Website Design Best Practices That Turn Visitors Into Customers

01Build Navigation That Matches How People Think

A confusing menu is the fastest way to lose a visitor. According to Clutch research, 94% of people cite easy navigation as the most important website feature.

Your navigation should reflect what your visitors are looking for, not how your company is organized internally. We see this mistake constantly with small business websites in Colorado. The business owner builds the menu around internal departments (About, Team, History, Philosophy), when visitors just want to know what you do, who you do it for, and how to get started.

What good navigation looks like:

• 5-7 top-level items maximum
• Service pages grouped logically under a single dropdown
• Contact or CTA visible on every page without scrolling
• Breadcrumb trails on sites with more than 20 pages

What it costs you to ignore this: Visitors who can’t find what they need in 2-3 clicks leave. A Highlands-area professional services firm we worked with in Denver cut their bounce rate by 22% just by simplifying their top nav from 11 items to 6 and adding a sticky “Get a Quote” button.

02Design for Mobile First, Desktop Second

More than 60% of web traffic comes from mobile devices (StatCounter, 2025). If your site was designed for desktop and then “made responsive,” you’re doing it backwards.

Mobile-first design means you build the phone experience first, then scale up. This forces you to prioritize content hierarchy because you don’t have room for everything. That constraint produces better design decisions.

What to check on your mobile site:

• Buttons large enough to tap with a thumb (minimum 44×44 pixels)
• No horizontal scrolling on any page
• Forms with minimal fields (name, email, phone is enough for most lead gen)
• Text readable without zooming

What it costs you to ignore this: Google uses mobile-first indexing, meaning it evaluates your mobile site for rankings, not your desktop version. A slow, clunky mobile experience hurts both user experience and search visibility.

Here’s what we stopped recommending to clients: designing for desktop first and then “making it responsive.” That workflow made sense in 2015. Today it produces bloated layouts that get crammed onto small screens. Start with the phone. If it works there, it’ll work everywhere.

03Speed Up or Lose Them

Every second of load time costs you money. Google’s Core Web Vitals research shows that as page load time increases from 1 to 3 seconds, bounce probability increases by 32%.

Most small business websites load in 4-6 seconds. That’s too slow.

The biggest speed killers we find on client sites:

• Uncompressed images (the #1 offender, every time)
• Too many plugins on WordPress sites
• Unoptimized fonts loading from external servers
• Autoplay videos on the homepage
• Bloated page builders adding unnecessary code

How to check your speed: Run your URL through Google PageSpeed Insights. Aim for a performance score above 80 on mobile. Below 50 means you’re actively losing visitors.

What it costs you to ignore this: Slow pages don’t just frustrate visitors. Google factors those same Core Web Vitals into rankings, including Interaction to Next Paint (INP), which measures how fast your site responds when someone clicks a button or taps a link. A slow site loses twice: once with the visitor, once with the algorithm.

04Use Visual Hierarchy to Guide Decisions

Visual hierarchy is how you control what visitors see first, second, and third on every page. Size, color, contrast, and spacing all direct the eye.

Most small business websites treat every element as equally important. When everything is bold, nothing is. High converting website design uses hierarchy to walk the visitor from headline to proof to action.

The basics:

• One primary headline per page (your H1). Make it specific.
• Subheadings that tell a story even if someone only reads those
• Contrast to draw the eye to your CTA (if your button blends into the background, it’s invisible)
• Whitespace around important elements. Crowding kills clarity.

What it costs you to ignore this: Visitors scan. They don’t read top to bottom. If your most important message (what you do, who it’s for, what to do next) isn’t visually dominant, it gets missed. We’ve seen conversion rate improvements of 15-25% from hierarchy fixes alone, no copy changes, no redesign, just restructuring what’s already there.

05Write for Scanners, Not Readers

NNGroup research confirms what every marketer suspects: people scan web pages in F-shaped patterns. They read the first line or two, then skim down the left side looking for something relevant.

This means your best content is wasted if it’s buried in a paragraph.

How to format for scanning:

• Short paragraphs (2-3 sentences max)
• Subheadings that communicate value on their own
• Bullet points for any list of 3+ items
• Bold text on key phrases, not full sentences
• One idea per paragraph

What it costs you to ignore this: Walls of text signal “this will take effort.” Visitors decide in seconds if a page is worth their time. If your service page has 8 dense paragraphs before getting to your offering, most people won’t make it past the third.

06Place CTAs Where They’ll Actually Get Clicked

A CTA buried at the bottom of a page is a CTA nobody sees. But plastering “BUY NOW” every 200 words isn’t the answer either. Strategic placement beats aggressive repetition.

CTA placement that works for small business websites:

• Above the fold: One soft CTA near the top (“Get a Free Consultation” or “See Our Work”)
• Mid-page: After you’ve demonstrated expertise or shown results. This is where the reader is most convinced.
• End of page: A final CTA that gives the visitor a specific next step

Design details that affect click rates:

• Button color should contrast with the page background
• Use action language (“Get Your Free Audit” beats “Submit”)
• Surround the CTA with whitespace, don’t crowd it

What it costs you to ignore this: Your site can have great content and strong traffic, but if the conversion path is unclear, visitors leave without acting. We’ve seen CRO audit results where simply moving a CTA from the footer to mid-page doubled the click-through rate.

07Stop Ignoring Accessibility

Accessibility isn’t just a legal checkbox. It’s a design practice that improves the experience for everyone.

About 1 in 4 adults in the U.S. have a disability that affects how they use websites. If your site doesn’t work for them, you’re excluding a significant portion of potential customers.

Baseline accessibility checks for any business website:

• Alt text on every image (describes the image, not keyword stuffing)
• Sufficient color contrast (4.5:1 ratio minimum for body text)
• All interactive elements reachable by keyboard
• Form labels clearly associated with their fields
• No information communicated only through color

What it costs you to ignore this: Beyond the ethical and legal dimensions, accessibility improvements tend to help all users. Clear labels, readable contrast, and logical tab order make any site easier to use. That translates to lower bounce rates and higher conversions for everyone.

08Kill the Clutter (Including Your Hero Slider)

This is our contrarian take: hero sliders (rotating image carousels at the top of your homepage) are one of the most popular website design features and one of the least effective.

Studies from the NNGroup show that auto-advancing content gets ignored. Users treat it like an ad and scroll past. Meanwhile, that slider is loading 3-5 large images and slowing your page down. Sliders are also an accessibility problem. Screen readers struggle to parse auto-advancing content, and users with motor impairments can’t reliably click a slide before it rotates away.

What to do instead:

• One strong headline with a clear value proposition
• One supporting image or short video (not autoplay)
• One CTA above the fold
• Remove any element that doesn’t serve the conversion goal

The same principle applies to every page: Every design element should earn its place. If it doesn’t support the visitor’s decision or move them toward a next step, it’s clutter.

09Website Design Best Practices Start With Testing

Even the best practices are still guesses until you measure results. Your site should never be “done.”

What to track:

• Conversion rate by page (not just site-wide)
• Bounce rate on key landing pages
• Scroll depth (are people reading to the CTA?)
• Click maps (tools like Hotjar show where visitors actually click)

What to test:

• CTA button color and placement
• Headline variations
• Form length (fewer fields usually wins)
• Page layout changes on high-traffic pages

What it costs you to ignore this: You’ll keep making design decisions based on opinion instead of data. And opinions, even experienced ones, are wrong more often than you’d think. The businesses that grow fastest are the ones that treat their website like a product, always improving based on what the numbers say.

Frequently Asked Questions About Website Design Best Practices