Magento eCommerce Website Design – 10 Annoying Elements To Avoid
We can advise the best processes to design a smooth and slick website without annoying elements to put off your first time (and repeat) visitors). If your business is looking to migrate an eCommerce website from one platform to another there are many platforms available and in this blog post we describe why we are firm favourites of Magento 2.
It’s great if you have paid for Google SEO and your website is on Google page 1 for your target search phrase, but you must remember that poor user experience can cause high page abandonment rates, low visitor-to-lead conversion rates, poor organic search listing positions, and a plain ol’ bad reputation.
So we have compiled a list of the 15 most annoying things we’ve seen on websites to act as a sort of guide for what not to do when designing your website. Let’s take a look at the worst offenders:
1) Pop-ups
Excessive pop-ups that disrupt the reading experience can be seriously annoying — especially when the CTA copy is made to guilt-trip you. You know, the ones that include a button that says something like, “No thanks, I don’t want to improve my website.” Can’t they just let you live your life?
If you’re going to use pop-ups there is a right way:
Use them in moderation. That way, you aren’t constantly bombarding your visitors with content they may not be interested in.
Make them “smart.” Smart CTAs let you display a different pop-up (or no pop-up at all) to different types of visitors based on whether they’ve visited your site before, or whether they’re at a certain stage in the buying cycle.
Track them for effectiveness. Assess the number of views and clicks on each pop-up CTA, along with how many submissions the pop-up actually leads to. If you find it isn’t performing very well, consider editing or removing it to create a better user experience for your visitors. You can also run A/B variation tests to test out various copy and offers. (HubSpot customers: Learn how to run an A/B test on a pop-up CTA here.)
Use delightful copy. Far too many sites use language meant to guilt-trip visitors into taking the desired action. Don’t follow their lead. Check out the example below in the exit intent CTA Make My Persona, which uses polite language in the “no” option.
2) Audio / Video Autoplays
Shhhh … I wasn’t supposed to be on this site at work – or, you are on mobile and autoplay video gobbles up your data. Or worse, you are on a train and there’s a loud jingle coming from your phone!
If someone’s enjoying what they thought was a silent browsing session and they’re bombarded with your theme song or a talking head on a video for which they didn’t press “play” — especially if they can’t find the button for “stop” — what do you think they’re going to do?
Some might fumble for their mute button … but I can more easily locate the back button in my browser than my computer’s volume controls. Although Facebook and Twitter now autoplay videos in our feeds, note that they’re always on mute unless users choose to unmute them.
Extend the same courtesy to your visitors by not forcing your multimedia content on them. Either let them choose when to play it, or at the very least have it start with the sound off.
3) Slow Loading Website – Too Many Images
Our shortening attention spans are not just making us check our phones several hundred times per day; they’re also making us really impatient when it comes to waiting for websites to load. According to a KISSmetrics report, 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in two seconds or less, and 40% abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load. Even a one-second delay decreases customer satisfaction by about 16%.
Slow loading time frustrates your site visitors and affects conversion rate and brand perception — especially for mobile users, who are sometimes relying on slower cellular internet connections when browsing the web. How does slow load time impact brand perception, you might be wondering? According to an Ericsson study, the longer it takes a website to load, the more website visitors blame the content provider instead of their mobile service providers.
But if you want people to stick around your website, you’re going to have to put optimising your site’s load performance at the top of your to-do list. Page load time can be impacted by image size, code, videos, and other factors.
4) Website Is Not Mobile Friendly
When browsing the internet on a mobile phone, have you ever been forced to scroll from side-to-side to read copy on a website? Or have you had to pinch-to-zoom because the words or buttons on a page were way too small? These are all examples of the painful UX people can have on websites that aren’t optimized for mobile.
Google announced a major mobile algorithm update in summer 2015 that penalizes websites that aren’t mobile-friendly, and it announced it would strengthen the ranking signal from mobile-friendly websites starting on May 1, 2016.
A big part of why Google continues to make these changes is to improve the web browsing experience for mobile users. So if your site isn’t optimized for mobile devices, you’ll likely lose out significantly in the organic search rankings. Can you really afford to miss out on all that traffic and all those sales? It’s unlikely.
