Five website design trends not to forget in 2022

Great website design starts with the basics. Here’s how to turn your website from boring and useless to lively and useful.

A clean, user-friendly website is essential for any kind of organisation. Your business website not only acts as a digital home base for your company and product line, but also supports your entire digital marketing strategy by providing a central portal where customers can direct their attention and interact with your brand and business. A bad site experience can hinder such attempts and break these relationships before they start.

Here are five website design recommendations to help you in 2022. turn your website into a customer conversion machine.

The first impression on a website is extremely important.

The first impression remains at the top of the list of useful website design recommendations. That’s because what people encounter right after they launch your website sets the tone for the whole encounter. And if your website design doesn’t live up to those critical first seconds, you’re not only missing out on new visitors, but also on opportunities to build a strong and favourable brand image that drives attention and future purchases.

The truth is that many things influence these important first impressions, and working with a web designer who knows these elements is essential to creating an attractive, professional website. Structure, colour and space are usually important visual components of a site’s design appeal. At the same time, seemingly small factors such as the layout of text and even the choice of font have a big impact on the website experience and engagement.

A web designer with an eye for these details and their proper place in the visual hierarchy not only creates a more visually impressive website, but can also help turn more casual visits into longer ones, giving users the engaging web pages and experience they need to stay and buy from your company.

To create a good website that stands out from the rest, pay attention to:

Simplicity. Users prefer simple, clear website designs to complex ones. The easier it is to assimilate and engage with the visual components of your websites, the better.

Similarity. All the visual components of your website – from photos and banners to logos and CTAs – should meet your visitors’ expectations and visually indicate what you do and what you provide. The inclusion of unexpected images and features often leads to confusion and ultimately a bad brand impression.

Accuracy. Whether your project is carried out by an experienced professional or by a team of inexperienced web designers, providing your website with brand-appropriate graphic components is website design 101. All elements must be consistent throughout the website and properly reflect your brand.

Each page must be mobile-friendly.

Nowadays, you can’t make a list of website design tips that doesn’t include mobile optimisation. Why? Because mobile connectivity matters in 2022. In fact, almost 80% of users think they are more likely to return to your website or share it with others if it is mobile-friendly. If your web designer doesn’t focus on creating a decent mobile-friendly website, your company is missing an easy opportunity to attract returning visitors and spread your brand.

Consumers are increasingly using mobile devices to search and research businesses online. If your web pages don’t load properly, or if your website design doesn’t provide a seamless mobile experience, potential buyers are likely to leave your website and your company for competitors in your market. Over time, these mobile challenges increase and pose a serious threat to your brand, reputation and profits, and make it increasingly difficult to attract new customers.

It is therefore very important that the design of the website takes into account mobile browsing and layout. From the outset, it is essential to look at every visual element, logo, text block, social media icons and call-to-action buttons through a mobile lens, ensuring that every element and part of the design process is mobile-friendly and designed to provide a next-level experience.

This can range from using important visual cues (logos, menus, CTAs, buttons) throughout the mobile site, to emphasising eye-catching fonts, making text and service pages easier to read, and rescaling page components to engage the user faster.

Minimise website load times.

A sluggish website can soon become your worst enemy, as it makes it difficult to retain potential buyers and bring them closer to the point of purchase. Like it or not, today’s sophisticated, savvy website visitors want websites to load quickly, and if your homepage or blogs don’t load quickly, they’re likely to go elsewhere to find what they’re looking for.

In other words, the loading speed of a website is a crucial, if not decisive, element of any practical and responsive design. It has a lasting impact on the visitor experience and ultimately your conversion rate. Understanding how fast your pages load and how to reduce that loading time is not just another website design tip to ignore or overlook. This is an important component of a web designer’s work and should always be a primary concern in creating a visually appealing website design.

Fortunately, website designers have a variety of tools to speed up website loading. Some of the easiest ways your web designer can increase your loading speed and outperform your competitors’ website are:

Resizing images Photos and graphics usually take up a lot of space, which has a big impact on page loading speed. Photo compression and optimisation can help reduce file sizes while reducing website load times by milliseconds.

Managing website plugins. Plugins, especially on WordPress sites, can often make a big difference to the overall performance of a website. However, too many of them can significantly reduce the speed of the website. By removing the redundant ones and keeping only the ones you need, you can quickly increase the speed of your website.

Speed is constantly monitored. Careful and continuous monitoring is needed throughout the design process and beyond. This helps to spot problems right away and take action to fix them before they become catastrophes.

Emphasise a personalised user experience

It is essential to create a website design that appeals to the widest potential audience. However, it is the ability to provide a customised shopping experience that really sets effective website design apart. By incorporating shopper customization tactics into the design and overall design of your website, you go beyond conventional digital marketing strategy and make a real connection by providing your visitors with personalised, relevant information and experiences that heighten emotions and drive action.

Incorporating user personalisation into a website design approach may initially seem challenging, especially given the many other design guidelines and considerations that need to be taken into account throughout the visual hierarchy.

Fortunately, there are some very simple methods to incorporate personalisation into your website design strategy, from integrating personalised, behavioural product offers into the design architecture to incorporating dynamic, highly relevant CTA elements into every new visit to your website. Providing targeted photos and interactive elements can also be a good strategy to improve the customisability of your design.

Never forget about SEO.

It’s fantastic to create a wonderful, user-friendly website that gives visitors a great experience. Unless, of course, your users can’t find it.

Online visibility is essential not only to make your website easy to find, but also to get it in front of customers when they need it most. By incorporating SEO into your website development plan, you can give your website the boost it needs to shine in the search engines and achieve the user engagement rates that keep it at the top.

The worlds of web design and SEO are understandably often at odds, with many web designers classifying SEO as digital marketing and content creation, and vice versa. But there are a few things designers can do immediately to significantly increase visibility.

Applying basic SEO principles to the design of headlines, image captions, sub-headlines and even URLs can often be beneficial and can immediately boost a website’s ranking signals and search potential. Knowing how to break up text and where to include interactive features in content and page layout can also be a simple but effective way to maximise search readiness from the start. Ignoring SEO in the website development process is risky.