Your website is the first impression of your business and your personality also to your customers and visitors. There are great and terribly bad websites available online. There are websites that entices you so much that you want to stay for long and with some you want to leave as early as possible. Have you ever thought what those aspects are that make or mar the very entity of a website? It could be clumsy navigation, long loading time or wrongly-placed advertisement or anything that ruins your user experience driving you crazy.
Keeping the user’ experience in mind, we have developed a list of 13 website turn offs that must be taken care of to avoid your visitors leaving your website:
Slow Loading Time
You must ensure that your website is not taking a lot of time in loading. As per estimation, 47% customers expect a web page to load in not more than 2 seconds time and this is not the case 40% leave the site. If your website loads slow it irritates your visitors and ruining your possibility of revenue generation as most of your visitors leave you website. There are many aspects that can add to the slow loading of your website which may include large images, videos, code etc. Just check your website for such hindrances and make necessary amendments in your site’s infrastructure fix this issue.
Vague Navigation
Having an unclear navigation is yet another issue that adds to the annoyance of your visitors. Are you sure your visitors know how to find specific product or page? Do they know where to go next? Probably your website lacks call-to-action. You may suffer a lot if you haven’t clearly defined for your visitors where to click and what to do. You might want them to fill a form, subscribe a blog, or play a video or any other task that you with them to perform. So, make it clear they understand this by clearly instructing and mentioning on your website!
Non-Responsive Website
If your website is not easily accessible from any device like mobile, iPhone, iPad chances are it is not responsive which is very important. As most of the users might access your website through their handsets due to the ubiquity of mobile devices, your website should be responsive which can be accessed not only from the computer but through mobiles as well.
Irritating Pop-ups
Yes, these could also play an irritating role in annoying your visitors. They might have come for some specific purpose and unwanted pop-ups may frustrate the very purpose of visiting your website. It may spoil their entire reading or visiting experience. If in any case you want to keep pop-ups, try to keep them bare minimum.
Auto-Play Videos
Not everyone would love to view the videos that you have displayed on your website. Without pressing the key if your video starts playing on the mere appearance of your visitor chances are you are irritating them. Let your visitor decide if they want to see the video or not by adding a start button pushing which the video may start not automatically. This is also called forcing multimedia content on them.
Distractive Animations
Placing images on your website is great as it may attract more visitors, but it should not be distracting. If your visitors don’t find what they came looking for on your website while browsing, they leave the page. All these distractive animations may appear of the entertaining but it also distracts user as not every user has come looking for entertaining animations.
Missing Contact Details
Just remembers contact details cannot be replaced by the contact us form. Both have their own relevance. You can use contact us form for email list but it cannot play a role in generating any lead. You must put your ‘Contact Us’ details with email, phone no and complete physical address on your website.
Unclear ‘About Us’ Page
Your ‘About Us’ should talk about your business, its mission and the people who founded it. You must use simple and easy language to explain it all avoiding any words that are cliché and hold no relevance to your business. You may develop an enticing story highlighting the foundation of the company by its makers. It will help your audiences to stay connected with the company in the language they understand.
No Business Objective Defined
If you haven’t defined your objective of erecting this business you audience may not feel confident in trusting you. The best part that a website should have it that it must highlight what brand/company is all about, what it does and what its audiences and customers can expect from this website.
Useless Stock Photographs
Of course, images are a great way to add value to your business making it more authentic and illustrative to the audiences. But at the same time placing useless and irrelevant stock photos can create an annoyance amongst your visitors. Better to put something which displays some real photos of your employees, work culture, customers, product, company and location.
Riddled with Keywords
Heavy paragraphs are mostly a big pain for the visitors. Make sure you haven’t embedded your website with keywords. It should be there and must gel with the context. Filling your web content with keywords is a very common practice or SEO (search engine optimization) but know must know the limits. It should be well optimized and free flowing.
Multiple Websites
Having multiple websites for different brands is yet another mistake to avoid. Separate platforms disrupt your user experience because they may get confused by clicking a ‘buy’ button and landing on an altogether new website. You can conjoin your two sites but without giving any negative experience to your customer and making their purchase a blissful experience.
Absence of Social Media Sharing Buttons
It’s an intrinsic nature of every human to share something interesting or share experience of significance with others. If your website does not have any social media sharing options they may get disappointed. Social media buttons are meant to make it easy for the readers to share their thoughts and interests. This also makes your website and its content viral without you making any effort.
Above are some of the major setbacks of any website that you must avoid to success in this landscape of online business.