I have talked about the importance of making a great first impression to your website visitors. There are studies that show that a person surfing the web will determine whether they are going to stay ony our website or go to one of your competitor’s website within the first 5 seconds. That leaves you with 5 seconds to convince your visitors to use your website and not to leave and go to one of your competitors. I am sure you are thinking that is not a lot of time and how am I supposed to do that if I don’t ever even interact with my website visitors. Well our Phoenix web design company has actually came up with different things that you do on your website that will affect a visitors first impression. This is extremely important because this will have a major impact on your click through rate and ultimately your close rate. This should have your attention because this can affect the way you put food on your family’s table. Let’s take a look at some of things that can give your visitors a positive or negative first impression.
- Load Times – If your visitor has to way 5 to 10 seconds for the website to load up they are more and likely to get frustrated and leave your website before they even see your site. To improve load times make sure that you are not using a ton of large images or media files.
- Error Messages – If visitors to your site are getting error messages or clicking on broken links they will be more likely to think that your company is not professional and leave your site. You should make sure that you are checking your website for these broken links or error messages on a frequent basis. If you find them then you should contact your web design company immediately.
- Look of Your Site – When you go to a website and it looks like a high school student made it for a class project, what are your thoughts? You probably don’t trust the site and would feel more comfortable to go to a professionaly designed website. This is why it is so important that you do your research and hire a web design company that has the skills to design a website that will benefit your business and not hurt it.
- Quality of Content – Visitors to your website are looking for information and if your website can’t give them the information they are looking for they are likely to leave your website. That is why the quality of the content on your website is so important. Websites that run into issues are websites that are writing content for the search engines and not for their visitors. Search engine optimization is such a valuable marketing tool that it causes some people to try to cheat the system.
- Navigation – Again, people know what they are looking for when they go to a website and if they have a hard time finding it they will assume it isn’t there and go to a different website that has it. That is why you need to lay out your website so that the navigation makes it easy to find content on your website.
First impressions are so important to the success of your website that you should strongly consider how you can improve your website’s first impressions that it leaves. I would suggest asking some of your friends and family to visit your website and ask them what they think. Try to find different ways you can improve the first impressions that your website leaves.