Did you know that 75% of users judge a company’s credibility based on their website design?
With more and more consumers judging and basing their first impressions of a business on their web design, it’s mandatory to have a custom web design that stands out.
A website’s user experience (UX) is not just about how a website looks, but how effectively it can help visitors find what they are looking for. This can be by guiding users toward making a purchase, finding information, or even staying engaged and distraction-free.
This is where custom web design shines the most. Unlike your typical generic themes and templates that thousands of other websites have, a custom web design lets you optimize performance and create a unique identity for your brand.
This article will go through 9 of the ways that a custom web design can improve UX and what it really means for your business in the long run.
Trying to build a custom web design for your business but don’t know where to start? Let us help.
Our Top 9 Ways Custom Web Design Improves UX
This list is in no particular order. Every point should be taken into consideration when creating a custom web design for your business. Make sure to take notes and strategize how to implement each one into your project.
1. Custom Navigation
One of the first things any visitor will notice when going to your website is the navigation.
If they are not able to find what they are looking for quickly, then your website has failed them, and they will leave out of frustration.
The goal of a website is to guide new visitors toward everything they need.
Visitors shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to find what they are looking for. They should be able to find all of your products or services in fewer than 10 clicks.
When looking at your website, ask yourself these questions: “Can a visitor find what they need?” “Can they use the layout intuitively?”.
You shouldn’t expect visitors to know how your website works at all. This means that your website should always be as simple as it can be without treating your visitors like kids in the process.
Here are some ways that a custom web design can enable this.
- Implementing advanced features such as filtering, contextual navigation, predictive search, and user-specific shortcuts.
- Easy to map out user personas and journeys early in the design process to help show customers what they truly want to see.
- Avoids the generic menu structures that come with templates and that usually have bloat and unnecessary buttons.
Good navigation is a must for any website, and a custom web design can help you achieve this from the start.
2. Performance & Load Speed Optimization
Your website can look amazing and have a perfect layout, but none of that will matter if it takes too long to load.
While navigation and looks are vital, nothing is more important than good performance and speed optimization.
If your website takes too long to load, then users will simply find an alternative that loads faster, even if its products or services are worse than yours.
Slow load times are often a problem with generic templates since they aren’t focused on speed and efficiency, but purely on looks. As you add content to them, you start to notice how slow each page loads.
With a custom web design, you’re able to remove any sort of bloat or unnecessary parts from each of your pages.
Since you build every page from scratch, you can add or remove as many things as needed to find that load time sweet spot.
You can optimize your images and use modern formats such as WebP to further compress and reduce load times. You can even test and monitor your website to find which changes made the biggest impact on your site.
Website optimization will always be a top priority when creating your own custom web design and should be taken into consideration when structuring each page.
3. Mobile Responsiveness
When more than half of the web traffic going to your website is from mobile devices, ensuring that your website runs perfectly on any mobile device is vital.
A custom web design lets you have a mobile-first mindset that helps you build a responsive website from the start.
In most cases, a generic template either has subpar mobile responsiveness or none at all.
Users now expect websites to simply work regardless of the device they are using and expect them to look good on their preferred device as well.
This also means that they expect your website to work just as well on desktop as it does on mobile, especially when it comes to navigation and accessibility.
A clear lack of mobile responsiveness can completely kill any chances of conversions with visitors due to how frustrating it is to navigate through your website.
And to make matters worse, not having a responsive design can and will directly impact your SEO efforts. Google uses a mobile-first indexing system, so having a website that isn’t responsive or optimized for mobile devices will directly affect your visibility and organic reach.
A custom web design lets you not rely on pre-built responsive features and instead add only the features that your website needs. You can customize breakpoints, adapt images and media for different types of devices, adjust micro-interactions for touch devices, and more.
It’s also easier to test and modify user flows on different devices with a custom web design over a template with clear restrictions.
Explore how we increased Bonanno Concepts’ engagement time by 356% in our most recent case study.
4. Brand Identity & Consistency
Your user experience isn’t only tied to how your website works; it’s also about how it feels.
Brand identity plays a giant role when it comes to the feel of your website. A website should be able to convey your brand identity in a way that builds trust, recognition, and engagement.
Most visitors will judge your website’s credibility and professionalism based on how your pages look and feel.
This means that having consistent branding through the use of different elements such as colors, imagery, tone of voice, and even typography is mandatory to reinforce familiarity.
A unique identity helps you stand out from your competitors, and that goes for your website as well.
Since you’re building from the ground up with a custom web design, you can integrate your brand’s visual identity as early as you want.
From layouts, animations, micro-interactions, and graphic elements that reflect your brand’s personality.
A custom web design also lets you avoid template fatigue, which is when a lot of websites share the same template and dilute the effectiveness of the template itself.
