You can have the most beautiful website in your industry and still convert almost no visitors into enquiries or sales. The reason is almost always UX. User experience design determines whether someone who lands on your website can quickly understand what you offer, trust your brand, and take the action you want them to take. Here are the 7 most common UX mistakes we see and exactly how to fix each one.

No Clear Call to Action Above the Fold

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The ‘above the fold’ area is everything visible on your website before a visitor scrolls. If there is no clear, prominent call to action in this space, a button, a form, or a link, you are missing your highest-impact conversion opportunity. How to fix it: Place a single, clear primary CTA button in the hero section of your homepage. Use direct, action-oriented language: ‘Get a Free Quote’, ‘Book a Consultation’, ‘Contact Us Today’. Make it visually prominent — contrasting colour, readable font, adequate size.

Cluttered Navigation With Too Many Options

Paradox of choice applies to website navigation. When visitors are presented with 10 menu items, they take longer to decide and are more likely to leave without taking any action. Navigation should guide visitors to the most important pages — not overwhelm them with every option simultaneously.

How to fix it: Limit your main navigation to 5–7 items maximum. Move secondary pages (Privacy Policy, Terms and Conditions, individual team member pages) to a footer menu. If you have many services, group them under a single ‘Services’ dropdown rather than listing each one separately.

Forms That Are Too Long or Too Complicated

Every additional field in a contact form reduces the number of people who will complete it. Research shows that reducing a form from 11 fields to 4 can increase completion rates by over 120%. Most businesses ask for far more information than they need at the initial enquiry stage.

How to fix it: Reduce your contact form to the minimum required: name, email or phone, and a brief description of what they need. You will gather the rest of the information in your follow-up conversation. A shorter form that gets submitted is more valuable than a comprehensive form that doesn’t.

Inconsistent Visual Design That Breaks Trust

When fonts change unexpectedly between pages, button colours are inconsistent, or some pages look clearly older than others, visitors unconsciously register this inconsistency as a trust signal — and not a positive one. Visual inconsistency communicates lack of attention to detail.

How to fix it: Establish and follow a clear visual style guide for your website. This covers: the specific fonts used for headings and body text, the primary and secondary brand colours, button styles, and image treatment. Every page should feel like it belongs to the same website.

Mistake 5: No Mobile-First Thinking in the Design Process

Many websites are still designed on desktop and then ‘made responsive’ as an afterthought. The result is a mobile experience that technically works but feels cramped, awkward, and difficult to navigate. Given that the majority of Sri Lankan internet users browse on mobile, this is a critical error.

How to fix it: Start every design decision with mobile in mind first. How does this section look on a 375px wide screen? Is this button easy to tap with a thumb? Is this text readable without zooming? Build for mobile first, then enhance for larger screens.

Slow Page Speed Caused by Design Choices

Many UX and design decisions directly impact page speed — and page speed directly impacts both user experience and Google rankings. Large uncompressed images, excessive animations, heavy video backgrounds, and too many font files all add load time.

How to fix it: Compress all images before uploading. Use WebP format instead of PNG or JPG where possible. Avoid full-page video backgrounds on mobile. Limit the number of font families to two. Test your page speed monthly using Google PageSpeed Insights and address any issues flagged.

No User Journey — Visitors Don’t Know What to Do Next

Every page of your website should have a clear next step for the visitor. This is called the user journey — the path you want visitors to follow from their first landing point to the action you want them to take. Without a deliberate journey, visitors browse without purpose and leave without engaging.

How to fix it: Map out the 2–3 most common visitor paths on your website. For each path, ensure there is a clear, logical next step at the end of every page. A service page should lead to a contact or quote page. A blog post should lead to a related service page. No page should be a dead end.

How to Audit Your Website UX for Free

You do not need a UX expert to identify the biggest problems on your website. Use these approaches to get an honest assessment:

  • Ask someone who has never seen your website to complete a task — find your pricing, submit an enquiry, find your location. Watch without helping and note every moment of confusion
  • Use Hotjar (free tier available) to record visitor sessions and see exactly where people click, scroll, and where they leave
  • Check your Google Analytics bounce rate by page — pages with high bounce rates often have UX problems
  • Test your website on an actual mobile device, not just a browser resize
 

“The goal of UX design is not to make a website that looks impressive — it is to make a website that works effortlessly for the person using it.”