Is your website unintentionally driving your audience away?

Visitors are prepared to make a judgement almost immediately upon arriving at your website, so presenting a refined and functional platform for them to engage with is essential.

Utilise Heatmap Data

One of the most overlooked tools, heatmap tracking, is actually one of the most powerful. As this technology closely monitors user behaviour, including links clicked and whether anyone ever makes it below the fold, you will quickly build a comprehensive understanding as to how your audience are choosing to interact with your website.

Ideally, you should see your audience following planned user journeys which lead them to pages containing the information they want easy access to. Realistically, you'll probably be met with some surprises, but it's important to consider these good surprises because there's always plenty to be learned from unexpected data.

The Need for Speed

You can invest an eye-watering sum of money into an exceptionally intuitive website but if it doesn't load within a couple of seconds, half of your potential visitors will instantly abandon ship. 47 percent of users expect web pages to fully load within 2 seconds and 57 percent will completely abandon a page if it hasn't loaded within 3 seconds. Speed. Really. Matters.

Use this as an opportunity to refine your largest digital asset. Consider how liberating it is to take items you no longer need from your own home and pass them along to someone who will get enjoyment from them. Refining a website is somewhat similar, especially when you're doing it for speed purposes. It challenges you to consider which elements are useful and which simply don't need to be there.

Just reducing the number of individual page elements by 1 percent, or ditching unnecessarily large images and replacing them with fast-loading, appropriately sized alternatives can make all the difference.

Convincing Calls to Action

The Internet is currently home to more than a billion websites and more than 4.8 billion individual pages. Needless to say, those numbers make for a lot of calls to action (CTAs).

Utilising actionable words is therefore non-negotiable. Audiences need your CTAs to be clear because they want to quickly understand both how to complete a certain action and why doing so will personally benefit them. Always choose 'Sign up to our email list here' or 'Book a table now' over complicated CTAs which lack clarity.

The Art of Brevity

Concise content is a thing of beauty. It's a fine art, the best examples of which probably deserve a place on the walls of an impressive contemporary art gallery. Okay, so while that might be a slight exaggeration, mastering the art of succinct content is a skill that must be developed and refined.

It can be tempting to want to load your website with an abundance of information, but it really is possible to say A LOT in relatively few words. It's usually better that way because audiences simply don't want to have to trawl through endless paragraphs to find the information they're looking for.

If you'd like us to audit your website's performance and help you to implement all-important tweaks, just give us a call and let's get started!