Is your website suffering from higher bounce rates? You can solve the issues only when you know what makes your online visitors click back shortly after they land on your website. So let’s think it that way: What is negative about your web design that repels your valuable target audience?
A research from Forrester Consultancy tried to understand the customer reaction when they encounter a poor web experience. From poor site performance to awful navigation structure, they analyzed the impact it has on the visitors. The same research reveals that most of the users do not wait any more than four seconds if the website is not good.
Here are the 9 reasons that irritate visitors to the extent that the Back button is the only rescue:
Popups and Autosound
Ask yourself: Is popup the best way to welcome your visitor? And as if that was not enough, some websites also have an unnecessary sound effect, making the audience feel more intruded than invited. Having these distractions often confuses the audience and decreases their interest level. What do they do? They punish your site by leaving it immediately, perhaps never to return.
Slow Load Time
Unless I really want to visit a particular page and have time to wait for long minutes, I wouldn’t stay interested in a website that loads slowly. Imagine a curious web user who might have clicked on your link on impulse, how long do you think he is going to be interested if your pages load terribly slow?
Confusing Navigation
Your navigation design needs to be intuitive and straightforward. Many websites, particularly the Flash-based ones, compromise their worth due to a bad ugly navigation system.
Key Information Missing
Your website is a place where you want your target audience to make transactions and get engaged to its content. Quite many times, crucial information such as “Book a room“, “Add to Cart” are missing, and the user knows no way how to proceed. It’s like making someone enter a place that has a dead end. No, there isn’t a dead end there, people have the option to run away from those websites.
Lack of Clarity
A first-time visitor needs to be told what the website is about within seconds. Unless the content, headings, descriptions are to-the-point and have an unambiguous message, the visitors feel they have landed on a wrong island. Ultimately, they leave the side none the wiser.
Generic Stock Photos
Images are good for your website as it impresses the visitor and also introduces a life in the web content. But then the images should also have some credibility, isn’t it? A website with Stock photos all over won’t help the audience to connect with you. If the users do not relate to the photos, why are the photos there in the first place?
Ads and Interstitials
Even big websites such as Forbes, have interstitials in their web design. You click on something and instead of being directed to the page, an intermediate page consisting of big ads appear. It’s good to have ads but does that impacts the user experience is what you should ask.
“Contact Us” form Versus Contact Information
Web designers try to play smart by providing a “Contact Us” page at the place where contact information would have done better. Of course, contact us pages are thought of as shortcuts to construct an opt-in email list, but one should never take them as a very serious metric.
Quite often, your users do not want to receive continuous communication from you, especially at times when they have a time-specific needs or problems that need only immediate response.
So having a “Contact Us” page is cool but it should not be the only means of communication between you and your audience. Make your email address, phone numbers, social media information available on the website.
Hostile Internal Linking
Internal linking helps the readers by taking them to the relevant information. Also, it helps your website by improving its organic ranking for important pages such as Services, Products, etc. If a website has a flawed internal linking, the users may be directed to an irrelevant page, leading to frustration.
You should include internal links only to important and relevant pages so that the website’s UX is enhanced. Also, consider including those links on sensible anchor text. Also, ensure that all the links open in a new tab and not the same window. You don’t want your website visitors to navigate from a page that they haven’t finished reading.
A website with such negligence in design and content suffers badly. While these factors are not very significant alone, they give the audience a bad impression about your website. As Maya Angelou said, “people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel”, website developers need to be very careful in their designs. It is in fact better to outsource the website development if it needs be, than to leave it unoptimized.
