9 Common Website Mistakes While Designing A Website: – You’ve written some great copy, have a professional look and are getting traffic to your site but still very few visitors are converting into leads and customers. Everyday there are thousands of websites that have great content but aren’t converting. Gaining conversions from new customers takes a truly special combination of factors.
There are many mistakes that can cause you to lose conversions and customers. If you are having trouble converting your visitors, consider the following reasons visitors may leave your site without converting into a sale or a lead.
The Design is Outdated
Nothing will scare a customer off of your website than a poorly designed website. On his blog “Social Triggers, ” Derek Halpern published an interesting study that shows the impact of a design has on a visitor. Old outdated looking websites scored high on their perception of being untrustworthy.
Difficult to Read
On a related note, design is more than colors, images and graphics. Fonts size as well as the color of your text and background, determine the level of ease or difficulty people have in reading your content. Content that is not easily read, will not convert very well.
For fonts choices try to stick to high-contrast color combinations and try to stick to cleaner types of fonts without “hooks” and “tails” like Serif.
Poor Spelling and Bad Grammar
It seems obvious not to have these mistakes but there are thousands of websites with grammatical, spelling and punctuation errors. With free tools like spellchecker there is really no reason nowadays to have misspellings and punctual errors. Hire someone to proof read your articles before your publish them if you feel your writing habits are not where they should be.
Bad Grammar can cause you to lose credibility with your visitors. Although blogging can be quite informal, good grammar should be taken into consideration when conveying your message.
Broken Links
Broken links are frustrating to the visitor and cause them to perceive the site is untrustworthy. There are many link checkers that you can use to find out what links are broken. Many times these links are affiliate links and may have just cost you a sale.
Disabling the back bar
This is another turn off to visitors. Disabling the back bar to try keeping them on the website only backfires. Visitors are more likely to close your website and not come back. Invest in an Exit Popup and give your visitors a choice instead of trying to take them hostage.
Too many Ads
If your website is an adsense or PPC then removing them entirely from your website may not be an option. But having ads in the text, on the side bar, footer, header, everywhere an ad can placed can annoy readers, especially if they distract from the content. Flashing and moving ads are the worst.
Slow Load Time
KISSmetrics research reports that load times matter and a matter of a few seconds can decrease visitor satisfaction by over 16%. Here are some key pointers from their analysis.
- 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in two seconds or less.
- 40% abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load.
- Even a one-second delay (or three seconds of waiting) decreases customer satisfaction by about 16%.
Optimizing your websites performance can help increase customer satisfaction overall.
Not Responsive-Mobile Friendly
Since Google’s major algorithm update if your website is not mobile friendly you can lose rankings. According to research gathered by Modify “30% of online shoppers abandon a transaction if the experience is not optimized for the sale.
Videos that Auto Play
Ever been scared out of your wits from a video that just blared at you the second you got on the page? Allow visitors to choose the time and place to watch your video. To bombard them with loud music or talking is just asking for them to click the back bar. You never know they could be at work, or just put their baby to bed.
No Personality
Your personality counts a lot when creating a blog or a website. Being too technical, dry or boring can lead to visitors clicking off of your page. You need something to grab them and Keep them on the page. Write articles, give facts, photos, but give your site style. and no…not blaring videos!
I just like the helpful information you provide in your articles