your website should be on HTTPS.

7. Too Much Use of Pop-ups and Interstitials

While effective, pop-ups and interstitials (retarget large ads or banners pitched for lead capture) also have negative implications for the SEO of your website if overused. These elements deteriorate the quality of the user experience and disturb page content. This may cause an increase in the bounce rate and a probable fall in ranking.

How to Solve Issues with Pop-ups

• Pop-ups are to be used judiciously. They could appear after a user has spent some time on the page or has scrolled down the page.
• Employ exit-intent pop-ups that pop up when an individual wants to leave the page. That is the last opportunity you will get to grab their interest.
• Make it easy to close pop-ups. They need not obstruct important content.

Conclusion

The design of a website itself plays an important role in SEO. A well-optimized website with good design assures superior user experience and will have more preference in search results. Not making common mistakes, as mentioned above, and following best practices will further improve the SEO of your website and enhance the user experience for better traffic and conversions.

Web design and search engine optimization are two significant factors that determine your online success. Regular auditing of performance and design issues, staying updated with SEO trends, and focusing on user experience will help make your website both search engine-friendly and visitor-friendly.

Agencies like Viranks specialize in ensuring that web design and SEO work together seamlessly to achieve optimal results for clients. This approach will ultimately drive better traffic and conversions.