Your website needs to be modern and attractive, by employing an elegant design, and it ought to inspire your visitors. But be careful: Do not chase the trend! In the end, conventions that die-hard aren’t necessarily conventions worth their while…

To keep your site clear of the small things in usability and design which often seem somewhat strange to your customers, we’ve taken a look around and made a list of the most annoying web design trends now being used.

Preloaders

You click on a webpage all excited, and your reward is a wheel. Or perhaps a loading bar, small jumping dots, or another thing that painfully reminds you of those great old days of flash-based sites: Loading… And it occurs after each single click, too.

This exists because sophisticated web pages with graphics, videos, and cool effects programmed with JavaScript can be displayed all at once.

The unwanted effects are annoying wait times. Maintaining your wait times is an essential part of search engine optimisation (SEO), and Google is quite demanding in this respect. Funnily enough, preloaders will help improve your page rate evaluation. Visitors to your website could care less about your fancy graphics, they do not wish to wait.

Preloaders result in higher bounce rates and frustrated traffic. Overall a lower conversation rate too because most viewers end up leaving.

Aggressive Pop-Ups

Pop-ups, they come like a Jack-in-the-Box. Once you’ve seen all you need to see and want to leave the website, or in the middle of reading something- BOOM: “Would you like to download my ebook? Type in your email now!” With two buttons under saying “I want your ebook!” and “I’m a genius that doesn’t need your information”. Who thought it was a good idea to guilt trip their audience?

This exists because many websites are desperate for you to subscribe to something (like a newsletter) or to Enjoy their webpage on Facebook. Before you can even read a word, But, such show up too early.

The unwanted effects are especially bothersome websites. Pop-ups such as this often cover the whole webpage or significant content and if you think about a more compact smartphone screen, you’ll be even more annoyed. To annoy your viewers even more, make sure to hide the button to close the pop up so they’ll have to spend significant time searching for the tiny transparent X in the bottom left corner. There’s only 1 button each user is trying to find: the X.

This results in once again, very high bounce rates, and at times, even a damaged brand.

Push Notifications

They’re the evil twin brother of pop-ups (and frequently appear alongside). As if the pop-up has not been annoying enough, push notifications take this one step farther.

Like before, it’s a simple and direct way to push information to your screen. It leverages the psychology to push something massive on you, then pushes something slightly less so that you’ll have a higher chance of buying into it. In other words, the website is trying to manipulate you into a sale.

The unwanted effects are that- even if you hit agree, they will haunt you even when you’ve left the site; bothering you until the marketing team believes it’s enough (which generally is never).

Because most people are used to push notifications already, most never click accept. It’s wasted time and effort- wasted data loading a useless push, and annoying to the user who sees it. When’s the last time you ever accepted a push notification?