Is Your Website Scaring Away Your Customers?

Make sure your website is treating your visitors, not tricking them!

As technology evolves and more and more big-name brands raise the bar on what a standard website needs to look and operate like, it becomes more and more important for smaller name brands and companies to keep up with the latest web design trends and best practises.

If however, your website isn’t doing this, you could actually be scaring away your own customers. So it’s more important than ever to make sure your website isn’t spooking anyone out and is treating them to an amazing experience.

One of the main questions you need to ask yourself is, “what kind of experience do you want to offer your customers and visitors”? Here are some of the points we came up with that could be scaring your visitors off your website!

Are your visitors afraid to browse around?

If your website’s first impression is on the scary side, your visitors will be too afraid to browse further and will run away almost immediately! One of the main things that can put off potential customers when visiting your website is the design. If they are greeted with a clutter of poorly displayed images and information, which makes it harder to find out what they are looking for, they’re likely to leave the site without looking any further. Not only will this lose you a potential customer but it will increase your website bounce rate too, which is a big SEO no-no. A rising bounce rate is a sure sign that your home or landing page is horrifying or off-putting, and can have a frightening effect on your search engine performance.

Making sure you choose a clean, client-focussed web design can help give your visitors a positive and strong first impression that you are a professional company with a clear intention of aiding and informing its customers. While images are a great way of catching the visitors attention, it’s important to make sure not to overdo it with too many images which hide the page content or to feature images which are too small or difficult to see – there’s nothing more haunting than a grainy, dreadful image greeting your visitors!

Also, make sure not to overload your website with pop-ups, as this can be an easy way of irritating your visitors and scaring them off to go and look somewhere else.

Is your website a little on the dead or outdated side?

There’s nothing quite as disengaging than visiting a website only to find content boasting about how a company has been in operation for 10 years, yet had its inception in 1999, and blog posts with dates going back to 2012. Talk about needing to clear out those cobwebs!

As important as making sure things like company dates and achievements stay up to date, having a regularly updated blog is one of the best ways for customers to engage with your business, as well as being a great way of generating new traffic through the blogs SEO benefits. The same goes for any social media channels which you have. Having inactive blogs and dead social media accounts can turn off customers and make them wonder if you’re still in business or dedicated to the service you provide. Don’t leave your content lurking way back in 2012, bring it bang up to date with monthly reviews and refreshes!

Do you have horrifyingly slow site loading times?

If a visitor to a website isn’t given the information they are looking for within at least 4 to 6 seconds, there’s a high chance of scaring them away straight into the hand of a competitor. Gone are the days of patience online! As internet and website loading speeds have improved more and more, people become less tolerable to waiting for a creeping site speed. It’s even become so important that the search engine giant Google themselves take loading speed into consideration when it comes to your SEO rankings.

We’re always aiding our clients in improving their website’s speed, and is a common issue which we delved into a few weeks ago which involved reducing redirects, reducing image sizes, reducing the number of plugins and much more. Check out: 10 Ways to Improve Your Website Speed & Performance.

Is your website mobile-friendly or frightening?

By the end of 2019, 63.4% of the population is predicted to be accessing the internet via their mobile phones, with 61.2% accessing the internet via mobile phone in 2018*. With this being the case, it’s no surprise that making sure your website is mobile optimised should be top of your priority list. 

Mobile users don’t want to visit a website which is difficult to navigate or find the information they’re looking without needing to zoom and zip around it first. If your website isn’t designed to be compatible with mobile devices, you’re potentially losing out on loads of unsatisfied or frustrated mobile visitors. But you don’t just need a mobile-friendly website to keep your visitors on side! in July 2018, Google rolled out an algorithm update which started ranking websites based on the speed of mobile versions and penalising any which were either scarily slow or simply didn’t have a mobile-friendly site.

Creating a website which utilises a responsive web design can help make Google and your mobile visitors happy. Making sure your website is mobile-friendly is something which we highly recommend, and is something which we have provided to our clients from our web design and digital consultancy HQ in Darlington.

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So, are you guilty of any of the above? Stop scaring those oh-so-important website visitors away! Speak to Hush about blowing out those cobwebs. We’re more than happy to help and can talk you through everything you can do to make sure your website is a treat with not tricks in sight. Get in touch at 01325 361 729 or fill out our contact form and someone will get back to you as soon as possible.