Your website is meant to educate and help people, not frustrate them! Unfortunately, we all come across those sites that lack useful information and instead leave us feeling bothered and frustrated. People often assume that it’s only old, outdated websites that create these feelings, but that’s not the case. Even a newly updated website can be a turn-off to users, particularly if the site was designed for you and not your audience.
Curious to know what turn-offs you should be avoiding? Here are five things you’ll want to bypass to keep your customers happy.
1. Slow page load times
People are used to doing things quickly on their mobile devices, whether it’s look up a restaurant, text a friend or place an order. Nobody likes a slow website, even when the content is good.
Knowing how important speed is to the user experience, Google uses it as a ranking factor. To prevent people from looking elsewhere, make sure your pages are loading in 3 seconds or less. Check out Google’s mobile-friendly test tool to review your site.
2. Excessive animation
Animation can be a great addition to your site, especially in terms of transitions and appearances. But, animation should be used sparingly.
How do you know if it’s too much? Focus on the areas that you want to draw attention to, such as call to action buttons. If you have animations in unnecessary places, you can probably take them out for a cleaner appearance.
3. Autoplay media
Always give people the option to play your media. It’s incredibly annoying when a user visits a site to read content and a video starts playing. Plus, the video often has nothing to do with the content. Luckily, browsers like Chrome have been moving in the direction of muting or silencing autoplay videos to improve the user experience.
4. Popup clutter
Similar to animation, you want to use popups sparingly. They do have a time and a place, such as when welcoming a new visitor to your site, offering a discount code or updating customers on terms and services. Respect your visitors by showing popups tastefully, such as by not showing too many popups at once and making them easy to close.
5. Not mobile friendly
One last thing to cover is not having a mobile-friendly site. Even so-called mobile sites have issues with overlapping, strange formats, hard-to-click buttons and small form fields. You must go over all of the details to ensure that your website is enjoyable to use on a tablet or smartphone. Plus, with Google’s mobile-first indexing, it’s this version of your site that will be shown to users.
For the best user experience, be sure to avoid these five turn-offs. They might seem small, but they can make a huge difference to the people who are using your site to find information and make purchases. To learn more about optimizing your site for improved performance, contact Magna Technology today.
