Your website isn’t merely a public information service; its primary purpose is to drive business growth through bookings or sales. While providing valuable information to your target audience is essential, the ultimate goal is to convert prospective clients into actual customers.
As a website owner or a business seeking to enhance its online presence, it is crucial to understand the nuances that contribute to the success of your conversion strategy. If you have recently embarked on a promotional journey and shared your data with us, consider this article as your guide to common reasons why websites struggle to convert visitors into leads and customers. It aims to equip you with the knowledge needed to transform your website into a conversion powerhouse.
Let’s explore the five key reasons your website might have ceased converting – and, more importantly, discover how to kickstart the journey to improvement. Your website’s success story begins right here.
Reason 1: Your Website Is Not Optimised for Mobile
In the contemporary era, the prevalence of smartphones and tablets is undeniable, with over 80% of internet users choosing to access the web through their mobile phones. Additionally, more than half of all global website traffic originates from smartphones. This surge in mobile device usage has prompted search engines to prioritise mobile-friendliness as a critical element in delivering an excellent user experience. Notably, Google’s mobile-first algorithm exemplifies this shift by giving precedence to the mobile version of content for indexing and ranking.
This underscores the important role that a mobile-responsive website plays in today’s digital landscape, particularly in converting visitors into customers and optimising conversion rates. The correlation between a challenging mobile experience and visitors leaving a website without converting is substantial. Factors such as a call to action (CTA) prominently displayed on the desktop homepage but becoming off-screen on mobile, or the displacement of text due to images, and logos being cut off, can significantly impact user engagement.
To ensure seamless functionality across various devices, a website should be designed specifically for mobile in terms of content and structure. This involves elements such as images, menus, and forms adapting seamlessly to different screen sizes and orientations, providing users with a consistent and optimised experience.
To achieve a website that is not only mobile-responsive but also designed with a mobile-first approach, implementing strategies for mobile optimisation becomes crucial. The basic strategies include utilising mobile-optimised templates, crafting a touch-friendly design for easy accessibility, maintaining a simple design to avoid clutter, focusing on an optimised layout for user ease, prioritising large and legible font sizes, opting for sizable buttons for easy clicks, keeping paragraphs concise for enhanced readability, and implementing a single call to action for streamlined user focus and interaction.
Reason 2: Your Website Is Slow to Load
In a world where patience wears thin within mere seconds, websites are no exception to the demand for swift performance. Research indicates that visitors are highly likely to abandon a website if it takes longer than three seconds to load. This user behaviour is consistent across studies, emphasising the critical importance of a website’s loading speed.
A slow-loading website requires immediate attention to prevent potential customer loss and negative impacts on search engine rankings. In an era where every second counts, the load time and speed of a website become decisive factors in maintaining healthy conversion rates. If the site is sluggish, visitors quickly abandon it, clicking the back button and exploring alternative search results. The chances of them revisiting in the near future become unlikely. The window of opportunity to capture a potential customer’s attention is incredibly brief, and a slow-loading site diminishes that opportunity within a matter of seconds.
Today’s users expect instantaneous access to information and seamless interactions. To ensure optimal website performance, it is crucial to streamline code and avoid excessive plugins that contribute to a sluggish site. Employing standards-compliant code enhances the loading process, while steering clear of Flash and AJAX prevents impediments to website speed. Clearly marking and prioritising crucial pages, optimising URLs, and eliminating the use of tables as a web design tool all contribute to efficient loading. Investing in professional hosting is another key consideration to guarantee optimal website performance.
Identifying and addressing factors that may slow down the site, such as a lack of mobile optimisation, broken links, absence of caching, messy code, unoptimised images, reliance on Flash and Java, and mediocre web hosting, are fundamental steps in maintaining a fast and responsive website.
