Web Design Mistakes: 9 Problems That Cost Leads and Sales

What Counts As A Web Design Mistake

A web design mistake is anything that stops somebody doing the thing they arrived on your site to do. That is the entire definition, and it is a strict one.

That definition rules out most arguments about taste. Whether you prefer a serif is a preference. Whether anybody can find your phone number is not.

It is a useful test to keep in mind during a redesign, because design discussions drift towards preference quickly and the person paying rarely has a way to push back.

Ask instead what the page is for, and whether a stranger could do that thing in under a minute. Most disagreements resolve themselves once that question is on the table.

The faults that actually cost money are dull and repetitive. Clutter, weak hierarchy, small text, confusing navigation, a hidden call to action, a broken phone layout, a slow page, a dated look, and no thought given to accessibility.

The right-hand column is the uncomfortable one. Almost all of this is cheap to fix and quietly expensive to leave alone for another year.

Nine faults account for most of what goes wrong on a small business site. None of them requires a redesign to fix.

How Fast People Judge A Page

Faster than is comfortable. The research everybody cites on this is also older and a good deal narrower than the way it is usually presented.

In a 2006 study published in Behaviour and Information Technology, Lindgaard and colleagues found participants formed consistent judgements of a page's visual appeal after exposures as short as 50 milliseconds.

That was a laboratory study of visual appeal from screenshots, twenty years ago, with no shopping or task involved. It says something real about first impressions and nothing about whether somebody buys.

The honest takeaway is narrow. The look of a page is assessed before any of its words are read, so a page that looks neglected has already lost ground by the time the argument starts.

What it does not license is panic about milliseconds. Nobody is optimising for 50 milliseconds.

You are simply making sure the first screen does not look broken, abandoned or assembled in a hurry. That is a low bar, and a surprising number of small business sites fail it on the home page.

The Work, In Order

Three fixes, ordered by how much each one is costing you right now rather than by how interesting it is to do.

You do not have to fix everything. Working down this order, most sites see the bulk of the benefit after the first two.

1. Fix the phone layout first

The small screen is the main version of your site rather than a secondary one, and has been for years.

StatCounter put mobile at 60.04 per cent of worldwide web traffic against 39.96 per cent for desktop in September 2026. That figure moves month to month, so treat it as the current shape rather than a constant.

• Text you can read. Without pinching, at arm's length.
• Taps that do not collide. Buttons spaced for a thumb.
• Nothing overflowing. No sideways scrolling, ever.
• The same content as desktop. Hiding sections on mobile hides them from everyone.

Test it on an actual phone, on ordinary mobile data. A narrow browser window on a fast laptop connection is not the same experience and will not find the same faults.

Then try to complete one real task while you are in there. Find the price, book something, send a message. Looking at a page is not the same as using it, and the faults only appear while using it.

Design the small screen first if you are building anything new. Shrinking a desktop layout produces compromises in a way that growing a phone layout does not.

2. Fix the speed

Speed is a design decision rather than a technical afterthought. Nearly every choice that makes a page heavy was made by somebody choosing how it should look, not by a developer.

Enormous hero images, several web fonts, an animation library loaded for one effect, a chat widget, three tracking scripts.

Each was added for a reason that made sense at the time. None of them was weighed against the cost, because nobody measured the page before and after.

Compress the images before touching anything else. On most small business sites that single change accounts for more improvement than everything else combined, and it requires no code.

• Resize before uploading. A four thousand pixel photograph in a six hundred pixel slot is waste.
• Use a modern format. Smaller files at the same visible quality.
• Cut the fonts. Two families is plenty, and each weight is another download.
• Remove unused scripts. The chat widget nobody answers is still loading.

Then run the page through PageSpeed Insights and fix what it names, in the order it names them.

Google publishes the thresholds that count as good, which makes this one of the very few parts of web design with a published target rather than an opinion. Use it while it is there.

Do not chase a perfect score. The score is a summary of measurements, and a site that is fast for real visitors on real connections has already done the job the score was summarising.

3. Make the next step obvious

A page should have exactly one thing it wants you to do, and that thing should be impossible to miss on any screen size.

Name the action rather than the mechanism. "Book a call" tells somebody what is about to happen to them.

"Submit" describes what the form does. That is a different question, and not one anybody visiting your site was asking.

Repeat it down the page. Somebody who scrolls past the first one and reads three more sections should not have to scroll back up to act on what convinced them.

On a long page, that usually means the same button appearing three or four times, with the same words each time. Varying the wording looks like variety and reads as three different offers.

And have only one. A page offering a call, a download, a newsletter and a chat has spread the decision across four options.

A distributed decision is usually no decision at all. Pick the one action that matters on that page and let the others live somewhere else.

Common Mistakes

The remaining faults, roughly in the order a visitor meets them. None needs a rebuild, and several take under an hour.

Clutter. Every element competing for the same attention, usually because each was added separately and nothing was ever removed. The fix is subtraction, and it is free.

No hierarchy. If everything is bold, nothing is. One clear heading per section, one dominant element per screen, and a visible difference in size between levels.

Text that is hard to read. Grey on light grey, lines running the full width of a wide monitor, body copy set too small. Sixteen pixels is a sensible floor and a comfortable line is around seventy characters.

Confusing navigation. Clever labels nobody recognises, and twenty items where five would do. Call the services page Services, and group the rest.

A dated look. It is read as neglect rather than as style. If the copyright notice in the footer says 2019, a visitor reasonably wonders whether the business is still trading.

Ignoring accessibility. Missing alt text, colour used as the only signal to mark an error, unlabelled form fields. Each one excludes somebody, and each fix takes minutes.

Accessibility work also tends to improve the page for everybody. Clear labels, good contrast and sensible headings are simply good design, and the people who need them most are not a separate audience.

What links all nine is that none of them is an opinion. Each one can be checked by watching one person try to use the site, which costs nothing and settles more arguments than a style guide.