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5 Common Mistakes Driving Visitors Away from Your Website

As your online storefront, your website has one vital function–entice visitors to browse and turn them into paying customers.

It’s helpful to understand what grabs people’s attention. However, it’s also important to consider what might be driving them away. Without knowing, you might be committing mistakes that harm your conversion rate.

In this blog post, we’re going to discuss five common mistakes that may be driving visitors away from your website.

Let get started.

Your website is too slow.

Improving your website’s speed is more important than ever, because of two reasons.

User Behavior

Today’s Internet users are used to getting what they want and getting it quickly. According to a recent survey, 75% of users will leave a webpage if they encounter delays during peak traffic periods.

Failure to display your web pages quickly will result in all your content creation efforts going to waste. No matter how much effort you spend on blog posts and other forms of content, it won’t help you if people aren’t reading them.

Why? Because people will leave your website before they have a chance to look around.

The Google Speed Update

The recent Google Speed Update is the second reason why you need a fast website.

As of July 9, 2018, page speed became a significant ranking factor in mobile search results. The faster your website, the better your chances of ranking higher compared to your competitors.

This doesn’t mean that you can forget about creating quality content.

Let’s say that you sell lamps. To promote your products, you wrote a blog post about choosing the right lamps for different rooms in a house. Your closest competitor also wrote a similar blog post.

Both posts have roughly the same number of words. They give the same value and use similar vocabulary. You would be hard press to pinpoint which post is better.

However, your website is faster. Google will compare both posts and notice which website loads faster. Your blog post will likely rank higher.

In a nutshell, content is still king, but you shouldn’t forget about page speed. When it comes to ranking higher in search results, you need to learn all the ways you can get ahead.

Your website isn’t optimised for mobile.

In 2018, 52.2% of all Internet traffic came from mobile phones, a 1.9% increase compared to 2017. As more users gain access to mobile phones and the Internet, the number will continue to rise in the coming years.

Your websites need to showcase your content in the best possible light. Failing to optimise for mobile will make visitors leave before they get a chance to do what you want them to do.

When people think of mobile optimised websites, they think of websites that adapt to the device used to view them.

In 2016, Google started showing users AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages in search results. AMP are websites that only contain necessary elements so they load as quickly as possible. If an image or a line of code are unnecessary, they won’t appear in the AMP version of your website.

Having AMP versions of your web pages is incredibly helpful. Google prioritises them in mobile search results since they provide a better user experience.

Determine which type of mobile website you currently have–or if you even have one. This step will be a good starting point for finding improvement areas.

If your website is mobile friendly but not responsive, now might be a great time to consider upgrading.

Attempt to view your website on different devices to ensure it looks good. Manually checking your website on different devices will be too time-consuming. It will also be close to impossible since most people only have access to a few types of mobile devices.

Responsinator is a free tool that does the work for you. It lets you see how your website looks in different devices in both landscape and portrait modes.

Whether a user is using an Android phone or the latest iPhone, you can make sure that your website is displaying correctly.

You’re using complicated forms.

You use forms on your website so visitors can easily reach you. Failing to make your forms user-friendly defeats that purpose.

Here are some common contact form mistakes you need to avoid:

You’re slicing fields.

These are instances where visitors have to enter a single piece of information into different fields.

For example, some websites ask users to enter the date, month and year into separate fields when asking for birth dates. It’s a tiny thing, but it takes up unnecessary time.

You don’t have a clear call to action.

What is the main purpose of your form? Do you want visitors to sign up for something? What is the benefit to the user if they submit the form?

Some websites use a generic “Submit” button, but you should avoid that as much as possible. Including a clear call to action reminds users why they’re submitting their contact details to you.

It could mean the difference between receiving an email from a potential customer and losing a lead.

You didn’t test your form.

This is one task you should never overlook. You can break it down into two parts.

View your form in different browsers.

Even if your form looks right on the browser you’re using, that might not be the case for other people. Not everyone uses the same browsers you do.

The majority of Internet users use Google Chrome, but we have to keep other browsers and all their different versions in mind. Checking how your form looks on every version of every browser requires too much effort.

Thankfully, we have a tool like BrowserShots available. All you have to do is enter a URL and hit enter. It will then view the webpage using different browsers, generating an image of your website on each one.

You can download the images and see if there are any issues.

Make sure you receive submissions.

This is a step that is easily forgotten.

Even if your form looks great on a six-year-old version of Internet Explorer, you still need to check if it’s working. Try to send yourself an email using the form to verify if you can receive it.

Skipping such a simple step could lead to a loss of leads and revenue.

You’ve forgotten when you last updated your website.

Imagine looking for a plumbing company online. You look up “plumbers in Sydney” on Google and find a company that seems to have reasonable rates.

As you scroll through their website, you notice that their last announcement was in 2015. You begin to question if this plumbing company is still in business.

It doesn’t feel like they’re professional enough to fix your issues. If they were, they would have a had an announcement made in the last few months.

Now, put yourself in the plumbing company’s shoes. You’ve lost a potential customer all because you failed to update your website.

There are more scenarios where websites that haven’t been updated could result in loss of revenue. Here are some things you need to ensure are up to date:

• The things you sell – Are you still offering the same products and services? If you’ve stopped or started selling something, an update is in order.
• Your contact information – Are you still using the same phone number and email address? Did you move to another office since you last updated your website? Make it easy for customers to find you.

You don’t take advantage of WordPress plugins.

If you’re using a WordPress website, now would be a great time to reexamine the plugins you’re using.

WordPress plugins are software that performs a specific function on your website. Whatever you want to do, there’s a huge chance there’s a plugin available for it.

If you’d like to improve your website’s SEO, Yoast would be great for you. It checks how SEO-friendly and readable your content is, grading it and giving you suggestions.

If you’d like to provide better customer service, you can use WP Live Chat Support. It lets you chat with visitors in real-time. They can receive answers to their inquiries about your products and services right away, helping you close more sales.

If you’d like visitors to read more blog posts, give Contextual Related Posts a try. It adds links to similar articles at the bottom of each blog post. Upon seeing them, visitors would be encouraged to continue reading.

Examine your main goals for your website. Is it ranking higher in search engine results? Do you want to build better relationships with your customers? Research which WordPress plugins can help you achieve them.

Conclusion

Your website has one main purpose–to turn visitors into loyal customers.

It’s not an easy task. You have to convince visitors to keep browsing, even if there are a thousand other things begging for their attention.

Most of the time, we hear about techniques to engage visitors, but it’s important to learn what drives them away. We might be unaware we’re committing easily rectifiable mistakes.

Improving your website’s speed is of the utmost importance. Content is still king, but page speed is now a major ranking factor in mobile search engine results.

Make sure your website is viewable on every device imaginable. Whether a user is using a computer, tablet or phone, it should be engaging and easy to explore.

Forms help potential customers reach you. Ensure they work properly on different browsers.

Update your website often. Whether there’s a recent company change or you’d like to tell customers something, keep your content fresh and relevant.

WordPress plugins turn your website from boring to binge-worthy. Keep visitors glued to your website by choosing ones that will encourage them to keep scrolling.

Cornerstone Digital is a web development company in Sydney. If you’d like a website that turns visitors into customers, we’d be glad to build one for you. Call us on (02) 8211 0668 or email us at info@cornerstone-digital.com.au.

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Darlyn Herradura

A self-professed book and digital marketing nerd, Darlyn Herradura focuses on building trust between customers and businesses with the written word. She understands that creating valuable content is the best way to get found online and happily spends her time doing that.