7 Common Web Design Mistakes

Updated March 4, 2025

Too Many Voices

Design is a topic that everyone can have an opinion on. While you might not have everyone in the office giving you an opinion on how your website’s About Us page is worded, you can bet if you change the design of the page you’ll get a bunch of people telling you it looks “great” or “ugly”…  So here are some common web design mistakes we often see and how to avoid them.

Designated Designer

Colors – Starting with the simple things; colors. Some colors, yellow for example, are difficult for some people to see. You need to make sure that your site is attractive, but it still needs to be accessible to as many people as possible. Make sure the colors you’ve chosen are easy to see for everyone.

Load time – While this might not strictly speaking be a ‘design’ issue, people won’t see your pretty pages if they take too long to load. Attention spans are getting shorter so load times need to get faster. Site speed is a major ranking factor on most search engines, so make sure your site is loading as quickly as it can.

Mobile optimized – Now google are indexing mobile and desktop sites separately you have even less excuse than before to ignore your mobile site. By now if your site isn’t mobile optimized you should be ashamed!

Web Page Etiquette

Logical flow – Every business should have a USP, and there are many factors that you would say set your business apart from your competition, but having a crazy website design is not one of them. People are visiting your website to find information, and it’s your job to make that as simple as possible. Don’t over design your site to a point where it becomes difficult to use.

Menus – As mentioned above, people are on your site to find information. Menus are a big part of that, especially on mobile devices where you’re working with a smaller screen. Having easy to use menus that lead visitors to the places they want to go are a bit part of a successful website design.

Search bar – While they might seem outdated we think that search bars should always be included at the top or the bottom with other navigation buttons. A search bar is especially useful on mobile sites where messing around with menus might be tricky. Also, as an aside, you can track what users search for in Google Analytics, which will help you improve your site in the future.

Enough empty space? – All this talk has been about your site, features, menus and so on… but don’t forget to leave some space. If your site is too crowded it becomes difficult to read, or to separate information. Leaving ‘white space’ is important as it helps visitors break up information and generally makes a site look less busy.

7 Web Design Mistakes Steps

If you follow the steps detailed above, you should have an attractive, easy-to-use website, that keeps leads flowing in. What design headaches do you have? We’d love to hear about them.