If you’re building a website for the first time and are having trouble deciding on a specific color scheme or a font to use, you might be wondering about the importance of web design and whether or not worrying about these little details is actually worth it.

I’m here to explain that yes, web design is important, especially for ecommerce and service-based businesses.

In this post, I talk about the importance of design and share tips on how to improve the design of your website along the way.

Why Web Design is Important

1. Websites still matter. Even as more and more businesses choose social media and email lists over full-fledged websites, websites are still the best way to represent your business online.
2. First impressions are important. Your website is one of the first experiences new and potential customers will have with your business.
3. Poor website designs are associated with spammers. Consumers will think your business lacks credibility if your design is so poor, it looks “scammy.”
4. Brand recognition and consistency are important. Having a cohesive style across all of your marketing channels helps you solidify your online presence. It also builds credibility.
5. It helps improve your site’s navigation and user experience. Good design is as functional as it is pretty.
6. It impacts conversions. If customers can’t use your site because it performs poorly, they aren’t going to purchase your products or fill out quote forms.
7. Good web design helps you be more inclusive. A well-designed website is optimized for mobile users as much as it is desktop users. It’s also more accessible to disabled users.
8. It’s good for SEO. Website performance is one of the most important Google ranking factors for search engine optimization (SEO).
9. Your competitors have good website designs, so you might as well improve yours as well to stay competitive.

Let’s talk about each of these points in more depth.

1. Websites Still Matter

More and more businesses are becoming social-first brands. TikTok, in particular, has become popular due to the rise of short-form vertical video content and how easy it is to create content for the platform (in comparison to YouTube videos).

Smaller brands have turned to email lists hosted by Substack and Beehiv.

In spite of the growth these marketing channels have experienced over the last decade, web design, and websites in general, are still very important.

For starters, the majority of interactions (48%) made with business profiles on Google Maps are made with the Website link included with every profile.

This means that the majority of consumers are very interested in learning more about businesses on or making direct purchases with websites.

Secondly, while social media is a powerful tool for content, websites still have a lot of benefits in the business world.

A lot of those benefits relate to ownership. While your host can remove your website from their servers, if you have a backup, you can get it up and running on a different server within the hour. It’ll even have the same web address.

The same can’t be said if a social media platform deletes some of your content. When that happens, all of the engagement you receive from that content is gone forever.

Websites are also better for conversions and sharing information.

Having access to full web pages allows you to design high-converting landing and sales pages as well as pages that share facts about your products, services and business as a whole.

2. Your Website Sets the First Impression for Your Brand

No matter where consumers learn about your business, one of the first actions they’ll take with it is a visit to your website to learn more about your products and services.

If your website is slow or poorly designed, it gives off a bad impression.

After all, if customers see how little you care about how your brand is perceived online, how can they trust that you care about the quality of your products and services?

Kick things off with a bang by building a well-designed website that sets the right tone for your brand and the quality of your service.

Check out the design of Mandola’s homepage, particularly their hero section.

Mandola’s is a popular Italian restaurant in Austin, Texas. While most restaurants in the area use images of Italian dishes they could have gotten from stock photography websites, Mandola’s uses an image that was clearly taken at their own restaurant.

You can see this in the logo on the cup in the very first image that greets you.

If you scroll beneath this section, you’re greeted with a very friendly image: the restaurant’s owners and workers on opening day in 2006, all with smiling faces.

And if you look at the restaurant’s reviews on Google Maps, you’ll see that it’s clearly one of the most popular Italian restaurants in the area given that it has over 3,200 reviews while similar restaurants (except a few outliers) have fewer than 2,700.

3. Poor Website Designs Look Spammy

In an age where AI-generated content looks as real and grammatically correct as human-generated content, it might be hard to believe that spammers still produce poorly-designed products, misspell words and make a lot of grammatical errors, but they do.

This means if your website is spammy, you’re going to ruin any credibility you might have built with a potential customer the moment they land on your website.

Do better by at least taking the time to find a quality website template.

4. It Helps Build Brand Recognition and Consistency

Another way to build credibility immediately is by ensuring the tone and styles consumers see on Google and social media carry over to your website.

If your logo is different, you use a different color scheme on your website than you do on social media or even use a different language, you lose credibility instantly.

In a similar vein, using a cohesive style across all of your marketing channels helps you build brand recognition. Consumers will start to associate a logo, color scheme, content style and certain fonts with your brand.

As they become exposed to this style more and more across multiple marketing channels, they’ll engage more and be more likely to convert.

5. Improved Navigation and User Experience

When you pay more attention to the way your website is designed, you also pay more attention to its user experience (UX).

If a page has too many buttons or links, a product page has too many options, or a form has too many fields, consumers will be less likely to interact with them.

Proper web design teaches you to build a website that’s easy to navigate, allowing consumers to find what they need easier.

It also gives them less options to choose from, helping them make decisions faster.

6. It Yields Higher Conversion Rates

This point piggybacks off of the last point.

If your site is easier to use and its UX is overall as good as it can be, your conversion rates are going to be higher as a result.

Customers will be more likely to engage with your site (convert) if they can find what they’re looking for as soon as they land on your site.

7. Good Web Design Makes Sites More Accessible

Responsive web design is very important. According to research by SOAX, 64% of web traffic comes from mobile devices.

This means that while you might design your website on desktop, it’s crucial that you optimize it for mobile devices by at least using a responsive design.

If your business serves the public, your design should be accessible as well.

If you serve customers from other countries, you should also optimize your performance by serving content through a content delivery network (CDN) that has data centers located around the world.

8. Website Performance is a Google Ranking Factor

There are over 200 ranking factors Google uses to determine how to rank search results for every search query users run through its engine.

Among this giant list of ranking factors is a smaller list that holds more weight than others.

Performance is one of those ranking factors.

Google wants to rank sites that load quickly and are easy to use immediately.

So, while you design your website, focus on lowering its page load time and increasing its Core Web Vitals score.

9. It Makes Makes Your Business More Competitive

What’s important to remember about web design and other factors related to digital marketing is that your competitors are probably already doing it. They may even be doing it well.

So, if you want to succeed in digital marketing and stay competitive on and offline, you need to at least excel at the basics.

And yes, having a well-designed website is a basic essential every website needs.

Thanks to WordPress themes and all-in-one hosting solutions, it’s never been easier to get a beautiful website up and running.

Here are a few best practices to follow when you create a website:

• Keep it simple
• Choose one or two fonts and a color palette, and stick with it
• Choose a goal for every page you design, and make sure its design is built to help you achieve that goal
• Use compressed images
• Use embedded videos over background videos and autoplay videos
• Limit yourself to one slider per page
• Limit the amount of animations that play on each web page