Web Design Statistics

• Brands make good first impressions with attractive websites.
• You have 50 milliseconds to showcase your style.
• WordPress powers 40# of all websites.
• People don’t recommend unresponsive sites.
• Poor UI design turns of 89% of visitors off.
• 47% of visitors want contact information
• Webpages should load in two seconds.
• Video backgrounds dramatically increases conversions.

When it comes to first impressions of a brand, 94 percent of people rely on website design. It’s essential you grab the visitor’s attention and keep them om your site. Visual appeal is essential to making a good first impression. While what is visually appealing is subjective, most users say they like uncluttered sites where every element has a purpose. Simplistic designs with plenty of white space focus on the main reasons people visit a site and take them directly to what they want. This gives the visitor the impression the brand commits itself to giving people what they want and creates an excellent first impression.

It only takes 50 milliseconds for a visitor to decide if they like a web design. That is 0.05 of a second. Colors especially invoke emotions that are easy for people to process quickly. A poorly thought out color scheme can have people hitting the back button. Visitors also like fonts that are easy to read and consistent throughout the site. Images are also important; they catch visitor’s eyes. If you have a cluttered, ugly homepage, the person will assume your business is equally chaotic and disorganized.

WordPress dominates the website building field; 40 percent of all sites use the CMS. While WordPress is highly customizable, many publishers simply choose a free, pre-made template instead of paying a web design firm to create one from scratch for them. This results in many sites, even in the same industry, looking remarkably similar. Getting started with a pre-made WordPress template is inexpensive, but it won’t differentiate a site from its competitors. Because WordPress is so popular, it is also more vulnerable to attacks from hackers. It’s a favorite target because criminals can use a bot to target millions of sites at the same time.

More than half, 57 percent to be exact, of people won’t recommend a website that does not render properly on their mobile device to friends. For e-commerce websites, this can be devastating. Online stores depend on users talking to friends about a great deal they got on a site. With Amazon’s dominance, every referral counts. People are hesitant to tell their friends about a site that downloads slowly, has text that is hard to read and does not have touch-friendly buttons. The current standard is a responsive design that adapts to the user’s screen size; developers rarely create separate mobile sites anymore as the publisher has to maintain two sites instead of one.

When a consumer has a poor experience on a website, 89 percent of of them will turn to a competitor’s website. A poor user experience can be anything from confusing menu options to a poorly designed checkout that asks for too much information. People don’t like being frustrated when visiting a site; they want to relax. If they wanted frustration, they would go to malls and hunt for parking spaces and stand in long checkout lines. Consumers use the Internet for convenience. Web designers need to keep this in mind when when creating user interfaces. Everything should be crystal clear; users shouldn’t wonder what will happen when they click on a button.

Trust is everything in conversions. When visiting a site, 64 percent of users look for a company’s contact information. It may not be the first thing they look for, but they will look if they are interested in a brand’s products or services. No one wants to buy something, only to find out it will arrive in a month or two because it is coming from China. Blind contact forms, with only an email address, are not good enough. Visitors want to see a physical address and a telephone number to help verify that they are dealing with a legitimate company. There is no reason for a company to hide this information unless they don’t want customers to contact them with complaints.

You have two seconds for your website to load or you might lose 47 percent of your visitors. This is where many publishers can gain an edge over the competition as few websites have an acceptable page speed. There are elements that affect page load speed that you cannot control, like the visitor’s device, internet connection and browser. Nevertheless, you have some control. You can upgrade your hosting plan, minimize HTTP requests and compress your images. You can also employ minification, which is removing unnecessary characters from your files.

This is probably the most surprising statistic. Video backgrounds can increase conversions by up to 140 percent. Effective video backgrounds set the mood, but don’t distract from the content. For example, a produce company may show several plants with water dripping slowly off the leaves. Publishers can use how-to, product demonstration and explainer videos on other pages where visitors can give them their full attention. Use short videos that loop to keep your website from taking a long time to load. Many publishers choose black and white videos or ones with muted colors as not to distract from the text.