Why should you care if your website looks good?

Photo by Nick Russill on Unsplash

Short answer: because people judge your business by your website before they read a single word, and the numbers show that judgement affects trust, engagement and sales.

"As long as it works, who cares how it looks?" It's a fair question. Your products are good, your prices are fair, your customers are happy. Why spend money making a website prettier?

Because your visitors don't know any of that yet. All they have is the page in front of them, and research has been very clear about what they do with it.

You have about 50 milliseconds

In 2006, researchers led by Gitte Lindgaard at Carleton University showed people web pages for just 50 milliseconds, roughly the blink of an eye. Participants still formed an opinion about the page's visual appeal, and those snap judgements closely matched the ratings people gave after looking for longer.

The first impression also sticks. Psychologists call it the halo effect: if a site looks good, people tend to forgive small flaws and even rate its content more favourably. If it looks bad, they go looking for reasons to leave.

Your visitors decide how they feel about your business before they've read your offer, your prices or your reviews.

Looking good means looking trustworthy

Stanford's Persuasive Technology Lab asked 2,684 people to evaluate the credibility of real websites and then analysed what they wrote. The most common theme by far was the site's visual design: it came up in 46.1% of all comments, ahead of information structure and content.

Google's own research from 2012 adds an important detail. People rated simple designs, and designs that look the way they expect for that type of site, as more beautiful than cluttered or unusual ones.

So "looking good" doesn't mean flashy. It means clean, clear and familiar, like the modern sites your customers already use every day.

Unattractive sites lose people

Adobe's State of Content report found that 38% of people will stop engaging with a website if its content or layout is unattractive. The same research found that, given 15 minutes, two-thirds of people would rather read something beautifully designed than something plain.

That's more than a third of your visitors leaving because of how the page looks, not because of what you sell.

Modern also means fast

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

A modern site isn't just about colours and fonts. Older sites are often heavy and slow, and speed has a direct effect on whether people stay:

• According to Google, the probability of a visitor bouncing rises by 32% when load time goes from 1 to 3 seconds, and by 90% at 5 seconds.
• Google also found that 53% of mobile visitors leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load.
• In a study commissioned by Google and carried out by Deloitte and fifty-five, improving mobile speed by just 0.1 seconds raised conversion rates by 8.4% for retail sites and 10.1% for travel sites. Retail customers also spent 9.2% more.

And many of those visitors are on a phone. In Poland, roughly 4 in 10 page views now come from mobile devices. A site built before smartphones took over often isn't readable on them at all.

Signs your website is stuck in 2010

If any of these sound familiar, your site may be quietly turning customers away:

• It doesn't fit on a phone. Visitors have to pinch and zoom to read anything.
• The browser says "Not secure". Without an SSL certificate, modern browsers warn people before they even see your page.
• The footer says © 2014. Or the news section was last updated years ago.
• It's slow. Huge images, sliders and old plugins take ages to load.
• Things are broken. Dead links, missing images, a contact form that doesn't send.
• It just looks old. Tiny text, cramped layouts, dated fonts and colours.

To a visitor, an outdated website raises a simple question: is this business still open? Many won't stick around to find out.

The numbers at a glance

Some of these studies are years old. But people haven't become more patient or less visual since then, and newer research keeps pointing in the same direction.

A modern website costs less than you think

A modern website doesn't have to be a huge project. For most small businesses, a clean, fast, mobile-friendly site with clear contact options is exactly what's needed, and it's often more affordable than people expect.

And you don't have to deal with the technical side. When you work with us, we handle the overhead: hosting, domain setup, the SSL certificate and everything else that keeps the site running. You get a website that looks like your business today, not like it did fifteen years ago.

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Website Refinery builds websites from scratch, refines existing ones, and creates web and mobile apps. Tell us about your project.

Sources

• Nature: Web users judge sites in the blink of an eye (Lindgaard et al.)
• Stanford / Consumer WebWatch: How Do People Evaluate a Web Site's Credibility?
• CXL: Why simple websites are scientifically better (Google research, 2012)
• HubSpot: Website design statistics (Adobe State of Content)
• Think with Google: Page load time statistics
• Think with Google: Mobile page speed industry benchmarks
• web.dev: Milliseconds Make Millions
• StatCounter: Desktop vs mobile market share in Poland