Redesigning your website is a great way to refresh your brand and better cater your online presence to your current audience. However, in the excitement of redesigning your website, you might find yourself drawn to some features that actually aren’t going to be helpful to you, either from a user intent or an SEO standpoint.
To help ensure that you don’t fall victim to these often used but rarely beneficial design features, here are three features you should not include when redesigning your website.
Image Carousels
If you have a lot of great images for your business, you might be tempted to showcase them all on your website as much as possible. In this type of situation, putting an image carousel on your homepage or subsequent pages throughout your website might seem like a good idea to you. But according to online marketing guru Neil Patel, image carousels are almost always a bad idea.
Especially if the image carousel moves by itself, the images might move faster or slower than your visitors actually want. In either of these situations, the perceived benefits of an image carousel won’t be achieved for your audience. If the images move too quickly, you might find that your visitors get overwhelmed or distracted. And if the images move too slowly, it’s as if you had a static image there anyway. So to resolve this problem, it’s best to just use a static image in the first place.
Complicated Navigation Menus
Having a lot of pages on your website can be a good thing if it helps your audience get the information they need and allows them plenty of products or services to choose from. But if you’re posting each one of these pages from your main navigation, you’ve likely over-complicated things.
Rather than going this route, it’s best to keep your main navigation menus fairly simple and straightforward. With an uncomplicated main navigation menu, Loren Baker, a contributor to Search Engine Journal, shares that you can still have a great internal linking structure that keeps all relevant content together through sub-navigation.
Long Video Content
Video content can be a great way to hook your audience and get them interested in what you’re offering and who your company is. However, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing, even with video content.
If your videos are too long, Kovacs David, a contributor to LifeHack.org, shares that your audience may lose their patience for you and your content. And since this is the last thing you want to have happen after just redesigning your website, it’s best to keep your videos to ones that can be short and sweet.
If you’re going to be redesigning your website soon and adding new and improved features and content, consider using the tips mentioned above to ensure that you don’t make some of the most common mistakes.