With the average company spending just $75,000 on digital marketing this year, you might feel pressure to get the most bang for your buck wherever you go. You need to pump the brakes on this impulse and focus on clean web design to ensure that you’re always presenting the best version of your brand to clients. Clean web design means cutting all the fat from your design and focusing on what’s valuable to your customers and clients.

Here are five reasons why clean web design should matter to your company this year.

1. Load Times Matter

When you set up a clean web design, you’re eschewing complexity for simplicity. You’re making a site that will load quick and easy. This matters more than you think in an era of extreme connectivity that stands on the cusp of 5G connections.

When your site loads faster, you’re accommodating mobile users. Since mobile usage has eclipsed laptop and desktop browsing in recent years, you’re going to be where the fastest growing sector of browsers will be. Making your site mobile optimized means keeping your videos and photos small enough to load quickly without crippling devices.

When you make things simple and clean, search engines take notice. Sites that are faster and coded in an organized way take precedence search engines. They will rank higher than older sites that are more complicated and resource heavy.

Search engines know that trends are pointing toward an increase in mobile usage over desktops.

A clean design will load fast and be lower on resources than a more complicated design that’s weighed down by large photos and video files.

2. Focus On Your Products and Services

The internet’s first major era was all about how much you could cram on a page. If you look at a site like eBay or Amazon, you’re looking at relics of a previous era of the internet. New companies and sales platforms are taking a wholly different approach by leaving lots of white space.

With plenty of room to breathe in a clean design, your customers and clients can pay closer attention to your products and services rather than feeling overwhelmed. You want your customers and clients to pay attention to your products and services.

People don’t read a website the way you want them to read it. They don’t look at it from top to bottom, left to right. Their eyes might dart around to the most attractive elements, to familiar elements, and to things that seem interesting to them. Since you can’t predict how visitors will see your site, you’re better off stripping it down than filling it up.

Clean design puts the focus on what value you bring to your clients and customers rather than distracting away from it. When you take the time to focus on what you have to offer, you don’t give your customers any room to think of anything else. They’re on your site, focused on what you have to offer, and unencumbered by distractions.

3. Follow The Trends

When you look at all the major template providers helping users to create sites now, they all look clean, stripped down, and simplified. That’s because the internet has grown up. The era of cluttered pages has passed and now a mature site shows confidence in a few images and few bits of text.

For most brands, the selling isn’t done on your site. When people visit your site, they’re not there to figure out whether to buy your products. They’re trying to find out more about the products they’ve already bought or what else you offer.

Even if your visitors aren’t converted, they’re already on your side or else they wouldn’t be on your site, to begin with. With so much competition out there in the world, there are more reasons to not visit a site than to visit one.

Trends are tending toward expanding the value that you offer to your customers and clients rather than selling. Your site should tell your story, offer more resources, or even give your customers new ways to use your products and services.

4. Make it Relaxing

Look at any site that designed before 2005 and you’re sure to be overwhelmed with what’s going on the internet. Look at the average email inbox and you’ll see a paralyzing amount of information. Even news sites haven’t figured out how to create a design that doesn’t feel like a deluge of data every time you open them.

Your site needs to be a relaxing place from all the hustle and bustle of other elements of the internet and your users’ daily lives. When they’re clicking over to your site from social media or another kind of news feed, they’re going to want an escape and something completely new. When you take the time to keep a clean and simple design, you contrast with those overwhelming sites and you give customers a reason to stick around.

Going from a social media site to your site should be like taking a vacation from life in New York City to an island in the middle of the ocean. there should be breathing room, space to look around, and simple text that informs without overwhelming. The more relaxing your site is, the easier it will be for your customers to take pleasure in using it.

Clean Web Design Is a Part of the Future

If you want your brand to remain competitive with now and in the future, you need to focus on clean web design. Without a simple and clear design, your customers and clients could miss out on the value they get from your products and services. When you simplify, you also sharpen your message to consumers.

If you want to focus on the biggest web design trends of the year, check out our guide here.