Bad website design: Bad for SEO, UX and business - Search Engine Land

I tell my clients two things to frame organic search discussions around content and user experience:

1. Search engines want to provide answers to their users in one click or less.
2. If you design your website with the idea of getting answers to visitors’ questions as efficiently as possible, your site should earn more attention in organic search

Search engines must keep their users happy to retain and/or grow their market share. Therefore, it’s in their best interest to send people to websites that they calculate will give users a good experience.

Bounce rates increase 32% when download times went from 1 to 3 seconds, according to Google. Also, bounce rates increase dramatically at 3 seconds, while page views also drop off, according to Pingdom.

Both of these stats are a bit old, but there’s no evidence to suggest people are any more patient today.

The challenge I most often run into with brands is that they design their websites in a way that hampers the “one click or less” goal. They incorporate things into their designs like:

• Large autoplay videos (sometimes with sound).
• Large hero images that push informational content far below the fold (add heroes that rotate through a slideshow and the experience is even worse).
• Custom fonts that are not likely to have been installed on the local machines of their visitors.

All of these design elements (and others) detract from user experience, conversion optimization and accessibility standards.

Examples of bad design and UX

Both...

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