The most common mistake I see on business websites is prioritizing how the site looks over what the site communicates.
A site can be beautifully designed and completely fail at its job. If a visitor lands on your homepage and can't answer three questions within ten seconds — what you do, who you do it for, and what they should do next — the design has failed regardless of how good it looks.
Trust on a website isn't built through aesthetics. It's built through clarity. When a visitor immediately understands what a business does and why it matters, they relax. That relaxation is trust. It's the feeling that the business knows what it's doing — that the people behind it are competent and worth engaging with.
Aesthetic quality reinforces that trust once it's established. But clarity has to come first.
This is why I structure websites around information hierarchy before I make a single visual decision. Who is this for? What do they need to know first? What action do we want them to take? The answers to those questions determine the layout. The visual design then serves that structure — not the other way around.
A site that's clear and simple will outperform a site that's beautiful and confusing every time.