You’ve spent time and money working with an agency to create the perfect website – so why aren’t your visitors hanging around? There are myriad reasons why users will abandon your website before they’ve had a chance to become loyal customers. In today’s post we’re going to look at five of the main reasons why users abandon your website in favour of your competition.
Performance
Performance is key! In today’s world of instant gratification users visit the web with intention. Long gone are the days of ‘web surfing’ – now that time is spent browsing social media. If a user is visiting a website they want their questions answered – quickly.
If you have a sluggish website that takes forever to load the user is likely to back out of your website and visit a competitor’s website that performs better, loads faster and meets their needs as quickly as possible.
At AWESEM Site Care we believe every site visitor should be valued as a potential lead, so we’ll ensure that your WordPress website is up to date and running at its best every day, with uptime and site health monitoring nipping any performance issues in the bud before they impact your customers.
Poor Navigation
As we said earlier, most users visit a website with intention. Most likely they are either looking for a service or want to find more about your company, which makes website navigation so important.
Studies show that humans’ attention span has decreased, as outlined by the BBC who explain that the average attention span is down from twelve seconds in the year 2000 to eight seconds now. This presents a clear issue for site owners, who need to ensure site navigation is clear and accessible, given that you only have eight seconds for your user to find what they’re looking for before they turn their attention elsewhere.
So what are some quick wins here? A clean navigation bar at the top of your site with easy to digest headings and subheadings that make sense. Test the navigation yourself, ask your employees to test it, ask industry buddies to test it – see how simple or complex it is to reach every area of your website. Remember, you know where everything on your site is, users don’t – try to look at your user journey with fresh eyes.
Keyword Stuffing
Once upon a time placing numerous keywords relevant to your business would mean you would rank higher in the search engine results, meaning it wasn’t uncommon to find web pages full of bloated information that was incomprehensible for the visitor, as they were bombarded with masses of keywords. Nowadays search engine optimisation has changed, so keyword stuffing is no longer beneficial to SEO – in fact, it can have the opposite effect.
Instead, you want to focus on using keywords sparingly, only where relevant, and building them naturally into your content. They should enhance your web copy, not dictate it.
At AWESEM Site Care we help you implement SEO services that mean you can say goodbye to keyword stuffing forever; our AWESEM Site Care SEO package boost could give your site the oomph it needs.
Lack of Trust
Safety on the web is paramount, now more than ever.
After Facebook’s data breach in 2018, which saw 30 million users have their personal data stolen, security has become a top tier priority for online businesses. In the wake of a string of high level data breaches, users on the web have understandably lost trust in websites and are cautious about parting with their personal information.
GDPR has helped to focus the blurred lines around the way personal data is shared online but websites have to do a lot more than adhere to GDPR to prove their trustworthiness. Transparency is key here, as well as honesty and clarity.
A good place to start is with reviews. You can sing the praises of your organisation from the mountain tops but where you’ll really earn trust is word of mouth. Think about sharing reviews or testimonials from long-standing clients, registering on TrustPilot to garner user reviews, and try linking to your social media profiles so users can see how you interact with existing customers on a daily basis.
Finally, always ensure you renew your SSL certificate in plenty of time – a site flagged as unsafe by Google is not a good look!
Unresponsive Sites
Studies have shown that around two billion users visit the internet on their smartphones, which equates to 51% of all online usage. These studies reinforce the importance of having a mobile-friendly website, as you could potentially be missing out on over half of your potential site visitors; a catastrophic impact on your business profits and growth.
WordPress core and plugin updates are part of our essential package at AWESEM Site Care, as it is something we believe is paramount to every successful WordPress website. This ensures your website has the strongest performance for all site visitors, regardless of device used, meaning your website will load as quickly as smoothly on a smartphone as it will on a desktop.
