One of the most important things for any business to focus on when it comes to their websites is that when people arrive, they stay there. For those businesses which actually sell items on their website, this is, of course, beneficial as the longer people stay, the more likely they are to buy things and browse more. For those businesses that do not sell things on their website, it is still important that their website if a representative of their business and that it works to a very high standard.
A company website is very often used as a measure by customers as to what exactly the business is all about, the better the website, the higher the respect that people are likely to have for the business, which of course contributes towards building a solid brand and increasing the chances of customers wanting to do business with them.
source:marketingland.com
In order to make sure that your business has an outstanding website you first need to understand what turns users off, and to do that we have the brilliant Mark Gilbert ATN marketing executive to help us decipher what is it that makes users leave a website and go elsewhere.
Page Contents
Attacks
It is always important that businesses add ‘calls to actions’ on their websites which encourage users to leave their email addresses, and this is good practice in reality for when it comes to marketing efforts.
What uses don’t want however is to feel as though they are under attack from a plethora of pop-ups that overwhelm them. Doing this is a guaranteed way to ensure that users won’t hang around.
Page Load Time
source:semrush.com
Something which all website owners must be aware of is the instant nature in which we expect things in the modern world. You have to realize that people just don’t have the patience to hang around and you may be fascinated to learn that if it takes more than 3 seconds for your page to load then you are drastically increasing your chance of people leaving the site.
This is the limit for most people, just 3 seconds to wait for your pages to load. The reason why page load speeds are so slow on many sites are down to 2 key reasons, the first, and most common reason is that people upload so much media onto their sites that it slows everything down.
Another reason why we see slow page load times is that people install plugins on their sites which are like apps that can help the site perform different functions. Unfortunately, these plugins are almost always made by different developers and they can sometimes have difficulty working with one another, thus slowing the site down further.
Broken Links
source:semrush.com
Imagine browsing a site, looking at a number of products for what you need, finally finding it, clicking the link to buy only to see a 404 error or another reason for a broken link. As you can imagine this is incredibly frustrating and it is a surefire way to make sure that someone doesn’t come back to your site.
Broken links can happen, there are numerous reasons for it, what you need to be on the front foot with however is ensuring regular maintenance to highlight those broken links and to fix them before the user discovers it.
source:123-reg.co.uk
One issue which many business websites have is poor navigation and in the main, this occurs when they are actually trying to improve navigation for its users. There is a real temptation when creating a website to add multiple menus in order to help people navigate the site easier.
What happens, however, is that in doing this customer and website users can easily get overwhelmed, and ultimately get lost becasue they have too many options. Instead of packing the header, the footer and the sidebars with multiple menu options, it is far better to have one menu bar and within that add sub-menus.
Furthermore, you need to ensure that landing pages are linked together within categories and using meta tags so that users who are likely to move between a certain area of your website can do so with absolute ease, ensuring that they stay on your website longer in the process.
The key to ensuring that customers continue to enjoy your website and don’t leave for the reasons mentioned above, or others, is to give your site regular maintenance, check those broken links and page load times, and address your website to ensure that it is very easy to use and that people not get the feeling of being overwhelmed. Do this and you will see a much higher bounce rate on your site, which will come with positive consequences for the business.
