Why Your Website Looks Great but Still Fails to Convert

It is a specific and maddening situation. You paid properly. The site looks better than anything your competitors have. The photography is good, the type is set well, everything lines up. And the enquiries have not moved.

The instinct is to assume something subtle is wrong with the design, and to go looking for a designer to find it. Usually the design is not the problem. It is doing its job — arguably too well.

Good-looking pages buy real goodwill

This is not a matter of taste. As Nielsen Norman Group documents, the aesthetic-usability effect describes users’ tendency to perceive attractive products as more usable. It was first studied by Kurosu and Kashimura at the Hitachi Design Center in 1995, who found that people’s assessments of how usable an interface was tracked how attractive they found it more closely than they tracked how usable it actually was.

In practical terms, a positive emotional response to a visual design makes people more tolerant of minor problems. Your handsome site is buying you patience. The same article is careful about the limit, though: a pretty design makes users forgiving of minor usability problems, not large ones. Past a certain size of obstacle, the goodwill runs out and the visitor leaves anyway.

Which is why nobody tells you what went wrong

Here is the consequence that catches businesses out. When someone struggles on an ugly site, they blame the site. When they struggle on an attractive one, they are more likely to assume they have missed something obvious, feel mildly stupid, and quietly leave. You get no complaint, no email, no feedback form. Just a visit that ended.

So the ordinary sources of information dry up exactly when you need them. Your existing clients say the site looks great, because it does and because they already know what you do. Your designer says it tests fine, because they know where everything is. Meanwhile the person you actually needed — a stranger with a problem and twenty minutes — has been and gone without leaving a trace. Three patterns account for most of what they ran into, and the useful thing about them is that each one reads completely differently depending on which side of the design review you are sitting on.

None of those is a fault a designer would be embarrassed by. They are all consequences of optimising for how a page looks in a presentation rather than how it behaves for a stranger in a hurry.

Beautiful and complicated are not the same thing

There is a second finding worth putting alongside the first, because it cuts against the way expensive sites are usually built. Tuch and colleagues, in the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies in 2012, tested 119 real websites and found that low visual complexity and high prototypicality — how closely a page resembles what people expect that kind of page to look like — produced the most positive first impressions, with the effect detectable at 17 milliseconds.

Simplicity and familiarity are doing the work, not sophistication. A site that has been made distinctive by inventing new patterns — an unconventional menu, a horizontal scroll, a hero that has to finish animating before it makes sense — is buying complexity with money it thought it was spending on beauty. If your redesign made the site more elaborate, it is entirely possible it made the first impression worse while making the portfolio shot better.

The failure is usually in the words

When a good-looking site does not convert, the missing thing is almost always information rather than design. Nielsen Norman Group analysed 45,237 page views in 2008 and concluded that on an average page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit, with 20% the likelier figure. It is an old study, but nothing since has suggested people started reading more.

If a fifth of your words get read, they had better be the ones that answer the question the visitor arrived with. Most attractive sites fail here in the same way: the copy was written to fit the design. Someone needed forty characters for the hero, so the headline became something short and evocative rather than something specific and useful. Consider a design studio whose homepage says “Work that moves people”. Handsome, unarguable, and it tells a prospective client nothing about sector, service, scale or price. The competitor whose homepage says “Brand and packaging design for independent food and drink brands” wins the enquiry without winning the design award.

• Say what you sell in the words a customer would use, not the words your industry uses
• Name who it is for, and by implication who it is not for
• Give a price, a range, or an explanation of how you charge
• Show the work, with enough context to tell what the job actually was
• Make the next step unmissable and obvious on every page

Every item on that list is a writing job, not a design job, and every one of them can be done inside the design you already paid for.

The failures nobody can see

There is a final category worth checking, because visual polish gives no protection against it at all. The WebAIM Million, an automated scan of the top million home pages, found detected WCAG 2 failures on 95.9% of them, averaging 56.1 errors per page. Automated testing only catches what a machine can catch, so that is a floor rather than a ceiling.

Handsome sites are, if anything, more prone to some of these: pale grey text on white because it looks refined, buttons that are icons with no label, form fields whose only label is placeholder text that vanishes when you type. Each of those is a deliberate aesthetic choice that makes the page harder to use — and the aesthetic-usability effect means a proportion of visitors will blame themselves for the difficulty rather than the page.

How to find out what is actually wrong

You do not need an agency to diagnose this, and you should not start with a redesign. You need to watch a stranger use the thing.

The uncomfortable truth about a beautiful site that does not convert is that the beauty was never the problem and is rarely the solution. It bought you a few seconds of goodwill, which is genuinely worth having. What you do with those seconds is a separate decision, and it is usually one nobody made.