Hi.
WTF?
Bye.
That’s how long it can take for a website user to have a poor experience on your website and then bounce the heck out of there.
You have about 5 seconds to make a good enough impression to keep your site user interested enough to stick around to browse some more.
So what can cause someone to have a poor experience on your website within 5 seconds of them landing on it? You might be surprised by these:
1. Your site takes more than 3 seconds to load all the content
People just don’t have the patience or time to wait for your website to get its shit together and load all the content, so site speed should be a high priority for you
2. Spelling mistakes - yes, really.
Typos tend to lead people to think that you’re not professional. Brutal hey! But it’s true. Get your spell check on, download Grammarly to help you find typos, or ask a friend to scan your site for you.
3. Lack of content on your home page.
I see this far more than I should when I audit websites - no words, one or two images, a logo, and phone number, nothing else.
Your home page is your big pitch to your potential customers or clients - if you were standing in a room with 10 people staring at you waiting to learn about your business, who you are, what you do and how you can help them, would you just stare back and say nothing??
Of course, you wouldn’t! So your website home page shouldn’t be blank or only have an image or 2, literally spell it out for them.
There’s more on the list of poor website experiences but these 3 are key:
Take an objective look at your website at run a site speed test using Google’s PageSpeed Insights or Pingdom.
Run a spell check on your entire website and fix any typos.
Invest in a website copywriter to professionally write your website content or give it a go yourself - aim for a minimum of 300 words per page and don’t forget KEYWORDS!