How websites turn off customers

You have probably put up a great looking website that you anticipate will attract thousands or even millions of users. Time is passing and your web statistics show that you have just had a couple of visits in the last month and most of them are from you.

Don’t get discouraged because in this article we will look at some of the things that might be sending customers away so that you can tackle and get rid of them from your future website designs. In a later article I will also showcase some techniques you could use to optimize you webpage design for fast loading pages.

When designing a webpage there are elements that turn off a buying customer. They make purchasing harder than it actually is or than the customer is willing to try sending them of. Marketing Experiments calls it friction. Unlike anxiety that is caused by credibility and trust issues, friction is triggered by the elements of the page.

The page or processing element of a page may have been designed in such a way that a customer will find it difficult in engaging it. Some of the design flaws that cause friction are: slow loading pages laden with heavy graphics that take forever to load and do not show any indication of loading progress. It is good practice to ensure that a customer does not wait when he doesn’t need to. Web users are reasonable as to what time a page should take to load all its content. For instance, one is likely to be more patient when waiting for a video than they will be for an image.

According to Zona Research slow loading pages have been responsible to loses of up to $25 billion a year for marketers. To counter this one could reduce the number of media a page and optimize it to load media only when clicked. Another solution would be to chop up huge graphics into smaller bits that would load faster. Most graphic design applications like Adobe Photoshop allow designers to save images in optimized formats for web use.

Moreover using page speed analyzing tools like YSlow which can be integrated in your browser can help you analyze the reasons why a specific page on your site is slow. Other problems include the length of the ordering process: with shopping carts the numbers of pages you will click through before you finally get to place your order are quite numerous. Marketing Experiments have managed to reduce the ordering process from nine to three pages.

Apart from the lengthy ordering processes poor design can also entail having you call to action buttons deep within the page. Lately, when shopping offline you have probably noticed that cashiers are among the first things you see when you enter a supermarket. The pay points have been strategically placed close to the entrance/exit and not deep within the aisles of the shopping complex.

Similarly, well designed pages should have an outstanding order page which will preferably be located at the top of the page and at the end of the item as shown above. You can browse through our online shop for a perfect example of a well layout shopping experience. You might find something you like and end up experiencing the fastest shopping cart system. Feel free to contact us for professional designed web pages optimized for speedy-loading and search engine marketing.


SNETTSCOM is an IT company. We excel at providing solutions in systems integration, consultancy, outsourcing, applications development, networking and security. Aside from this, SNETTSCOM also specializes in creative design and marketing.