5 Essential Web Design Elements to Create a Stunning Website

With the right integration and design, some elements aid in telling stories explaining your company, improve the visual elements of your site and offer better user experience (among other things).

The key, however, is to determine what website elements to improve to help you grow your business.

To give you a head start, here are five essential web design elements to boost your website’s performance.

1. Ensure Optimum Load Speed

Your website’s load speed is a vital element in keeping your site visitors interested and helps convince them to stay.

If your website takes more than three seconds to load, over 53% of users will abandon your site, which can lead to higher bounce rates.

So to keep that from happening, here are some tips to optimize your site’s load speed:

  • Reduce plugins.
  • Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
  • Optimize your homepage.
  • Optimize images by compressing them.
  • Use fewer redirects.
  • Review your web hosting platforms. If they offer higher-tier plans that can help increase your load speed, then you should consider upgrading.

Remember that those first three seconds can affect the decision of your site visitors to stay or leave your website.

Regardless of how visually appealing or strategically positioned your web design elements are, slow load speed will lower the chances of your site visitors even getting to your conversion page.

So it’s essential for you to ensure your site’s load speed is at an optimum level since it’s a web design element that can make or break the performance of your website.

2. The Power of Color

Colors may seem like basic elements of web design, but they can have a significant impact on improving the aesthetics of your website.

After all, they can boost the visual elements of your site.  

However, you need to know which colors, including how they mix and match, to use on your website to invoke certain responses and feelings from your audiences.

Also, using color schemes is a vital aspect of building your website with a theme to help establish your brand’s identity.

For example, using too many color combinations on your website might not look visually pleasing and might not catch your site visitors’ attention enough to make them stay.

A good technique when choosing color schemes is to use various shades of the same color hues.

Web Design Elements
As shown in the screenshot above, the combination of purple and blue hues helps make the homepage of the website look pleasing and subtle to the viewers’ eyes.

Using a few, but well-thought-out colors can help express your message to your target audiences, stir their emotions, and spark their interest.

Choosing the right colors that are visually appealing and functional at the same time can help improve user experience, which can lead to an increase in traffic and sales.    

3. A Call-to-Action Button that Stands Out

Your website can have several purposes, such as selling services and products, promoting your blog or brand, or simply blogging (among other things).

However, one of the keys to success is to create a visible and compelling call-to-action (CTA).

A CTA can be a newsletter sign up, free trial, subscriptions, account creation, and asking people to purchase.

So it’s essential to create a strong call-to-action since it’s a vital website element that can aid in increasing your conversions.

You can be creative with the design, colors, and even the words you use to help make your CTA button stand out.  

Web Design Elements
Here are some other examples of good call-to-action:

  • Download free (ebook, pdf, etc.)
  • See pricing
  • Subscribe
  • Watch video now
  • Click for more information

A call-to-action, whether in the form of buttons, a popup, banners, or even an entire landing page, should be able to easily capture the attention of your website visitors and help increase user engagement.  

4. Make it Mobile-Friendly

People expect to get the same kind of website experience on both desktop and mobile devices.

So it’s crucial to ensure that your website is mobile-friendly to give mobile device users the same level of user experience as desktop users.

Otherwise, if your site isn’t adapted for, let’s say, different display sizes like on mobile devices, visitors will leave your website because it’s difficult to read your content on their smartphones.

Trust me. You wouldn’t want that to happen.

So to help ensure that your website is mobile-friendly, here are some tips on how to do it:

  • Simple navigation. Since mobile device displays are relatively smaller compared to desktops, a good strategy is to prioritize showing vital information in specific locations on your website. For instance, your products or services and contact details should be easy to find when using a mobile screen, with straightforward and minimal navigation.
  • Appropriate button size. Think of it this way; if users can’t click on any of your site’s buttons, then they’re not the right size. Make your buttons big enough so that users can click on them with a single tap.
  • Easier to read font size. Use font styles and sizes that are clear and large enough to read, especially on smaller displays. Avoid making your site visitors squint to read your content.
  • Check your website’s mobile-friendliness. One way of checking if your site is mobile friendly is by using online tools like Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.

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  • Adaptive display. Making your website mobile-responsive means that the display and layout of your web pages can automatically adapt to different device screen sizes. Ensuring your web design is optimized to be mobile-friendly is one way of improving your site’s functionality and overall look, providing a better user experience to your visitors.

5. Navigation Made Easy

Take a look at your website from a website visitor’s perspective.

Does your navigation menu look crisp and clean? Is it easy to get around your website? Will your users find what they’re looking for as quickly as possible?

If you answered yes to all these questions, then you are on the right track. Otherwise, you might need to improve your website navigation by making it simple.

If viewers can’t navigate your website easily, they will end up clicking away in seconds, which can increase your bounce rate, and lower your chances of converting your site visitors into buyers.

Here are a few tips that can help you simplify the navigation on your website.

  • Create descriptive but concise links and labels.
  • Keep the items in your main menu to a maximum of seven, not including the dropdown sections.

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  • Keep the navigation bar in a fixed position.
  • As much as possible, it shouldn’t take more than three clicks for your site visitors to move from one point to another within your website. No matter how much valuable content your website has or how visually pleasing it looks, if visitors can’t navigate it easily and quickly find what they’re looking for, then you are defeating its purpose.

Conclusion

Remember that the primary objective of your web design is to engage your website visitors by giving them excellent user experience, and guiding them along towards acting on your conversion goal.  

So take a look at your website from your users’ perspective, check what needs some tweaking, and give these essential web design elements tips a try to improve your site.

If you found this information useful, share it with your family and friends. Cheers!

Mark Thomasson
Mark is a biz-dev hero at Invoicebus - a simple invoicing service that gets your invoices paid faster. He passionately blogs on topics that help small biz owners succeed in their business. He is also a lifelong learner who practices mindfulness and enjoys long walks in nature more than anything else.
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