Top 5 Tips for Automotive Website Design
Could your automotive website use a major upgrade? Maybe the site design needs updating to a more modern and user-friendly layout, or it’s simply not helping your dealership reach its full potential.
Either way, there are plenty of automotive web design best practices to utilize when revamping your site to boost its appeal and performance.
Today, we’re covering the top tips for automotive websites, along with the common website design mistakes you should work to avoid.
Consider these automotive web design tips to enhance the user experience (UX) and attract more leads, conversions and sales!
1. Ensure Your Site Is Easy to Navigate
Your website’s navigation is one of the most critical factors regarding how visitors interact with your site and business online. If you’re looking to improve your automotive website’s UX, you could certainly start by taking a close look at its navigation.
Is your site’s menu easy and intuitive to navigate? Is it optimized for all shoppers? In other words, can visitors find what they’re looking for within the navigation menu, regardless of where they are in the purchase process?
Some visitors may know exactly what new car model they’re after and want to get to that model’s inventory quickly. Still, other shoppers may be in the initial stage of their search and seek a more broad view of your inventory, where they can narrow down their options gradually.
Regardless of how you organize links within the navigation, you’ll want to keep all potential customers in mind. Don’t forget to display your dealership’s finance application, service scheduler, specials and other popular pages prominently within the menu!
Keep the following automotive website navigation best practices in mind as you look to improve your site’s user experience:
- Minimize menu clutter
- Utilize dropdowns to formulate a navigation funnel
- Make navigation titles clear and concise
- Include a search bar
- Ensure menu items are easy to read on mobile devices
2. Optimize the Space Above the Fold
Navigation is the main way visitors interact with your website; that’s why it’s always front and center. Likewise, you should ensure that your automotive dealership or service center’s top vehicles, pages and services are also quick to locate online.
The important calls to action or CTAs on your site should always be above the fold on any given page. This is another automotive web design best practice because it helps ensure that visitors won’t have to dig to find what they’re after.
In short, are you prominently displaying links like your new inventory, used car specials, credit application and contact information? If not, you might want to get started: it’s one simple way to improve automotive website UX.
3. Make It Mobile-Friendly
Car shoppers are increasingly starting their searches on mobile devices, which is why it’s more crucial than ever that your site is mobile-friendly. This doesn’t mean your website simply has to look good on an iPhone: it also needs to operate as seamlessly on a mobile screen as a desktop.
Mobile navigation is a major factor when designing a car dealership or service center website that converts mobile visitors into customers. If your site’s menu is too difficult to navigate on a mobile device, shoppers will likely become frustrated and bounce, leaving for another site and business.
With a responsive website and NAV 2.0 from fusionZONE, you can help ensure your automotive site is ready for mobile shoppers.
Our mobile-first approach to automotive web design and navigation means that you can spend less time optimizing your site and more time fielding online leads and converting them into sales. Contact our team to learn more!
4. Utilize Custom Images and Content
Looking beyond the overall website design, the way you use graphics and content on your site also matters.
Stock images and generic content not only look bad, but they also negatively affect consumer confidence. Plus, duplicate content and content not optimized for search engines can hold your website back in organic search.
Utilizing unique vehicle images over stock model graphics is always the way to go. The same goes for custom content tailored around your dealership.
Custom graphics and unique content can help:
- Improve the look and feel of your website
- Enhance your search engine optimization or SEO efforts
- Differentiate your website and dealership from the competition
- Build consumer confidence in your business
- Help convert more visitors into customers
How do you ensure that your automotive website’s menu, links and content are easy to read and navigate? Let’s take a look.
5. Keep It Simple and Clean
Last on our list of automotive web design best practices is a clean and simple layout. From the navigation and calls to action above the fold to the graphics, content and lead forms throughout the rest of a page, you’ll want to provide an intuitive shopping experience at every turn.
You can create a clean and simple website design by utilizing white space, breaking up content into smaller, more digestible portions and using high-quality graphics to separate content sections and calls to action.
Often, less is more in the world of automotive web design. After all, the main goal of your website should be to cater to visitors and customers with detailed information about your business, products and services.
If your site is confusing to navigate or not mobile-friendly, you could lose more online shoppers than you’ll gain.
Don’t miss our blog post, 7 Tips to Improve Your Automotive Website’s User Experience, for even more ways to turn site visitors into customers.
Want even more automotive web design tips and common website design mistakes to avoid? Then reach out to the fusionZONE team.
We’ve been designing high-performance automotive websites for dealers and service centers for many years, and we will gladly assist with your site’s needs!