Web Design Stats You Need to Know - and How to Leverage These for Your Agency
How do you keep building value for web design clients? More importantly, how do you communicate that value to clients?
It’s a common question by most web design agencies.
Web design is a competitive market, and agencies often face stiff competition both from other agencies and independent freelancers who may attempt to undercut them on price. If you design websites for a client, it’s important to have the capacity to demonstrate how your services lead directly to tangible benefits for the client and their business.
The key lies in demonstrating value in clear and jargon-free terms. Even if you’re working with white label web design services, you need to prepare a pitch that puts you and your client on the same page. With this in mind, I’ve prepared some eye-opening web design statistics that you can leverage when talking to your clients.
The building blocks of web design
Let’s start with something that is of great importance to web designers but practically invisible to their clients – the infrastructure upon which the website is based. When agencies ask which script to use for building the site, most clients will just look blankly at you. Many will have no idea about the relative merits of Javascript, C++, or Python. They won’t understand how their choice in programming languages can have tangible, meaningful benefits for them.
If you’re working with HTML5, for instance, you can use the following stats to explain its benefits to clients:
● Only 27% of website use HTML5, but these websites account for 49% of all pageviews
● HTML5 shows a 2.5% growth
● All other languages show 1% growth
The takeaway: Switching to HTML5 can more than double your clients’ pageviews.
What is it that makes HTML 5 so appealing? To put it in client-friendly terms:
● Its robust enough to meet the ever-changing demands of clients’ websites
● It offers great mobile support, making it perfect for responsive websites (essential in an era where most customers will access your clients’ sites from mobile devices)
● When running within a web browser, it is not tied to the underlying operating system and won’t slow down the OS when multitasking.
Your clients want a website that is fast and responsive, conducive to mobile optimization, which brings us to…
Page load times
In the mobile era, your clients know that their customers have increasingly narrow attention spans. They know enough about their customer’s browsing habits and how they access websites in fleeting moments. This means that page load times are important for clients. Research demonstrates that page load times can play an increasingly large role when it comes to bounce rates.
Faster page load times can lead directly to traffic growth, while pages with longer loading times contribute to nothing more than bounce rates:
- A page load time of 4 seconds can double your bounce rate, while a page load time of 8 seconds can increase bounce rates by 150%
- 40% of web users will abandon a page if the page load time is more than 3 seconds
- Pages that have a load time of one second or more experiencing growth of 4.6%
The average website bounce rate is around 40-55%. If you can demonstrate ways in which you can reduce this by tweaking the site architecture to reduce load times, it can build value in your services.
Implications of layout and aesthetics
A customer’s first experience with a brand often happens on the website. As such, your clients may want to make aesthetic choices in line with their branding. This may have implications for their choices when it comes to design and layout. While you can accommodate design requests, decisions made on aesthetics can have a tangible impact on how users respond to the website.
For example, color has a direct impact on traffic growth. When it comes to the color scheme of websites, the following stats will be useful when pitching web design to clients:
● Red was shown to be damaging to growth rates, reducing them by 1.35%
● Yellow showed the lowest growth rate at 0.1%
● Orange showed a growth rate of 0.7%
● Purple showed a growth rate of 1.2%
● Blue showed a growth rate of 2%
● Green emerged the winner with growth of 3%
● Sites with darker color schemes showed growth of 2%, while sites with lighter color schemes showed slower growth at 1.3%
Demonstrating this knowledge to your clients can help them understand that aesthetic and color choices are made strategically and not arbitrarily.
Understanding the way users interact with the layout of a website can help clients make more informed choices. Some of the stats you can use in support of this are:
● Most web users navigate websites in an F-shaped pattern, looking from left to right, top to bottom, and left to right again
● Horizontally designed pages encourage users to read in a Z shape, going from left to right, top right to bottom left, and then left to right again
● Most users only scan the first few words of subheads, paragraphs, and bullet points
● You have most of your users’ attention in the first 2 paragraphs of your website’s content
● 70% of users look at lists with bullet points
The choices you make build trust and value
Finally, it’s important to be able to demonstrate that the choices you help clients make can build trust and value in their brand, strengthening its appeal for their target audiences. A shocking 94% of web users say that design choices affect whether or not they trust a certain website.
Show your clients that you can build trust in their brand by:
● Avoiding stock photos and ready-made themes
● Showcasing social media followers
● Displaying the names and logos of prominent clients
● Including high authority links to media coverage
By using with these statistics, you can develop a more effective pitch and highlight how your expertise can address the web design needs of your clients.