How often do you click on a website only to immediately hit the back button or X out of the tab because the website didn’t grab your interest? I’d wager it was rather recent. We’ve all done it. We’ll all continue to do it. Maybe the colors are off-putting, annoying music starts playing before the page loads, or there just isn’t anything to hold your interest.
We know what can cause website visitors to leave, but, what are some of the factors that make them stay? Is the content you develop easily accessible; are your brand colors appealing, does the layout ensure your user interface is simple to navigate? That’s what we all want out of our websites. With over two billion people connected to the internet in some form, there’s a lot you have to consider in keeping user traffic engaged with your website.
So how should you go about that? There are a few potential options and they only involve a little bit of bemoaning your existence and wondering why you undertook this project in the first place.
Realize That Your Audience Is Busy
We’ve all got a lot to do in a day. Work. Kids. The new episode of our favorite TV show. Your attention is at a premium, and so are the eyes that commit to viewing your web content. You wouldn’t allow a website to waste this valuable time and neither will your visitors. On average it takes 17 to 50 milliseconds for someone to decide if they like a website or not. A blink takes between 100 and 400 milliseconds.
You blinked, right? Just to check? Yeah. You did.
It could take less than one-fourth the time for someone to decide if they like your website. Mildly terrifying, honestly.
But don’t panic just yet, because just as easily as you can lose a visitor in that amount of time, you can also keep them if you know what you’re doing.
Know What Your Audience Is There For
If you want people to stick around longer than a blink, you need to know why they are there and give them what they came for right off the bat. Are you a crafter? Probably better to open with your crafts and not a gallery of pictures from your family reunion. Are you an international provider of building materials? Probably shouldn’t open with a picture of your cat, no matter how cute they look curled up in your tool bag.
…And Make It Easy To Find
There’s not much that is more annoying than going to a website that on the surface, looks like it’s exactly what you need, only for you to discover that the information you really need is MIA. A crafting website with no clear information on how to purchase the crafts, a supply website with no clear specs on the supplies, a consulting website with unclear contact information. You wouldn’t hang around on a website like that, so why would you expect people to do it on yours?
Getting all this to mesh together with the hundreds of other factors that go into designing a successful website can be a time-consuming process, which is where UZU comes in. Let us help you keep people longer than a blink.