Designing a business website is a little like designing a dentist’s office. It isn’t enough to design a place where people can come and get their teeth pulled. A good dentist’s office has to provide a welcoming environment that assures its clients of safety, reliability, acumen and as much comfort as can be obtained in a dentist’s office.
Your business website should do much of the same for your clients and customers. You have customers who know little about your business and you have some who know your business well (and know your website). Both of them need to enjoy a good customer experience on your site as much as those who visit a dentist’s office have to enjoy a good patient experience in that office.
If you visit a dentist’s office and the attendant is non-responsive, or they wait an hour to get you into a dentist’s chair, often you’ll bail and never come back. That’s what we call in website design a “bounce.” Bounces are site visits that quickly end because for one reason or another the visitor did not get what they were expecting when they entered.
Here are 4 top reasons your website’s design might send your bounce rates sky high:
- Slow Load Speeds: If your website seems to take decades to load all of the imagery, graphics and text, it can send your bounce rate soaring. People don’t like having their time wasted. If someone visits your site, it’s often for a solution. And solutions don’t often come with minutes-long loading times. The reason is by the time it loads, they’ve moved on to the next website in the search results page. One of the biggest reasons that accounts for slow loading time is heavy graphics and large images that weight the site down. Compress your graphics and images, and you’ll go a long way toward keeping your site speedy.
- Content is Disorganized: Information is everything when it comes to website design. Yes, graphics and photos are all wonderful, sure. But if the information is not organized and clearly laid out, your site visitors could be out the door and onto the next site in no time. Clean up your content flow. Organize information into “buckets” grouped by: (1) importance and necessity; (2) popularity; (3) function. If you spread your company rates out over each of your service pages, for instance, that would require visitors to visit first each and every service they may need from your business to get a good sense of cost. If you have all of your rates on a single webpage that is, perhaps, subordinate to a Services page, that may make more organizational sense and respect your customers’ time, which will keep them happy.
- Not Optimized for Mobile: Okay, people. It has to be said: it’s time to respect the power of mobile. No more can site owners ignore the fact that a greater abundance of website visits come from mobile viewing than desktop. Alienating mobile site visitors by only hosting a desktop site design is tantamount to asking those visitors to leave out of frustration. And that’s because that’s exactly what most of them will do. Viewing a website designed for desktop on a mobile device is extremely difficult to do, especially for an extensive site. Text is typically extremely small. The site itself must be expanded to view its critical components and clicking on links is nearly impossible when finger tips are typically the size of 4 – 5 rows of text.
Optimize your site for mobile and those that view it on mobile devices will be able to find just what they need with the same ease as your desktop users, and it’ll keep them on the site long enough to convert them into customers.
- Error Pages: One of the easiest things to avoid are error pages on your site. Links to pages that used to exist or pages that are broken and you simply aren’t aware of it can frustrate visitors and send them onward to the next business website in a matter of seconds. A simple fix for this annoying problem? A site audit. Many online tools offer the ability to check your site for broken links. Simply enter your domain and a report is generated that shows you exactly where your broken pages are.
If you would like to work with a website design firm that understands the power of User Experience and the futility of bounce rates, call Proctor Digital at 773.664.5819. We’d love to help!