Many people think web design is just about adding appealing visuals to the website. Well, it’s more than that. Throughout the process, the web designer has to take into the account user experience. After all, that’s what matters the most.
A website is like a 24/7 online shop. It’s the first thing your audience will see if they want to know more about your business. Web design creates a significant impact on SEO. It’s imperative to optimize websites for search engines as well as users.
Ways Your Website Design Affects SEO
Let’s take a look at how web design affects SEO:
Navigation structure
The navigation structure of your website doesn’t just affect user experience, it impacts search rankings as well. A complex navigation structure would make it difficult for visitors to find the information they are looking for. This would negatively affect factors like bounce rate, average time spent, engagement, etc.
Now the question is, what makes navigation structure good? Firstly, have a simple main menu. It should be filled with too many items. Also, make sure the main menu is easily accessible on desktop as well as mobile devices.
Page loading speed
Page loading speed is one of the important SEO ranking factors. And, web design has a significant impact on loading speed. If your site takes too long to load, there might be issues with web design. To fasten loading speed, you can minify CSS & JS, compress images, use a caching solution, minimize redirects, etc.
Images
To increase the engagement rate and increase the average time spent on the website, adding eye-catchy visuals and images can be a good idea. Adding plenty of images to the website can increase engagement, however, it can increase the site’s loading speed. As we have seen, a slow-loading website ruins the user experience and impacts search rankings negatively. To deal with this issue, what you can do is, start using compressed images.
404 pages
A 404 page appears when the user visits a broken link or a page that doesn’t exist anymore. Is there anything you can do to make it user-friendly and encourage users to stay on your website? Yes?
Firstly, you have to use creativity when designing a 404 page. On the page, you need to mention that the URL they are looking for is either a wrong URL or it doesn’t exist anymore. Another thing you can do is, add a search bar on the 404 page. This way, web visitors can search for what they are looking for.
Reading experience
It’s not just about coming up with great content. No matter how high-quality content your website has, with a poor reading experience, web visitors are very less likely to go through the entire content, resulting in a higher bounce rate and low average time spent. A high bounce rate and low dwell time will ultimately result in lower search rankings. This makes the reading experience one of the important ranking factors.
To enhance the reading experience of your web visitors, what you can do is structure your content with headings & subheadings, use shorter paragraphs, leave white space, use readable fonts, etc. These are basic, yet effective factors affecting the reading experience.
Final Thoughts
If your website fails to satisfy users, don’t expect it to rank higher on major search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. When it comes to rankings, search engines prioritize websites that provide a quality user experience.
A proper focus on important web design elements like beautiful visuals, navigation structure, content, CTA, etc. will improve the usability and experience of people visiting your website. This is how web design affects search engine optimization.
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Encircle Technologies is an IT company specialising in the Web and Mobile app development services for all types of businesses; small or large, for all business verticals, across the world. We’re proud to say that our team has worked with some truly incredible partners over a short period of time.
