Technology is at everyone’s fingertips. We are literally connected to hundreds or thousands of people online within seconds. On average, you have 2-3 seconds to grab the attention of your website visitor and pull them into your website before they go looking elsewhere. Therefore you want your site to look as nice as possible, perform quickly, and grab the viewer’s attention all within milliseconds. The worst thing you can do is anger or frustrate your website visitors because what will they do? They’ll bail, and likely end up finding someone in the same service industry that has a better experience (aka your competitors!).
Here are some tips to avoid doing on your website to improve the user experience.
Nothing makes a user leave your website faster than a website that takes ages to load. If you have 2-3 seconds to grab your viewer’s attention, you absolutely cannot use those seconds simply to load your website. Speed is key. Read more about how to speed up your website without a developer.
Not only will Google dock your search ranking for not being mobile responsive, your customers will be quite unhappy if they have to zoom in to read anything on your website. If they have to buy something? Forget it! Websites that aren’t mobile friendly not only imply being old, but they’re hard to navigate, hard to read, and frustrating to the user experience.
If a user can’t easily get where they need to be, nothing will frustrate them more. It is important to have a clear menu hierarchy that is not only nicely designed and developed but logical for a user to navigate. Use clear and direct words when labeling navigation so a user can easily find products and services. The clearer and quicker you can be getting a user to their end goal is what will convert traffic into leads and sales.
Too much content makes a reader’s eyes go cross-eyed. In the age of lists, no one wants to read long paragraphs of text. Keep your content short, informative and to the point. At the same time, don’t have too little content that your visitors don’t know what you do. One of the number one reasons for a high bounce rate is that a user can’t tell from a first glance what a company does. It’s important to find a balance between the succinct and the mundane for your viewer’s not to be frustrated with your site.
Not only is a popup frustrating and hard to exit out of, it deters a user from their intended goal. Unless the advertisement is saving a user money on the current product they are considering buying, they’re likely not interested. Google is now penalizing websites that have pop-ups on their mobile site, so think twice before you decide you want pop-ups everywhere advertising your latest sale or another company’s information!
It’s really pretty easy to keep a customer happy. These were just 5 small things that anger a website user, but in reality if you have a clean, simple, user-friendly website, you’re probably in the clear. Make sure to quickly grab their attention within two seconds and hold them in with a great navigation and user experience, and your website will see new leads coming your way.
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