Bad website design is rarely ugly. Most website design mistakes that cost enquiries look fine in a design review, then fall apart when a real visitor arrives on a phone, straight from Google, with a question and little patience.
Those visitors don’t complain. They leave. When a site gets traffic but few enquiries, the cause is usually several small failures, each quietly turning away a share of people.
Below are 13 of the most common, each with a five-minute check and a fix that doesn’t need a rebuild. If you are weighing one up anyway, start with the signs your website needs a redesign.
The six questions behind most website design mistakes
Visitors arrive with the same six questions. When a page leaves one unanswered, most go back to the search results rather than dig. That, far more often than a colour choice, is why visitors leave a website.
| Visitor question | Typical mistakes | Fastest check |
|---|---|---|
| What do you do? | Vague headlines, jargon | Five-second test |
| Where is it? | Confusing menus, buried answers | Watch someone find a service |
| Can I read it? | Low contrast, small text | Read it on your phone in daylight |
| How do I act? | No next step, failing forms | Send yourself an enquiry |
| Can I trust you? | No proof, signs of neglect | Compare with a competitor |
| Does it work on my phone? | Tiny targets, slow pages, pop-ups | Use it one-handed on mobile data |
Few of these are about looks. They are common UX mistakes where design meets content, development and performance, which is why a good website needs all four working together.
“What do you do?”
1. A headline that could belong to anyone
“Welcome to our website.” “Excellence in every project.” Visitors decide within seconds whether they are in the right place, and a slogan makes them work it out. Many won’t.
Five-minute check. Show your homepage to someone new for five seconds, then hide it. Can they say what you do, for whom, and what they would click?
The fix. Say what you do and for whom, in plain words: “Steel structures for factories and warehouses, built to your schedule” beats any slogan. If a slider rotates five messages, pick one.
2. Services named in your language, not your customers’
People scan for the words already in their heads. If your page says “integrated envelope solutions” and they want “roof and wall cladding”, they won’t see the match, and the page is harder to find for the words they actually search.
Five-minute check. Compare the queries in Google Search Console’s Performance report with the headings on your service pages.
The fix. Name services the way customers do, in every language you serve, and explain specialist terms the first time they appear.
“Where is it?”
3. A menu built around your organisation chart
“Solutions”, “Divisions”, “Our DNA”, or nine items of equal weight because every department wanted one. Visitors don’t know how you are organised, so unclear labels force them to guess.
Five-minute check. Ask someone outside the business to find a specific service and how to get a price for it. Watch without helping.
The fix. Label items with what visitors are looking for, keep the top level short and put the contact route in the same place on every page. See website navigation design.
4. The answer people need is buried
Prices, service areas, lead times and specifications hidden in a PDF or missing. Buyers check you are a realistic option before getting in touch. If they can’t tell, they contact someone who made it easy.
Five-minute check. On your phone, count the taps to the five answers your sales team gives most, starting from your top landing pages in Google Analytics (often not the homepage).
The fix. Answer deciding questions on the service page. A price range, or an honest note on what affects the price, beats silence.
“Can I read it?”
5. Text that’s hard to read
Pale grey on white, headlines over busy photos, 12-pixel body text, lines running the full width of the screen, ten-sentence paragraphs. What looks refined on a large monitor is hard work on a phone in daylight and shuts out people with low vision.
Five-minute check. Read your key service page on your phone at arm’s length: do the headings alone give you the gist? Then run your colours through a contrast checker. WCAG 2.2 asks for at least 4.5:1 for normal text, button labels included, and 3:1 for large text and for the borders or fills that show where a button or form field is.
The fix. Darken body text, put a solid panel behind text on photos, and use body text of 16 pixels or more, lines of roughly 45–75 characters and descriptive subheadings. Turn text in images into real text that can be resized, translated and read aloud. Visual hierarchy then makes the most important line the most visible, and our guides to colour contrast and web typography go deeper.
“How do I act?”
6. No clear next step, or five of them
Pages that simply stop, buttons labelled “Submit” or “Learn more”, or a row of equally loud options. When everything is emphasised, nothing is.
Five-minute check. Scroll to the end of each key page. Is there one obvious next step, with a button that says what happens?
The fix. Choose one primary action per page, repeat it where decisions happen and label it with the outcome, such as “Get a quote”. More in call to action best practices.
7. Contact details that are awkward to use
A phone number you can’t tap, an email address shown as an image, contact details only on the Contact page, no sign of the messaging app your customers use. Every channel you make awkward loses the people who prefer it.
Five-minute check. From a service page on your phone, try to call, email and message the business. Count the taps.
