Tips For Avoiding Website Homepage Design Mistakes

By: Christina Nguyen

It’s essential for all businesses to have a fully functioning, efficient, usable, informative, visually pleasing website to establish what their brand actually is and provide relevant business information. Your website is a crucial chunk of establishing your legitimacy and reliability. That’s why having a slow, outdated, drab website makes such a bad impression. 

Your website’s user experience (UX) is a part of your overall customer experience, and many customers will leave your business behind if that experience isn’t great. 86% of customers will pay more for a better customer experience. Since the first page they’ll usually land on is your homepage, it’s essential that this page is as perfect as you can make it. It doesn’t need to spark a reverberating “WOW,” but it should be easy and enjoyable to use.

Not every business knows how to make a functional and/or aesthetically pleasing homepage though. You’ve probably experienced a disappointing website or two yourself. If you can avoid these common UX mistakes, you’ll be putting yourself ahead of much of your competition:

1. Lack of responsiveness across different monitors.
   
   

Ever sent your friend the page of an exciting new indie brand you discovered on Instagram, only for them to tell you that their website sucks? Wait, what? It looks just fine on your end! That’s when you receive the screenshot of their jumbled display from their monitor, which you now recall was half the size of yours. 

Beyond monitor size differences, a lot of people will be accessing your homepage through their phones and tablets. Make sure you’ve got a design that’ll display finely there, or else you risk putting off plenty of new customers. 50% of customers will leave a website if it doesn’t work for mobile.

2. Important pages are too hard to navigate to.
   
   

The homepage should clearly present important pages, such as About Us, Shop, and Contact Us. If any brand information is critical to what your customers are on your site to see, they can be frustrated if they can’t find it. This could happen if your Contact page takes several clicks to access from the homepage, such as being buried under a large, collapsing navigation. 

If you find yourself wanting to add more navigation links, consider other navigation structures that are more accessible to your users, such as footer navigation or a side navigation. Here are some tips for constructing clear, efficient navigation for your site.

3. Improper hero image, including a carousel that moves too fast.
   
   

What’s the first thing you want users to see when they land on your homepage? The answer to this will be uncovered when you conduct your UX research. Most likely, users will want to know how to access the most important parts of your business details and learn of any major updates. 

If you’ve got multiple news items to display, that means you’re likely to have a carousel. While many websites have clickable arrows to navigate the carousel, some just let it play automatically at a pace that doesn’t let the user read every word. Keep this in mind when deciding how much text you want to use.

Some carousels don’t obviously present as carousels, allowing users to scroll by without clicking through all the slides. This can cause them to miss vital information they’d otherwise be interested in, such as your 60% off clearance sale announcement. To make sure your users know a carousel exists, make sure the arrows are clearly visible.

4. Search bars that require too much precision.
   
   

Ever searched for something on a website and have nothing show up even though you swear the product existed? You end up going to Google to search for it there, then voilà – it’s at the top of the list. This happens in some website search engines when a user leaves out a word or misspelled the name by one measly letter.

Frustrating, isn’t it? Just because a user’s interested in your business doesn’t mean they’ll know how to spell everything they’re looking for by the letter. It also isn’t very inclusive of users that may have learning or motor disorders. So make sure your search bars can account for typos, missing hyphens, and common misnomers or misspellings. 

5.  Uninviting or overly obnoxious CTAs.
   
   

Call-to-action (CTA) buttons, especially those on your homepage, need an important balance of being inviting without being too obnoxious. They should be prominently visible without taking up too much of the section desperately screaming at users to click. It’s common for UX designers to A/B test between multiple button colors, sizes, and copy to see which grab the highest conversion rates.

Image Source: Call-to-Action buttons – the ultimate guide for high-converting CTAs