The seconds pass by in your visitor’s mind as they arrive to your website. If they don’t bounce immediately because of poorly targeted marketing efforts and sucky landing pages, you’ll still be lucky if they’ll stick around for the next 120 seconds. It’s like every visitor to your website has a timer in her head and if she can’t complete her task in the allotted time, she is out of there.
How are you wasting your visitors time?
- Does it take a while for your pages to load?
- Do your database lookups take so long your visitors can go and get a snack before the results are returned?
- Do you have important content that is hidden away?
- Is your most important copy buried among a bunch of filler copy?
- Does it take your visitors too long to find the product they are looking for?
- Do you force visitors to pogo-stick between a category page and product pages because your category page fails to provide enough information to confidently select among the choices.
- Is it difficult to sort among choices by the factors or qualities that your visitor feels important? Or do you only allow sorting by price?
- Does your registration or check out process have too many steps and take to long to complete?
- Does it take several steps for your visitor to figure out their total cost including shipping?
Here is another classic way of wasting your visitors time that could easily be avoided.
Placing your out of stock messaging on the category pages will prevent your visitors from repeatedly finding that the product they clicked on and started to desire is – upon their arrival on the product page – suddenly unavailable for purchase.
So while I’ve given you a valuable list and a good examples to get you started, every site has its own unique challenges, and it’s worth asking your team: how many different ways can you find to shave valuable seconds during your visitors journey to become a lead or sale?
How can you help your vistors beat their own internal clocks in order to win more business?
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