It happens: you spend days, weeks, and months meticulously creating the perfect website, only for it to experience a high bounce rate. You will naturally wonder where you went wrong. The truth is, most people make an opinion about a website in a matter of milliseconds, so it’s probably not that there’s a single minor grammatical error or an image that’s a little out of place (although these should also be fixed).
Instead, it’s likely an obvious point that you may have mentally filtered out. If you want to ensure people stay on your website for as long as possible, keep these four features that users hate when browsing sites in mind.
1: Mobile Unfriendliness
When more than 92% of internet users use their phones to access the web, you can’t put making your website mobile-friendly on the back burner. Otherwise, you’ll alienate the majority of your users! To make your website more responsive and useable on a mobile, there are several steps you can take, including compressing images, optimizing speed, and stripping the content.
2: Too Many Pop-ups
When a user clicks onto a website for a specific reason—for example, to read an in-depth article about sustainability—they certainly don’t want any disruption. Unfortunately, that’s precisely what most pop-ups provide. Whether people are reading a paragraph or trying to find the contact page, they don’t want a large pop-up to take over the screen with information they don’t care about.
Now, that isn’t to say there aren’t useful pop-ups; some pop-ups are an essential part of your website, as they offer users a more streamlined experience. A chatbot, for example, can answer questions before the user decides to use a contact form. Specific accessibility overlays are also highly useful—offering a more user-friendly experience. Adding this kind of overlay may do the opposite of annoying your users.
Of course, you want to make sure these accessibility overlays are helpful. Here are accessibility overlays explained, which will help you understand the ins and outs of providing better accessibility to users in a more interactive and in-tune way with the rest of your website.
3: Confusing Navigation
If your website was a real-life store, would people know where to go? Confusing navigation is one of the biggest reasons people click off a website—even if they originally were very interested in the content. Therefore, if you have a website, make sure the navigation is as intuitive as possible. No one is looking for a website that feels like a puzzle or a maze!
4: Videos that Autoplay
The chances are you have been on a website that automatically plays videos before, and there’s an even greater chance that your reaction was anything but positive. While videos are a great way to engage people online, they aren’t as enjoyable when you don’t have control over when they play—especially when you cannot find the button to get it to pause!
To avoid annoying your users, never allow media to autoplay on your website’s pages.
It’s always best to address the most hated parts of websites before delving into the more detailed parts; that’s especially true if you’ve noticed a higher bounce rate than usual. Once you have the more obvious annoyances figured out, you can focus on other areas of your website to make it as user-friendly and appealing as possible.
Featured photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash.
