The main purpose of a website is to drive your audience to one location to complete an action. That could be to find out information, to make a purchase or to sign up for a service.
Once you've driven your audience to your website though, how do you make sure that they complete your desired action?
Below I've listed a few reasons why your website isn't converting and ways you can fix it.
Your pages are too slow to load.
Page speed refers to how quickly pages on your website load. A slow-loading webpage will affect your user experience (UX), leaving people frustrated and wanting to leave your website. Google also looks at your site speed - the quicker your website responds, the higher you're likely to be in the search engine results page ranking.
There are various factors that can affect the speed your pages loading speed:
- Images and videos: The more you have on the page, the slower it will take to load. Large image and video files will also massively impact its speed. I'm not saying to get rid of photos and videos entirely, as media makes your page more engaging, but I would certainly recommend optimising and compressing your images before adding them to your site.
- Plugins and integrations: I would recommend regularly reviewing any plugins or integrations you have active on your site, to make sure they are working as they should and that they are still relevant. If not, disable any that are unnecessary as these will be contributing to your loading speeds.
- Code: Make sure your websites code (CSS, JavaScript, and HTML) is clean and tidy by removing spaces, characters and comments that are not needed.
Your forms and checkout process is too long.
Your customers will get frustrated if they are asked to fill out endless amounts of details in web forms. Whether they're filling out an enquiry form or purchasing a product, there are a few things that you can do to make it a much smoother process.
- Form fields: Keep the amount of form fields to a minimum. The more effort that is required by a user to fill in a form, the easier they are put off. Really think about the exact details you require from your user, before creating a long form.
- Field structure: Providing clear field labels, placeholder text and masked inputs can instantly improve the user's experience. They shouldn't have to second guess anything when filling out a form.
- Mobile optimisation: With over half of all internet shopping carried out on a mobile device, ensuring your forms work responsively is a must. Features such as biometric detection, quick device pay (i.e. Apple Pay), credit card scanning (with a camera) and storing some personal data with cookies are all available to enhance a users experience.
There are pop-ups everywhere.
When used in the right way, a pop-up can improve the user experience and give your visitor access to extra content that could benefit them. However, popups can also lead to users leaving your website, mainly when they display automatically without invitation by the user, like a 'sign up to our mailing list' popup. Keep in mind:
- Placement: Avoid automatically displaying popups. They stop the user before they have even had a chance to interact with your site. Instead, stick to using popups that display on the click of a button, that way it won't come as an un-invited interruption.
- Length: Consider how much content you're putting in the popup. If it's endlessly long, chances are the content should belong on a page on your site.
- Design: Put as much design effort into the pop-up as you did the website. If it looks completely different from the rest of your other content, it can be confusing and leave your user unsure whether it's even related to your website.
The user journey is confusing.
A user journey relates to a path someone takes through a website to achieve the end goal. If the journey is too long or complicated, a user may never actually find the content they need. The best way to prevent this is to invest time with your website designer to explore what information your target audience needs to know and build the most efficient way to get them to their end goal.
It's not responsive.
Mobile usage has been on the rise for a long time, especially over the past two years when browsing in actual shops has changed. If your website isn't mobile responsive, then you're missing out on valuable customers. Scaling, pinching and zooming just to access unreadable content is too much effort these days. A good website designer should have this covered and if they haven't, then maybe it's time to look for a better designer. We know a few.
You set your videos to auto-play.
There's probably been a time when you've been casually browsing a page, then out of nowhere, loud music or an advert begins to play. You frantically close tabs in a hurry to stop it and it turns out to be an auto-playing video. Annoying, right?
We know that videos are engaging content and often grab the attention of a user much quicker than a block of text, so we'd never recommend removing them entirely. What we would recommend though, is giving your user the power to control whether they would like to play the video or not.
There are no calls to action (CTA).
In most cases, a website's aim is to navigate the user somewhere in order to carry out a specific action. If the call to actions aren't enticing or are unclear, you can say bye-bye to that potential conversion.
- Unsuitable wording: A button or link may be the very last piece of content that someone reads before they choose whether or not to interact with your site so the copywriting needs to be engaging and actually benefit the user in some way. Instead of using commands like 'Click Here', 'Submit' and 'Read More', turn your request into something a bit more inviting like 'Start my free trial' or 'Download my report'. It's also worth remembering that using terms like 'click here' aren't accessible to those who use screen readers either.
- Too many to know what to do: Having too many CTA's on one page can make it confusing. If you need to have various calls to actions on one page, use design and colours to create a clear hierarchy, letting the user know what the most preferred action is.
- Wrong time, wrong place: This is where planning out the user journey becomes really important. If your customer is not at the right point in their conversion journey, they are going to ultimately ignore the call to action.
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Whether you're looking for a website design agency to build you a brand new website or you just want an informal chat about how to improve your existing site, why not get in touch with us. All of our website solutions are completely bespoke, so we can provide you with exactly what you need.