Even the latest and greatest websites become out of date within a couple of years dues to advances in technology, design and coding. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably been having some concerns about the performance of your website. You may wonder – how bad is it? What do your customers think about it? How many leads are you losing because of your website?
Over the years we’ve tested hundreds of websites and the symptoms below always indicate issues with the website’s UX. Whether you’re trying to assess the situation or making a business case for redesigning the site, this list should help you recognize some of the most common symptoms of poor user experience and turn it into an exemplary one.
Which one of the following symptoms applies to your website?
Your website is not converting users into new business, sales, or leads
A well thought out website should be generating new business – without any excuse. If your website is not converting less than 2-5% traffic into new opportunities (sales, leads, or requests) then it is simply not attracting, engaging, and converting visitors into potential customers.
There are many reasons why this could be happening: from poor value proposition and unclear messaging to insufficient proof and weak calls-to-actions – even a minor bottleneck, such as a banner not loading, can cost you a ton of business.
Your website’s bounce and exit rates are high
This one is quite easy to measure with Google Analytics- basically what happens when users can’t find what they are looking for? They leave! If the core pages of your website have a bounce rate higher than 50%, it’s an indicator that users are not finding the information they’re interested in and there’s no reason for them to stay on your website. This can also be an indicator of a slow loading website, meaning that the site takes too much time to load and the users simply just leave the site before its contents are loaded.
The bounce rate is much higher on mobile devices
This could be an indicator of serious usability issues on mobile devices. Even if your website is mobile-friendly or responsive, certain UX issues may be exaggerated on mobile devices. For example, difficulty with navigation, information that is buried, or font size that is too small. If the bounce/exit rate on mobile is significantly higher, the user experience might be even worse on mobile devices. If the mobile to desktop ratio is steadily growing, this means that the website UX will continue sliding until you address the issues with the mobile experience.
Users are not engaging with your content
When was the last time you had a look at how users are engaging with your site’s content and asked:
- Are the users reading what’s on the site?
- Are users sharing it?
- Are they interacting with it?
- Do they want more?
If the answers are mostly “No”, then the chances are that there are website UX issues that exist within the content. These issues could range from the readability of the text and high cognitive load to the usefulness of the content.
Your competitor’s websites seem to be better
You’re not the only one thinking about this! Users often open multiple websites when doing research or due diligence. When they open the websites and compare them side-by-side and notice that the competitor’s website is significantly better in every aspect and provides for more rewarding and more effective total user experience, they will gravitate towards it. Wouldn’t you? Why suffer and put up with a painful user experience? Creating a website SWOT analysis will reveal weaknesses and threats, understanding these allows you to convert them into strengths and opportunities.
Users are having a hard time finding information on your website
How can you tell? Well, excessive and repetitive search queries may indicate information findability issues. You can start by analyzing the search logs on your website. What are the top queries? Are the users finding what they are searching for? What will you find when you search for similar keywords?
Studying the logs may also reveal the information that is missing from your website.
Your customer prefer calling you before using the website
The current trend is clear, younger generations prefer searching for information on the website, they do not like to call or meet, they prefer self-service. They would rather find information and perform tasks on your website than with a person. However, if they resort to calling you, that might mean that they don’t find the information they are looking for on your website, again, an indicator of badly optimized website UX.
Website tweaks and changes produce little to no effect
Tweaking is not fixing. If you already tried various changes and they produced little to no effect, it might be time for a fresh new perspective. We all develop bias and tunnel vision and sometimes this gets in the way of progress. Sometimes an outside perspective would make all the difference in the world.
JusttempalteIT has years of experience when it comes to UX and UI design and our experts guarantee we can find and fix problems much quicker than “guesswork” and with an almost immediate ROI.
What can you do?
Simply Contact Us and one of our UX specialists will get in touch with you and will review your website.