Did you know that 94% of your visitors’ first impressions are influenced by the design of your website?

Whether you’re starting a new website or you want to redesign an existing one, we put together a guide to help you achieve great results from your web design efforts. 

How Web Design Improves Performance

Web design can impact your website. Okay, you get that. But how, exactly, can your website’s design improve its performance?

First of all, a good website design attracts new visitors who land on your website. When they first arrive on your domain, they will either be positively or negatively surprised, or they will feel like it’s just another website. It’s up to you to decide which feelings you want your visitors to have. That first impression will stay with them and will influence the perception they have of your brand forever.

As a consequence of this, visitors will decide to either come back to your site or to let it be. One of the key benefits of great web design is that it will bring repeat visitors (and customers).

In general, if the design of your website is bad, users will assume that its content is bad too, along with the products or services you offer. That’s because we as humans give great importance to visual elements. 

Web design is not just the colors or the general look of your website. Instead, a high-performing web design is accessible to everyone (including people with visual impairments), it’s user-friendly, and it has clear and simple navigation, along with many more elements. 

Here are the top tips from the best designed websites in 2021:

Symmetry 

When designing a website, the first thing you should do to improve the user experience is using symmetry. You can use a grid-based layout to keep content aligned and try experimenting with different types of symmetry, such as rotational, horizontal, reflection, and translational symmetry. But make sure you adapt the layout of your site to the type of content you share.

Website Speed

Would you stay on a website that takes forever to load? Most internet users would say no. if you want to create a positive experience for your website visitors, make sure your website allows pages to load fast. That will decrease the bounce rate and boost your conversions.

Responsive Design

In a world where mobile devices are increasingly being used to search for information and products or services to buy, it’s crucially important that your website is responsive and optimized for mobile device users.

Make sure you follow the best practices to have a successful responsive website. 

Appropriate Design

The design elements of your website should be appropriate to the industry or niche you’re in. not only does the copy speak directly to your audience’s needs and goals — your web design should too. Make sure all elements of your web design are aligned to your brand, industry, and audience. For example, you might find that some colors work better for certain demographics of the audience you want to target. And speaking of color…

Color

Any design expert will tell you that color plays a vitally important role in your website design. 

As a general rule of thumb, don’t use more than four colors for your web design. Using too many colors will overwhelm users and cause high bounce rates for new visitors. 

Simple Design

You’ve probably seen those websites with flashy ad banners, confusing navigation, and just too much content. Those are obvious signs of poor website design, which result in a negative user experience. 

Pay attention to all elements of your website — the copy, visual assets (like images and videos).   Even the fonts you use. 

Try to make all your content and design elements minimalistic and as simple and clear as possible. That’s the key to a great website design.

Clear Navigation

Not only should your content be simple and minimalistic, but the navigation of your website should also be as clear as possible. Ask yourself: can users easily find the information they’re looking for? Check whether all the important pages — including the “about us” page, “contact” page, etc. are easily found when someone lands on your site.

Consider using infinite scroll technology if your website doesn’t have too much content and you want to keep navigation extremely minimalist. That will make it easy for users to scroll through your content and offerings.

When designing your website, make sure you follow the tips outlined above. If you’re still unsure about which trends you should incorporate in your web design in 2021, you can take inspiration from some of the ones in the infographic below.