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When it comes to the customer experience today, ‘fast and frictionless’ are the words to bear in mind. The more barriers your website presents to a smooth experience, the more likely it is that your customers will simply move on. If you think your website is not performing as well as could be expected, it could be due to some or all of the following issues.

Complex Navigation

It should be easy for potential customers to get where they want to go on your website. If your offering feels unclear, your site navigation complex or the length of time to get to the checkout page too long and onerous, your customers may lose interest.

Look at your website through your customers eyes and see if there are any ways in which navigation could be improved. Imagine you have a product in mind and see how many clicks it takes you to get from the homepage to the product you’re interested in and then on to the checkout page (or other destination page). If it takes more than 3 or 4 clicks to get to the product page and more than 8 or 9 in total to get to the purchase complete page there is room for improvement.

Long Load Times

With the growing popularity of portable devices, browsing behavior has changed dramatically over the last few years and today’s consumers expect fast load times. People might be browsing whilst on the move: perhaps they want to make a quick purchase or look something up in the few minutes between leaving work and walking to the car. For every second it takes your site or products to load, it will increase the number of people who drop off. According to Google, 53% of mobile site visits leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load.

To help with load times, simply compressing images and text can be a game changer. Google suggests that 25% of pages could save more than 250KB and 10% can save more than 1MB that way.

Besides the fact that slow load times are off-putting for site visitors, a slow site can also lead to a negative ranking factor on Google.

Too Much Text

Today’s visitors have a short attention span and if your website has too much text, it can be distracting. Visitors want to quickly understand what your business offers and big blocks of text can be too much to take in. Good quality, well chosen images can often replace a lot of text, and a copywriter can help you avoid getting bogged down in content.

Broken or Illogical Links

There’s nothing more frustrating than links which result in an error 404 page or images of products which aren’t clickable at all. This is basic stuff, but it’s surprising how often errors exist. Go through your website on a regular basis and check all your links work. Also make sure your links take people to the logical next step in their journey. If you run online ads, they need to take people to the page most relevant to their search query (ideally a specific product page, for example, and not the homepage).

We hope you found this blog post useful and it helped to illuminate possible areas of improvement on your website. To talk to us about improving your website, get in touch.