Before embarking on a new website design, you should first consider the customer buying journey. If your website isn’t based on the customer buying journey, your conversion rates will be significantly lower.

That’s because the main goal of creating a website is to guide your visitor through the most important content on their way to making a purchase with your company. When your website is visually complex or has too many modules, visitors can get overwhelmed and choose to leave and go elsewhere.

Large blocks of text, complicated color schemes and challenging navigation menus all contribute to website visitor overwhelm.

So if you’re looking at a website redesign in 2021, here’s why simple websites are trending.

Simple websites have higher conversion rates

When your homepage takes the customer through the buying journey with relevant information with each scroll, they’re more likely to make a purchase or reach out for more information.

Complicated websites with tons of ornamentation and complex navigation structures are not the way to go anymore. Your visitors won’t be impressed with fancy animations that slow download speeds or make it harder to find the checkout button.

Your website should not read like a sales brochure. Instead, make it a casual conversation with the visitor where you show that you understand their needs and their pain points.

Your simple website isn’t likely to go out of style

The trendier you go with your website design, the more likely it will be that you need a redesign in 3-5 years. The beauty of simple websites is that they’re timeless.

Website trends, like all digital marketing trends, move rapidly. If you’re trying to keep up, you’ll find yourself redesigning your website regularly. The simpler your design, the less likely it will be that your website will look outdated in a few years.

And, it’s simple to make minor adjustments to a minimalist website without needing to rewrite content or do a full overhaul. So you can freshen up your website a few years down the road without having to go through the full website design process.

The simpler the website, the less distraction for your visitors

Too many calls to action can lead to confusion for website visitors. The simpler your website is, the clearer your calls to action will be, leading to a higher conversion rate. While video is great, too many could lead your visitors to get distracted and not convert.

Likewise, a gallery serves some visual companies, like interior designers, quite well. But when there are too many photos or the viewing experience is too complex, the visitor can get distracted, lose track of time and move on to other internet tasks.

One way to focus your visitors is to avoid putting all your webpages in your main navigation. Only put the most important pages there. You can link to lower-level pages from higher-level pages, but the lower level ones don’t need to be in your main menu.

If you’re unsure how to prioritize what pages go in your main menu, know that you should have no more than six tabs. And each of those tabs should not have more than a few options underneath them.

Consider which pages are designed for conversion and essential to the customer buying journey, and place those in your main navigation menu.

The website will meet user expectations

Website visitors have certain expectations for where they’ll find things on your website. That’s because website trends have taught website visitors where to go for a variety of pages and functions.

For example, users expect to see these features on your website:

• A logo in the upper left that they can click to return home from any page.
• The menu bar at the top of every page, or a hamburger button that expands the menu.
• Contact information in the footer of every page.
• For e-commerce websites, a cart button in the upper right corner.

While there are a variety of ways to handle these website features, you want to meet users’ expectations so that your website is easy to navigate and key information is quick to find.

Simple websites appeal to all visitors regardless of demographic

If your business serves a wide age demographic, a simple website can appeal to your full customer base. Instead of making features familiar or impressive to just one category of customers, make it appealing to all with simplicity.

There’s nothing spammy about a simple website, which also means your users are more likely to stay once they land on your site.

Here is an example of a simple one page scroll site that conveys the message the client wanted to get across:  https://westparkny.com

You’ll enjoy faster load speeds

Load speeds have a large bearing on the success of your website. The faster your website loads, the better your website will rank for SEO and the less likely your users are to abandon your site. According to Google, 52 percent of mobile users will abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load.

Heavy use of graphics, videos and animations can slow down your website. So the simpler the design, the better in getting users to stay and engage with your content.

Appear trustworthy and professional with a simple website

Clean website design looks professional. A cluttered website is often a signal that the company threw it together quickly using a standard template and put little thought into how it would perform for customers.

Stanford research found that 75 percent of website users make judgments about how credible a company is based on their website design. Not only that, but 94 percent of a visitor’s first impressions of a company come from website design.

You can easily adapt a simple website

The more complicated your website is, the more chances there are for things to go wrong. Updating a complicated website is tedious and can cause so many headaches for your company.

The cleaner and simpler your website code is, the better. And with clean and simple website code, you can make minor adjustments and updates with ease. This makes you more agile to add new products or services pages and meet the changing needs of your customers. Example: https://cransbaldwinllc.com/

Large companies prove simple design is effective

Over the last 10 years or so, designs have become simpler to adapt to the digital age. Take a look at some recent logo changes from large companies and you’ll see that fine details have disappeared in favor of raw simplicity.

There’s a good reason for that. Users stare at screens all day long, consuming information and gathering details about companies that interest them. This can lead to eye strain and mental fatigue.

So the simpler you can make your designs, the easier they’ll be for visitors to consume and the more likely they’ll be effective in earning new customers.

Simple website design services

If you’re convinced that it’s time to revise your website with a simpler design, contact Wieting Design. We offer clean, modern design services to help you meet the trends for 2021 and beyond. Improve your website’s conversion rates now by getting in touch with us.

Wieting Design offers modern websites that delight customers and turn website visitors into prospects. We have experience designing websites for a variety of industries and would love the opportunity to discuss your project with you. Contact us to learn more.

Wieting Design offers Graphic Design, Website Design, Search Engine Marketing, Video Production and Logo Design to our clients.