How does Web Design affect SEO and User Experience (UX)?

How does Web Design affect SEO and User Experience (UX)? It takes only 50 milliseconds for your users to form an opinion about your website. So if you don't make a positive impression, the user is likely to end up in the competition. It is clear that the aesthetics of your website is important when judging your services, but you should not forget two other aspects that you should not overlook, SEO and User Experience (UX) .

We all turn to search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo to find answers, so optimizing your website for SEO is essential, from my point of view more important than design, since SEO helps your site web can be found by your customers. If you put effort into design alone, it's like having a beautiful Mercedes-AMG F1 W11 EQ Performance without thinking about a strategy, going out for a run and wanting to dominate the market.

At the same time, your website design goes beyond aesthetics. A website with little User Experience (UX) not only makes navigation frustrating for your users when browsing your site; It also affects the positioning in which your website will appear in search engines such as Google.

Let's look at different aspects of web design and how they affect SEO and User Experience (UX):

The mobile version of your website

The use of mobile phones is unavoidable. There are an estimated 3.5 billion smartphone users and it's on the rise.

How does Web Design affect SEO and User Experience (UX)

Number of smartphone users worldwide from 2016 to 2021 (in billions). Source: Statista

With these figures, you will understand that the mobile version is not an option, it is a requirement. In fact, Google separately analyzes the indexing of your website in the mobile version when it comes to displaying the results. This means that Google will use the evaluation of the mobile version of your website in search results from mobile.

You must make sure that your site not only works in a mobile "user-friendly" version but that it is optimized for it.

Speed of your website

It doesn't matter how beautiful and well-designed your website is if it doesn't load quickly. If your page takes:

1 to 3 seconds the probability of abandonment increases by 32%
1 to 5 seconds the probability of abandonment increases by 90%
1 to 6 seconds the probability of abandonment increases by 106%
1 to 10 seconds the probability of abandonment increases by 123%

The ideal loading time for a user is below 3.3 seconds, which corresponds to the highest sales index.

Google of course uses load time as one of the many ranking factors. All things being equal, a website that loads faster than your website will rank higher in search results. Is your competitor's website faster than yours?

What can you do to make your website faster?

There are multiple posts that we have written about it, below you will find the most outstanding ones:

Improve your mobile website SEO with AMP
Lazy content on your website to improve SEO
Web performance, CDN & SEO
Is this the WWW we have dreamed of?
Why am I not getting enough sales on my website?
Universal Design Principles: cost-benefit
Does SEO have something to do with web development?

In summary, in reference to web design, it is about not overloading your website with high-resolution images or images that do not really add value to the content. You must find a balance between design and optimization.

Typography and color on your website

Typography and color is another aspect of web design that affects SEO and User Experience (UX). There is nothing more frustrating than arriving at a website with small text, typography, or color contrast making it difficult to read. If this is your case, most users will leave your website, you must make them feel comfortable. Without forgetting again the great Google with SEO, which will evaluate if the font size and color contrast are adequate to facilitate reading and navigation.

Having a professional web design is important and mandatory, but there are certain rules that must be taken into account. Use an appropriate font, font size, and color contrast to make your services easy to read on all devices, including computers, tablets, and mobile phones.

Conclusion

Web design, SEO, and User Experience (UX) go hand in hand. It is important to find a balance between them. Even with the best web design, your users are likely to leave your website without converting. Google, among others, is somehow the ones that set the rules of the game, and these rules are not simply technical, but rather that "the machine" has intelligence and is capable of discerning between what is optimal for human use and what is. no, this way Google can prioritize the millions of websites on the internet and offer you the best result every time you do "Search".