While brand identity isn’t directly tied to UX like others on this list, it’s still a must if you want to make a lasting impression on anyone who visits your website.
5. Accessibility
An overlooked aspect of UX is accessibility.
While it might not seem like a big deal, having good accessibility can bring in new traffic and stop any potential legal issues that might arise.
Good accessibility’s main reason is to help people with disabilities interact with your website in the easiest way possible. A custom website lets you add all of the accessibility features you want while building your website instead of it being a random extra included with a generic website.
Having an accessible website means even more users can interact with your website and potentially become customers.
If anyone with a disability is unable to interact with your website, then they might become frustrated and leave a bad review on your website and social media.
Some accessibility features can also improve the quality of your website for everyone, such as better contrast, simpler navigation, and easier flows.
Accessibility is a must for any website that takes itself seriously and wants everyone to find out about its products and services.
6. Conversion-Focused Design
Good UX isn’t just nice to have; it’s ideal if you want to increase your conversions.
Whether you’re trying to convince them to purchase something, sign up, download a PDF, or ask for an inquiry. Custom web design helps you take control over how your website guides visitors through your website to those specific outcomes.
A poorly placed CTA or unclear pathing toward your products can make it so users leave before they even get a chance to interact with what truly matters.
Nowadays, users expect websites to anticipate what they need, so creating next steps, such as going to checkout after they pick a product, is important.
A custom web design lets you map flows and design every single page with the goal of leading visitors exactly where you want them to go.
You can also design CTAs that stand out via color, placement, wording, and how visitors interact with them.
If you want to optimize even further, you can create custom landing pages and conduct multiple A/B tests that help find the perfect configuration for each page.
This is entirely different from a template where the most you can change is the color and content.
7. Scalability & Future-Proofing
A website is never static. Over time, your website will add new products or services, change its target audience, and implement different technologies. It’s mandatory for your website to be able to adapt to new changes quickly.
A custom web development lets you do just that. You have a foundation where you can build and scale as much as you want.
A site built on a generic template, on the other hand, can’t do any of this and struggles to scale over time. These templates generally limit the number of pages too unless you pay extra.
This means that any sort of restructuring or scaling project will be difficult overall when compared to a custom web design.
With a custom web design, you have full control over your codebase, hosting, architecture, integration points, and more. This means that you can build with growth in mind without ever worrying about page limits.
It also means that you don’t have to deal with constant issues that will occur with templates, such as a lack of page flexibility.
By having a custom web design, you future-proof your website and ensure that your UX is always good, regardless of how much you grow.
8. Improved SEO
You can’t have exceptional SEO without a good web design.
Users who have a good time browsing through your website are more likely to stay, engage, and convert. This is something that search engines take note of.
Custom web design gives you complete control over the technical aspects of your website, which means that you can customize and tweak it for better SEO.
Technical issues tend to slow down a website; therefore, they harm your SEO rankings. This is why fixing any issue on your website and testing that it’s working is a priority over others.
Having full access to your website also means that you can ensure clean and efficient code that doesn’t have unnecessary code plastered in, like many generic templates do.
You can also structure your pages in a way that benefits SEO and makes it easier for visitors to understand what the page is all about.
SEO is at the core of most, if not all, strategies, so ensuring that you’re doing the best job possible to improve it is mandatory.
Learn how we improved Vertx’s user engagement time by 58% with a custom web design in our latest case study.
9. Emotional Engagement & Memorable Experiences
Despite not directly impacting functionality, a powerful benefit of a custom web design is how it can create memorable and emotionally engaging experiences.
You can create a story with animations, interactive features, micro-interactions, scroll-triggered events, and an immersive layout that helps you drive your brand story.
You can also adapt your content based on the user persona you’re focusing on, which helps your content feel a lot more personal instead of having the same generic content for everything.
It’s also possible to build trust and authenticity through design alone. Images of real people, thoughtful micro-interactions, and a consistent voice all help visitors feel more comfortable with your brand before even making a single purchase.
Get a Custom Web Design That Converts With Blacksmith
After going through 9 of these best custom web design strategies that enhance UX, it’s easy to notice how much better it is to use a custom web design over a template.
That being said, it also comes at a cost of more work and maintenance. It could take you weeks to organize and create a custom web design for your website, and that’s without even taking into account actual implementation and monthly maintenance.
This is time you could be using for other aspects of your business. So what now?
That’s where we come in. Blacksmith is a professional web design agency with a group of expert web developers and web designers ready to create the perfect website for your business. We will ensure that your website not only stands out from the competition, but that it performs the best as well.
Unsure if investing in a custom web design is a good idea for your business? Don’t worry, click here to schedule a call with us and we’ll provide you with a free audit. This way, we can show you the areas where a lack of custom web design is making your current website suffer, and what we can do to fix it.
