You've got the website, you've got the page views, but you don't have the customers. What are you doing wrong? This article will explain five common mistakes that websites make that could drive away potential customers.
You've got the website, you've got the page views, but you don't have the customers. What are you doing wrong? This article will explain five common mistakes that websites make that could drive away potential customers.
We’ve all been there, you click on a website with the intent of buying something then end up either sitting there for 30 seconds waiting for the site to load or just going to one of their competitors. They could have gotten a new sale had they optimised the site's load time.
According to a study by gomez.com and akamai.com (see infographic), 47% of consumers expect a webpage to load within 2 seconds and 40% would abandon the webpage if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
You can test your website speed using Google's PageSpeed Insights. A common issue that slows down a lot of websites is having too many active plugins, so if you notice that your website is very slow you should check the list of active plugins and decide whether you really need them or not (check with your web developer before disabling plugins if you're not sure what you're doing).
No one likes having sound blaring out of their device unexpectedly. If a user is at work, on a bus, up late in a house with other people, at school, etc. and they visit your site then audio suddenly starts playing, their first reaction is going to be to just close the website to get it to stop, so you've lost a potential customer in less than 5 seconds.
By all means have music or videos on your site but the visitor needs to have the option to play it rather than have it play automatically.
When a potential customer visits your website they like to see that you're still active. If they check out your blog and see the last post was from 2 years ago they might start to wonder if you're actually still in business.
To keep your website looking fresh you should aim to create a new blog post every month. You should also try to keep content & images on the rest of your site relevant and up to date, so for example if you have a banner advertising an offer or discount, you should make sure it's removed once it's expired.
Once you've got a potential customer on your site you only have a short amount of time to make them stay. This means that if you want a customer to do something (browse your products, sign up, get in touch, etc) you need to put it right in front of them because they won't want to go hunting for it.
Take Mailchimp's website as an example, when someone visits their website they're probably looking to create an account and get started with making newsletters and what not, so Mailchimp put the sign up button right in front of them where it stands out and they can't miss it.
According to Statista, on average 52.4% of all page visits are from a mobile device. So if your website isn't optimised for mobile devices you could be losing over half of your potential customers. A mobile friendly site will have the text all be a readable size without the user having to zoom in, and have all links/buttons big enough for someone to easily tap with their finger.
Hopefully this article can help you to improve conversions for your business. If you know your site is guilty of one/some of these but you're not sure how to fix it yourself, speak to your web developer or send us a message and we'll try our best to help you out!
Share this article on social media to help out any of your friends who may be having the same issues with their website!
