Confused about picking a design for your website that feels contemporary? Check out our blog on website design trends that you should avoid in 2023.

Website design companies are expected to build websites that are contemporary and up-to-date. Various popular website trends and web design principles are followed by website developers while designing a website. Some of these designs might be trendy but useless when it comes to the value they had to your website. Businesses should avoid using such designs on their websites.

This article is a guide to take you through the designs you should avoid in 2023 to keep your website from looking outdated.

Web Design Trends to Avoid in 2023

1. Using Stock Images

Businesses often refer to stock images for adding media to their websites. Stock images provide photos of various kinds to their users for different purposes. Users can use these photos for personal work or buy their license for commercial use.

Stock images are not recommended because they are costly when bought of deficient quality and free.

As a business, you should opt for professional photography for your website. This will offer you the freedom to create the photo you want and provide you with professional quality.

2. Infinite Scrolling

Infinite scrolling might sound like an interesting feature for a website but is one of the worst choices of design for your website. With infinite scrolling, you lose the chance to add footer data. A website footer is one of the factors used by Google to rank your website. Using infinite scrolling harms this ranking as there is no footer. Low website ranking is a straight-up loss for a business.

So, instead of creating an infinite well of scrolling on your website, you should ask creative agencies to go with the traditional footer design. This will help your website get ranked higher in Google searches. 

3. Excessive Images With Minimal Text

Various website owners believe that adding a lot of images will make the website look attractive. Even though a picture speaks a thousand words, for a website this is a loss. 

Google uses the text of your website to find whether your website is relevant to a user’s search. Google cannot check images. Thus, having a good amount of text is necessary for your website. If you want to include more media on your website, you should try to balance it with appropriate amounts of text.

4. Unrefined Landing Pages

A landing page is a web page where a user is taken when he clicks on your website’s link in the search results of a search engine. Users prefer a landing page that contains information that is specific to what they asked for. 

If someone wants information about a specific topic, they must land on a web page dedicated entirely to that topic. If your landing page contains content on topics other than what is asked, users might have to navigate here and there and find the relevant information themselves. This is annoying to a lot of users. So it can harm your website’s impression on a user’s mind. 

Therefore, you should always have a landing page that contains information specific to a topic.

5. Annoying Pop-ups

Pop-ups are one of the most annoying features you can add to your website to push your visitors away. We all hate being interrupted while performing a task. When the user is surfing through your content to find some useful information, if you throw a pop-up on their face, they will most probably get irritated. None of them would focus on the content of the popup and close right away. 

So pop-ups are useless and annoying. You should avoid adding popup features to your website to improve your website user interface.

6. Autoplay

Autoplay lets you play a video on your website automatically when the user reaches it. Though it might sound like a convenience for the user, it is not. The user does not need to watch the video. Maybe they are just interested in reading the text content of your website. Auto-playing videos are like forcing them to watch a media just because you have put it there. Thus, you should avoid autoplay videos and let the user decide whether they want to watch the video or not.

7. Too Many Ads

Showing many ads might improve your chance of getting paid per click but on the other hand, it seriously harms the opinion of your website in the user’s mind. 

No user wants to land on a website that contains ads more than its content. Seeing a large number of advertisements, many users might close your website even before reaching your content. 

Therefore you should ask branding agencies to avoid putting a lot of necessary advertisements on your website’s pages.

8. Multiple Fonts 

It is recommended that there is uniformity in the design of your website. If elements of your website feel like they’re out of place, it will harm your website’s appearance. One of the most out of the place things is using different fonts throughout the web pages.

When you read the same sentence in different font styles, you can form different opinions for each, even though the content is the same. 

Therefore, it becomes important to choose the right font style for your website.

9. Complex Website Navigation

Users prefer websites that have simple navigations over those with complex ones. While surfing your website, it would help your user if your website has features like a sitemap, menu, etc. that help in navigation. 

Therefore you should avoid using designs that limit the accessibility of users and give them a hard time navigating through your website. You should use a drop-down menu and site maps so that users can go to different parts of your website quickly.

10. A Website Not Optimized For Mobile

Nowadays most of the traffic on your site is due to mobile devices. If your website is not optimized for use on mobiles then you are causing inconvenience to your visitors and losing them. Mobile websites get scaled easily for small screens. They support portrait views and do not get distorted on mobile browsers.

Therefore to attract visitors to your website, you should make sure it is also designed for mobiles.

11. HTTP Connections

Many websites use HTTP connections to transfer data between the browser and the server. The issue with HTTP connections is that they are insecure. Data is transferred without any encryption. Hackers can easily intervene with this data. This compromises security and thus, websites with HTTP-only connections are avoided by many users.

Website owners should use HTTPS connection for data transfer, especially for sensitive data like logins. HTTPS protocol is more secure and improves the reliability of your website.

12. Not Using SEO-optimized Content 

Search engine optimization helps a website to get ranked higher in search results. Search engines use content, image meta descriptions, keywords, etc. to rank websites in searches. If your website gets a higher ranking, it will improve the traffic through your website. Hence, every website should keep search engine optimization in mind while designing their websites. 

13. Poor CTAs

Calls-To-Action plays an important role on your websites by motivating visitors to perform actions like signing up, CTAs improve the productivity of your website by increasing interaction with your customers. Poor CTAs means your website is not well designed. Website owners should ensure that their website contains string CTAs containing strong verbs, language, and appearance that catches users’ attention. Tell them a good reason to act. Users can also be targeted for missing out. A website with a good CTA is a must in the present times to increase the productivity of a business.

14. Poor Distribution of Whitespace

If a website seems packed with a lot of information and text, it might overwhelm the visitors. Visitors are looking for content that they can understand and absorb quickly. Something with a lot of text will look like a lot of work to read. Thus, they may pick another website with similar but less text. 

Thus, websites should avoid designs where content looks dense and crammed. Content should be scattered throughout the webpage with an optimal amount of whitespace.

Conclusion

Having a good website design is crucial for successful e-commerce. Good website design attracts visitors and lures them to use your products and services. There are a lot of poor website designs that website owners put on their sites. These mistakes cost them a lot of visitors. Visitors tend to choose fast, easy-to-navigate, precise, and attractive websites. Using designs that don’t work well in these aspects reduces the interest of visitors in your website. So, every business should avoid the mistakes we have listed in this article and ensure their website offers the best results.

Author Bio:

Brijesh Jakharia co-founded SPINX Digital in 2005 and takes great pride in crafting web and mobile marketing solutions for mid-market businesses to enterprises. Marketing is his passion, and the thrill to build a brand from the ground up has helped him craft successful brand stories for world-class clients. While not at work, he loves to spend his time on research and reading digital content stories.