Is your website hurting your business revenue? And 8 focus points on how to avoid it.
Many of us spend a significant portion of our time looking for information online. Whether it is to answer questions we have, to browse and look for possible future purchases or instantly buy the things we like. And even if you're not aware of it.
With every click, scroll or swipe you make up your mind about the site you are currently visiting. Little things, that you enjoy or worse, annoy you. You often don’t really take note of most of them. But they are there. And they influence your decisions to come back to that site later or purchase from that vendor.
As a business, it’s important to make sure your customers are not turned off by your website. A bad website can easily contribute to missed revenue. Sometimes it’s little things that just don’t seem to work as one would expect and sometimes there are bigger issues that turn potential customers away from your website.
So, a well-thought-out website that’s updated regularly is not a nice-to-have but a crucial part of any business.
What makes a bad website?
An outdated design
The first thing a user sees on your website is not the text, headlines, images or CTA’s. The first thing is the overall impression of the design. And most customers judge the credibility of a business by the overall design of the website.
Slow loading speed
Conversions can increase significantly when loading speeds are faster. Especially for e-commerce websites. But also other websites benefit from faster loading times because it lowers the feeling of ‘dissatisfaction’ among your users.
On the other hand, we have Google, which also takes into account various indicators that contribute to overall loading speed and user perception of loading times. When these scores are bad your website gets penalised and ranked lower in search results. Which then also contributes to lower conversions.
Not having the information your users need
Humans are impatient and most of us don’t want to spend a lot of time looking through websites for the information we need. If after a few clicks your customer can’t find what they need they move on to the next site (probably one of your competitors). So make sure your customers can easily find the content they need, where they expect it to be as fast as possible.
Cluttered or unclear navigation, structure and calls to action
Determining the main navigation, structure and calls to action for your website are tough. All of these must be systematic, highly logical and easily understandable.
As consumers, we don’t like too many choices even tho we often think otherwise. We also don’t like to think too hard to understand or find what we are looking for. Creating clear navigation, site structure and calls to action help a lot in guiding users to the information they seek or through a buying process.
Not paying attention to mobile and responsive design
A decade ago almost 90% of website traffic came from desktop devices (Although, I was already heavily advocating for responsive design back then). Today, in 2022, almost 60% of website traffic comes from mobile devices. So, paying enough attention to responsive design and optimising your website specifically for mobile devices should be a no-brainer.
Unnecessary distractions
Animations
Going overboard with animations is not a good idea. It distracts the user. And unless the animation is part of storytelling or allows you to draw attention to specific parts of a page you should be careful with adding too much. (And even tho the impact is often not big, animations can creep into speed performance)
Sounds and music
Just don’t. Going to a website and getting blasted by sounds that are unexpected and most likely way too loud is very disturbing for your users.
Popups
It’s bad enough that users need extra clicks to get rid of a cookie policy banner (please, don’t make that hard for them). Especially on mobile devices, they can take up a big part of the available screen real estate.
If you throw in popups, that are mostly basically yelling “Please give me your personal information for my own benefit” when a user is quietly scrolling through and reading your website, is a good way to make them leave and never come back. Popups can be helpful but you have to be really careful when and where to implement them.
Not all websites are created equal
It has to be said that the potential conversion gain of tackling these bad actors is not the same for all websites. Company size, specific industry or niche, type of website (B2B, B2C, e-commerce) and even geographical and other economical differences can all play into account.
But, tackling these issues gets you in a much better position to earn more revenue while making sure your customers have a good experience interacting with the website portion of your website.