The fix. Make phone numbers and email addresses tappable, show the main contact routes on every page, and say what happens after someone gets in touch, and how quickly.
8. Forms that ask too much, or quietly fail
Ten required fields, puzzles to prove you are human, errors that wipe everything typed. Every unnecessary field is a reason to stop. A broken form is worse: the visitor believes they got in touch, and you never hear from them.
Five-minute check. Send yourself an enquiry from your phone. Did you see a confirmation, and did the email arrive? Check spam too.
The fix. Ask only for what you need to reply, use field types that bring up the right keyboard, set form text to at least 16 pixels so iPhones don’t zoom in on a tapped field, and test monthly. Web form design covers the rest, and tracking enquiries in GA4 shows when submissions drop.
“Can I trust you?”
9. Claims without proof
“Trusted by leading companies” with no names, testimonials signed “J., Manager”, stock photos of people who clearly don’t work there. Unsupported claims read as filler, and visitors comparing providers lean towards the one with evidence.
Five-minute check. For every claim on your homepage, find the proof on the same page.
The fix. Swap adjectives for specifics: named testimonials (with permission), project examples with problem and outcome, certifications, real photos of your people and work. See website credibility.
10. Signs that nobody is looking after the site
A copyright year long past, a news page that stopped years ago, broken links, a “Not secure” warning in the address bar. Visitors read a neglected website as a neglected business.
Five-minute check. Look at your footer, news page and address bar, then click every menu and footer link.
The fix. Remove sections you can’t keep current, run the whole site on HTTPS and give someone a monthly check, or hand it to a website care plan.
“Does it work on my phone?”
11. Designed on a desktop, tested on nobody’s phone
Links too close to tap accurately, hover-only menus, sideways scrolling, sticky headers and chat bubbles covering half the screen. For many businesses most visitors use a phone, and a squeezed desktop layout makes them work for everything.
Five-minute check. Check your device split in Google Analytics, then complete your most important task on your own phone, one-handed.
The fix. Design for the phone first and test on real devices. Give tap targets room: WCAG 2.2 sets a minimum of 24 by 24 CSS pixels (or enough space around smaller targets), and Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines recommend 44 by 44 points. Mobile-first vs responsive design explains the approach.
12. Slow, jumpy pages on mobile data
A blank screen, then banners loading in and pushing the button you were about to tap down the page. Each second of waiting is a chance to leave, and moving content causes mis-taps.
Five-minute check. Run key pages through PageSpeed Insights and read the mobile Core Web Vitals assessment, based on real visits when Google has enough data. Google rates Largest Contentful Paint up to 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint up to 200 milliseconds and Cumulative Layout Shift up to 0.1 as good, at the 75th percentile of visits.
The fix. The usual culprits are oversized images, too many plugins and scripts, and slow hosting. The jumps come from images, banners and embeds that load without space reserved for them. Why is my website slow? helps you find yours.
13. Pop-ups that block the page
A newsletter offer or chat window that covers the content the moment someone arrives from Google. They came for an answer and got an obstacle.
Google’s Search Central guidance advises against intrusive interstitials and dialogs that hide the content, suggests small banners instead, and says intrusive dialogs can lead to poorer search performance. Dialogs required by law, such as age checks, should overlay the page, not redirect to another. Whatever the ranking effect, the visitor who closes the tab costs you more.
Five-minute check. In a private window on your phone, open a service page from a Google search. What can you see before tapping anything?
The fix. Swap entry pop-ups for an inline offer or a small, dismissible banner, stop chat windows opening by themselves and keep the cookie banner compact.
Which fixes to make first
Not every mistake costs the same. Sort what you found into three groups:
| Priority | What it means | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Fix today | Stops enquiries completely | A form that doesn’t send, a wrong phone number |
| Fix this month | Loses a share of visitors | A vague headline, slow pages, entry pop-ups |
| Batch together | Wears down trust slowly | An outdated footer, stale news |
Track enquiries as key events in GA4 before you start, so you can see which fixes work.
If a single page gets paid traffic and still doesn’t convert, work through why a landing page isn’t converting. To watch real people complete key tasks, a website UX audit goes further than any checklist.
Some website usability problems are symptoms, though. If the menu can’t be simplified without restructuring the site, or every text change needs a developer, patching will cost more than it saves, and a website redesign deserves a serious look.
What to do next
Tick each check your site passes today:
Most unticked boxes can be fixed on the site you already have. If you would rather someone else ran these checks, ask for a free website audit: a person, not just an automated tool, reviews your site and sends back a short list of what to fix first, in order.