5) No Sales Call To Action and Poor Navigation
When someone lands on your site, do they know what to do? Where to go? What their next steps should be?
While this might seem like a no-brainer, research by Small Business Trends suggests that 80% of small B2B business websites lacked a call-to-action — as recently as 2013. They weren’t missing out on leads and sales because their CTAs were poorly written; they were missing out because they simply didn’t provide any direction on their website or ask people to click around.
Include clear headline copy, jargonless page copy that explains the value of what you do, and a clear primary call-to-action that shows visitors how to take the next steps — whether that’s subscribing to your blog, getting a free trial, watching a video, or any other action you hope visitors will perform on your site.
Be direct, tell people what to do next. Call our friendly helpful team on 01895 255 633 for expert advice, our developers are happy to answer all of your questions. Read more about Magento eCommerce Website Design. See what we did there?
6) Distracting Animations or Photo Overlead
You’re probably familiar with the blink test by now. You know, the few seconds users have to orient themselves on any given web page before they click “back” in their browser. We refer to this as the “4 second rule – impress or digress”
Animations, autoplay videos, blinking and flashing paid advertisements, and other interactive entertainment may seem really cool, but if they’re too obtrusive or disorienting, they can detract from a visitor’s focus during those critical three seconds. Keep any animations on your website simple. Read more here.
7) Stock Photos That Are Used By Others
Bad stock photos are generic at best, and ridiculous at worst. Images are helpful if they clarify something for a visitor, and generic stock photography doesn’t help visitors or your business.
It’s much better to show real pictures of customers, employees, your company, your product, and your location. If you don’t have any of those, browse this list of the best free, non-cheesy stock photo websites. If you’re particularly design savvy, you can create visuals yourself that directly relate to what you do. Be focussed and genuine.
8) Welcome To My Website
In the same vein as a bad ‘About Us’ page, it’s really frustrating to click around a company’s website and not get a clear sense of what the company actually offers.
The best webpages clearly explain who they are, what they do, and/or what you (the visitor) can do there. If you’re a well-known brand or company (i.e., Coca-Cola) you may be able to get away with not having to describe who you are and what you do. However, most businesses still need to answer these questions so that each visitor knows they are in the “right place.”
Steven Krugg sums it up best in his best-selling book, Don’t Make Me Think: If visitors can’t identify what it is you do within seconds, they won’t stick around long.
9) Homepage Repeats Keywords
Remember back in the early 2000s when you went to a website and saw paragraphs and paragraphs of copy? Aside from being visually overwhelming, if you read that copy you’d find nothing more than a bunch of keywords meant for crawlers, not humans.
Unfortunately, some websites are still writing for bots, even though Google’s algorithm is far more sophisticated at determining a page’s relevancy than it was 10 years ago. Stuffing your content with keywords is one of the most common search engine optimization (SEO) mistakes marketers make. While keywords are crucial to driving SEO success, Google will penalize your website in search for keyword-stuffing.
Even more importantly, keyword-stuffed copy makes for a bad reader experience. So instead or cramming a keyword in every chance you get, write unique and enticing copy coupled with a catchy sales call to action.
10) Zero Blog Posts – Or Posts Dated Last Year
If you don’t have a blog, you’re missing out on an opportunity to provide your visitors with a ton of valuable information. (And you’re missing out on ranking opportunities, too.). Conversley, if you do have a blog but you haven’t bothered to post in months, poeple will assume you’re not bothered about engaging with new visitors.
These days, consumers are empowered to perform in-depth company research on their own before ever contacting a salesperson. If they find answers to their common questions in articles on your company’s blog, they’re much more likely to come into the sales process trusting what you have to say because you’ve helped them in the past. (This is one of the many benefits of business blogging.)
If you’re an avid content creator, you know how important a well-crafted title is. Great titles are what cause people to click through to read what you have written. But if they’re met with content that’s unrelated to the title you provided, you’ll disappoint visitors — and they’ll often abandon your site.
This is why click-baity headlines aren’t a very fair way to get people to your site. They take advantage of our natural curiosity. If you’re going to use that tactic, you’d better deliver content that excites as much as the title. If not, you’ll just annoy people. The lesson: While it’s important to capture peoples’ attention in titles, make sure it isn’t misleading and your content can actually live up to what you promised you’d deliver.
