Web Design Mistakes That Are Harmful To SEO

Sometimes, you spend a lot of time designing your website by adjusting themes and adding stunning images with the hope to get visitors. But you do not get any visitors. You may wonder about the problem.

The reason behind this drop in traffic and ranking may be the website design itself. Certain website design mistakes can hurt your SEO. The good thing is you can avoid these mistakes pretty easily.

In this article, we will discuss top website design mistakes that can be harmful to your SEO.

Poor website navigation

Many websites leave their visitors with frustration due to their messy navigation. If your visitors have no idea what to do next after landing on your website, you have got to make your website navigation more logical for them.

Slow website speed

Adding too many design elements and annotations can make your website look good, but what good will all this be if your page fails to load due to slow speed? People want pages to open at a lightning-fast speed after they click or tap on their links. Making the wait for the page to load can also make them hate your webpage. If you want your visitors to stay on your page, make sure that it loads in no more than 2-3 seconds.

The webpage that is not friendly to mobile

The number of smartphone users has long surpassed that of desktop users. The fact of the matter is that almost every person in metropolitan areas, towns, and villages is going to have a smartphone in a few years. With this high number of smartphone users, you are going to have to make sure that your website opens quickly and responds well to a smartphone screen. If you are to choose between creating a website for smartphone screens and doing the same for desktop displays, you may want to pick the first option due to a larger audience using smartphones. Remember, the visitor will five times more likely to leave your page if it is not friendly to their mobile screen.

Missing H1 tags

Search engines determine what your website is about by looking at the H1 tags that you use on your webpages. If you do not have placed H1 tags on your pages, your website will drop in SERPs. You, however, need to keep it in mind that placing H1 tags is not all about optimizing your website for search engines. A page with properly placed H1 tags will look good to users too.

Large images and media files

You may want to place large images in your webpages due to details that they have to offer, but it can slow down your website when it comes to its loading speed. You may want to check your website by analyzing it through Google’s PageSpeed Insights Test.

Text in images

Placing text in the center of the image looks cool, but it can result in a significant SEO disadvantage. In most cases, you will not be able to use H1 tags while creating a title that appears over a background image.