When it comes to visitors and your website, we all hear the seemingly ‘unlikely’ statistic that if we don’t catch the attention of the user in someting like half a second, then they will navagate away. Unfortunatley this statistic is true, due to us the users literally being spoilt for choice when it comes to content. It’s changed our browsing habbits as users, we want content, we want it fast, we want it easily, which is why so many sites are doing simple things wrong to drive away users.
1. Long Loading Times
If you have a website which take a long time to load, due to heavy imagery, flash, or just giant pages, with endless text, but if the pages don’t load as quickly as possible, then your visitors will leave. The only time they won’t leave is if your content is expected to be large, perhaps a video, or a review with a gallery. You can make some of these points by saying in the title (what they see before they click through), then the users have it in their mind it might just take that bit longer to load. We can tell that page sizes are also important to Google as a search engine and from an SEO point of view too. If you Google a lot of search terms, those which rank highly tend to be 9 times out of 10, the smaller pages, and these day’s, sites in no.1 spots are quite frequently the smallest.
How you can tell if your pages are too big, and NEED making smaller, is to install something like Google analytics, and just see if you have a particually high BR (bounce rate), or see about testing it yourself, or with friends who possibly are on slower broadband connections than yourself – but on another note, you can make your pages smaller by reducing them, spreading over several pages if you have lots of text in an article, compress images using professional software like Photoshop.
2. Annoying and Irritating Sounds or Adverts
Now it still amazes me today, to find websites which when I navigate too, my speakers go crazy with the absolutely delightful sound effect, which not only goes off on the first visit, it goes off on every page that I load. Now when I said delightful, I’m actually thinking awful! Now the horror story does not end there, usually I go on to find bleeping, or other noises associated with the menu, which is quite often flash, or javascript – now if your aim is to just annoy people, then leave these things in, if not listen up.
Remove flash animations with sound, or if you really want the sound, have it off by default, with the opportunity for user to turn it on if desired. Don’t play the same sounds for every page load, this really upsets me, and at times can send me insane. If you have sounds on your menu, a bleep or whatever, please take that off, because this often means your using flash, and if so, these links have little or no visibility as the search engines cannot read the flash. This gives even more reason for removal.
3. Registration Only
Wuup doesn’t require any registration to view our content, and usually there is no reason to have one, unless you have particularly lucrative content that you don’t want everyone to see, or at least want them to pay for. But this doesn’t even just go for registration only, if you also try and shove a registration into a users face, you’re more likely to drive them away, but if you have some form of analytics installed on your site, it will be reflected in your ‘time on site’ and ‘bounce rate’ statistics.
4. Terrible Design
A lot of websites get a LOT of visitors, due to being around for quite a while, but quite often they are managed by amateur web designers or enthusiasts. This means a lot of website templates aren’t quite up to scratch, and today a lot of users are vain, your content maybe sensational, but if your template is not, you will loose them. Consider redesigning it, take time with it, several months if necessary, or hire a professional team, or contractor to do it for you.
5. Boring or Uninteresting Content
If you have a lot of content, it may be great, but you have to write in an interesting and structured way. Users want the information quickly, they want to navigate to headings, read a section and leave feeling satisfied, or hungry for more. Either way you want more repeat users. If your content is uninteresting, try and write more candidly, write anecdotes and spice it up with humor. This will usually mean your article becomes link bait, resulting in inbound links, referrals and more.
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