Colorful and animated designs, eye-catching themes, and creative imagery all work together to make your website more attractive, but did you know that they can also reduce the amount of traffic flowing to your website?

Websites are made for both users and search engines and common design mistakes can negatively affect your SEO efforts by lowering your ranking on popular search engines.

In this blog, we take a look at 4 web design mistakes that are hurting your SEO.

Large Media Files and Images

Large high-resolution images might be nice to look at, but if they increase page load speeds for your website they might also lower your search result rankings.

Users these days have short attention spans and longer loading image times are likely to make them move to another service provider. To solve this problem, you should compress large media files and use website speed tests that give you an idea of how fast your website loads.

Don’t Skip H1 Tags

Visually pleasing websites aren’t all that helpful if they don’t appear in search results. This happens often because website designers forget to add H1 tags. H1, or heading 1 tag, is perhaps the most vital component of an SEO effort and is the first thing a search engine crawler will attempt to locate in order to display results and compare different websites. Effective H1 tags include keywords, which make them pivotal to ranking the website higher. Designers usually remove these tags because they don’t find appropriate places for them on the main webpage, this lowers websites ranking.

Infinite Scroll Options

An infinite scroll refers to a specific design feature that allows online users to keep scrolling down a web page’s content. It’s an extremely popular technique that in most cases, negatively affects SEO performance because of how search engines crawl websites.

Let’s assume your blog page has 80 published blogs and has infinite scroll enabled to save users from the hassle of clicking “next” after every few blogs. It may seem convenient, however, a websites default settings only permits 10 blogs to be shown per page which means that whenever a search engine crawler goes through the webpage, it’ll only see 10 blogs and not register the remaining 70.

It is possible to make your webpage search-crawler friendly and aesthetically pleasing at the same time by following these instructions.

Text in Images

Unlike humans, search engines cannot “see” the content and if the text has been included into the image, it’s not registered by the search engine which can possibly render h1 tags and sub-headlines as useless.

Making your mark in the digital landscape requires web designs that are both aesthetically pleasing and SEO-friendly. Our website development services in Costa Rica help do just that and help businesses generate traffic and sales! Contact us today!