By Jim Clanin
Once you’ve won the SEO battle and gotten someone to click through your site, conversion is all about user experience. If you want to lose your visitors as soon as possible, make sure your web design service or ecommerce website design firm follows these 8 tips to annoy your visitors:
1. Auto-Play Videos
One of the most frustrating experiences is arriving at a page and having a video suddenly start playing. What if their speakers are on? How loud is it for them? What if they can’t find the video to pause it or mute it? They might just leave, and find a nice quiet website to purchase from. Videos are actually a great thing to have on your site, but the visitor needs to have control over how and when they view it.
2. Cheesy Stock Photos
We’ve all seen the generic stock photos. Smiling, multi-cultural people dressed in business casual and gathered in a board room or around a computer; a happy older couple riding bicycles; the oh-so-original assortment of puzzle pieces. What does this tell visitors about your business? Virtually nothing, and they can actually harm your first impression Photos can be a powerful way to communicate with your potential customers. Choose them well.
3. Complicated Layouts
Remember that lots of different types of people may visit your site, ranging from techies to novices. A complex website with lots of options might seem really cool in development, but will ultimately turn away less experienced users. Potential customers should be able to find what they’re looking for within just a few clicks. Have your web designer look at your analytics to get a starting idea of what your visitors are after.
4. Slow Loading
Every second counts. We live in a culture obsessed with getting things quickly, and a report from CacheFly states that “visitors who consider a website ‘fast’ will visit an average of 1.6x more pages than on a site they consider slow. That’s 60% more chances to close a sale.” Use the Page Speed tool to measure your loading speed and make necessary adjustments. Have your ecommerce design firm talk with your hosting company, get a content delivery network, or decrease image sizes on your site.
5. Center-Page Ads
Ok, if you’re trying to generate ad revenue, it makes sense to get as many click-throughs as possible. But at what cost? Generally, visitors don’t like having to navigate around an ad directly in the middle of the site they’re viewing. It’s like having a salesman jump out of nowhere and deliver a pitch when you’re still in brochure-reading mode. Your website should do everything possible not to interrupt a visitor’s time and experience on your site, and it should keep them on your page, not on an ad.
6. Pop-Ups
Why would anyone still use these? Even if the ad is a promotion for your company, people don’t like them. Think about how you feel when an ad interrupts you while browsing a site. Plain and simple, there’s just no good way to use pop-ups on your website. Instead, use clickable banners on the side bar of your page, putting the user in control.
7. Inconsistent Ad Copy
If someone clicked on your ad for 20% off a certain service, and arrives at a landing page advertising a different promotion, they’re likely to just hit the back button and find someone else. They came for a specific sale, and it they can’t find it immediately, you’ll lose them. Make sure your ad copy is consistent between venues.
8. Really Long Contact Forms
A recent presentation by Marketing Experiments reported that eliminating required fields in contact forms can powerfully impact lead generation. In one experiment, making a single required field optional – the phone number – produced a 275% difference in lead generation over the form which required the phone number. The bottom line is that visitors don’t like filling out long forms and providing lots of information, especially high-cost information like their phone number or address. If you can make a field optional or eliminate it altogether, you’re more likely to get that lead.
What about you- what website features drive you crazy?
