For almost 8 years now my good friend Mack Prioleau and I have been working on a variety of online businesses, some of which have been more successful than others. During this 8 years Mack and I have also learned a great deal about what users are looking for in a website. This is really Mack’s area more than mine, as he is the one with the creative and graphic design skills.
We recently did a small survey on one of our sites about what people hate to see on a website, and Mack brought the results to me last week. The survey provided some great information which anyone who is building a website should bear in mind.
1. Broken Links
Broken links like a 404 error can happen for a number of reasons and it is something which certainly irks anyone using the website, and with good reason. If you find a product or a great article on someone’s site and you click the link to see it, only to find it doesn’t exist, you are certainly not going to be happy, and you’ll also be unlikely to hang around much longer.
2. Page Load Speed
We live in a fast paced world where we have just about everything that we need at our fingertips, this has resulted in people having far lower patience than ever before. This I am sure is the contributory factor in the annoyance which many users have when a website has a slow page load time.
In our survey almost 70% of those polled replied saying that this was their biggest issue, and that when a site takes too long to load, they assume it to be poor an move on.
3. Overwhelming CTAs
There is nothing wrong with marketing to your customers whilst they are on the page and utilizing call to action pop-ups. With this being said however some websites just go too far with this and it can lead to the feeling of overwhelmed when they arrive on a site’s homepage. This is tough as a website owner because it does beg the question ‘how much is too much’?
Regardless of the difficulty, it is clear that customers do not want to be bombarded when they hit the site, so the challenge is to find the right balance.
4. Navigation
Ease of navigation, or indeed difficulty of navigation is another frustration which many web users told us that they have, highlighting the importance that you are smart in how you lay out the website. Users want to easily jump around your website to find information or products that they like the look of. If however they have to trawl through menus and sub-menus to find it then they easily get frustrated and could leave the site. For this reason it is essential that you are internal linking and creating smart menus which help the user get to where they want to go.
Check your website and see if you have any of the issues listed above.