Looking at so many beautiful WordPress website themes, it difficult to stay ahead of the trends. But if you’re in the website design business, staying innovative and up with the times is a must do.
Website design is an adaptable and versatile field. Consequently, website designers must keep their skills sharp in order to craft the latest website designs. But unless you’re a professional website designer, your website may be outdated, not meeting latest website design trends.
Additionally, outdated WordPress website themes can also contain components which negatively impact your marketing efforts.
How Outdated Website Design Trends Can Hurt Your Business
We said it time and time again in many of our articles. That is, first impressions are everything and in web design, appearance and functionality is key. With only a few seconds to capture visitors’ attention, your website design must convince them to interact and stick around.
But the appearance and functionality of your website are just two of many components necessary for a great user experience. Lacking in any of these components will negatively effect your online marketing strategy.
Adobe was quick to point out that nearly 40% of people will stop engaging with a website if the content is unattractive. And Google concluded that people will continue to search different sites if they don’t like what they see on one.
Given these points, if your site is experiencing outdated website design trends, it should be improved. With this in mind, your WordPress website themes should not contain any of the following.
1) Misuse Of The Hamburger Menu
With almost every trend, it either gets overused or not used correctly at some point. Such is the case with the hamburger menu. In general, hamburger menus make the most sense on smaller devices. Because there’s minimal screen space on phones and tablets portrait, hamburger menus are best suited for these devices.
However, desktop websites somehow thought they would give this menu style a go as well. But the hamburger menus have been in existence long enough for people to understand its appropriate usage. Yes, the desktop site may look minimalistic, but it can also be confusing to desktop users.
How? Because it forces desktop website users to take an extra, unnecessary step to access your content. Not only that, but desktop hamburger menus can also impede your content’s discoverability.
So, when searching for WordPress website themes and menus, don’t order the hamburger.
2) Mobile-Friendly Websites
Not long after smartphones were introduced, mobile-friendly website design came along. Although friendly on mobile, sometimes users still had to pinch and zoom to properly adjust the content. In addition to that, they lacked information as well as website maintenance issues.
Enter responsive web design. This type of website design automatically adjusts to the device screen size being used to access a website. Thus, all content looks appealing on phones, tablet, laptops, as well as desktops.
Obviously, if your website is not responsive in 2022, then it’s following outdated website design trends. In 2018, 88% of the Alexa top 100 sites were mobile responsive.
3) Flash Websites
It’s hard to believe, but there are still websites that predominantly uses Flash. Yes, it was all that and a bag of chips back in the day. Almost every website had those awesome animations that Flash made possible. However, Flash is no longer an industry standard for animations and scripts.
Its usage began to dwindle as mobile device usage skyrocketed in 2007. Flash-driven websites began to decline in traffic due to limited functionality on mobile devices. In fact, Apple blocked all Flash content from being viewed on their devices. And shortly after, Google made the same decision. Some of Apple’s reasons were to protect the devices’ battery life. Also that Flash did not support the touch capabilities of smartphones.
Given these points and many others, better search rankings will not come if you have a Flash websites. Yes, beautiful animations can be made with Flash. But Flash websites do not include many SEO basics such as image alt tags and title tags.
If your website still relies on Flash to function, then it’s following outdated website design trends. There are many WordPress website themes with beautiful animations that are made with pure CSS or various types of plugins.
4) Homepage Carousels
Website designers and developers alike agree that having a carousel on the homepage slows down the site load time. However, we still get such requests from many of our clients, even after we give them the facts. So, we do as they ask because they’ve been given professional advice.
The original purpose of carousels was to catch and maintain visitors’ attention. However, research shows that carousels do just the opposite. Back in 2013, a study was done of over 3,000,000 websites during a 6-month time span. The result was that only 1% of visitors actually clicked on the carousel. Of those visitors, 89% only clicked on the first slide.
With such a depressing click-through rate, it’s easy to see why astute marketers abandoned the trend. Since this space is above the fold, it could be better used for other marketing purposes. If your site still uses carousels, consider an alternative before your conversions plummet to the point of no return.
Looking for the latest trends in website design? You’ve come to the right place. Get in touch today and discover how we can enhance on business online presence with a beautiful website design!
About the Author
Christina is the Web Content Director at Envisager Studio. She leads the content creation process and ensures tone and key messaging personifies the client’s brand and engages target markets. In her spare time, she writes about content marketing, content management, and website content.
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