10 design mistakes that quietly kill your sales

Logi here. I look at a lot of websites, and I can tell you something reassuring: ugly almost never kills sales. Confusion does.

Here are the ten I see most often, sorted by how fast they're fixed.

1. Five buttons with equal weight

The homepage has "Browse", "Learn more", "Subscribe", "Contact" and "See the gallery". They all look equally important.

Result: nobody presses any of them. When everything is a priority, nothing is.

Fix: one bright button per screen. The rest become text links.

2. The price hidden behind a message

"DM for price" is the most expensive sentence on the internet. Half the people won't message. The other half will message and then vanish after your reply.

Fix: post a price or a range. "From €60" is enough.

3. Shipping cost appears at the end

Someone filled the cart, typed their address, and at the last step sees +€4 shipping. They close the tab.

This is the leading cause of abandoned carts everywhere in the world.

Fix: show shipping in the cart. And add a free-shipping threshold — it works like a magnet.

4. Forced registration

"Create an account to order" removes 20–30% of orders. People don't want another password because of one candle.

Fix: guest checkout. Offer the account after the purchase.

5. A homepage carousel

Nice animation, three beautiful slides. Reality: almost nobody reaches the second, and on a phone most people don't even realise there are others.

Fix: one message, one image, one button. Everything else lives further down the page.

6. Photos that don't show scale

The product sits on white, close up, with no clue how big it is. People don't buy what they can't picture.

Fix: at least one photo in a hand, on a table, next to something familiar. And a minimum of three photos per product.

7. Grey text on a grey background

Light grey on white looks refined on a designer's monitor and is unreadable on a phone, in sunlight, for anyone over 45.

Fix: dark text on a light background. Boring and effective. If unsure, check the contrast — there are free tools.

8. Not a single piece of proof

The site claims the product is wonderful. There are no reviews, no customer photos, nothing that doesn't come from you.

Fix: three genuine reviews somewhere visible. If you don't have any yet, a photo of the process or of a real customer with the product does the job.

9. The phone number isn't tappable

On a phone, someone sees a number, taps it and nothing happens, because it's an image or plain text.

Fix: a real tel: link. One of the cheapest changes with the biggest effect for a local business.

10. The site takes eight seconds

Usually because of phone photos uploaded at original size: 4 MB each, ten per page.

Fix: shrink images to around 200 KB. That's the difference between 8 seconds and 2, and every second past the third costs orders.

Bonus: how to check it yourself

Open your site on the phone of someone who has never seen it, and stay silent. Watch where they stop and where their finger hunts. Three minutes of watching says more than three hours of theory.

The questions your site must answer within five seconds:

• What do they sell?
• What does it cost?
• How does it reach me?
• Can I trust them?
• What do I press now?

If any of those is missing, fix that — before you touch colours.

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Not one of these ten is a job for a designer. All of them fit into one calm hour. And together they lift conversion more than a full redesign.