The average web surfer spends 5-10 seconds deciding whether or not they want to remain on a site. And given that users who leave disappointed rarely return, it is important to catch their attention the first time around.
The seven tips listed below will help you to improve your website, encourage repeat visits, and get results.
1. Create Compelling Headlines
By writing concise and descriptive headlines, you tell your visitor what your site can offer them and why they should stay on your site. Be sure to use no more than 6-10 words, and make your headline standout by using a larger font size or bold text.
2. Make Sure that Your Pages Load Quickly
If your pages do not load within 5-8 seconds, you will lose most of your visitors! For most sites, this is fairly easy to achieve. However, if your site has lots of images or graphics, it might be especially hard for you to achieve this sub 8 second load time. For these types of sites, try optimizing your images, resizing your images, or removing unnecessary images. Also, remove excess whitespace from your pages.
3. Choose Smart Colors
Have you ever come across those websites which seem to feature every color in the rainbow? Please use these as an example of what not to do. Research has shown that visitors respond best to websites that have a simple and consistent color scheme. And if your website contains lots of text, for ease of reading, it is suggested that you use dark text on a light background.
4. Provide a Simple User-Friendly Navigation
Its very important to enable your visitors to easily find the content that they are looking for. So try to keep the navigation in an easy to find location such as across the top of a site or in a left or right sidebar. And if your site is large (30+ pages), it might be helpful to have a search box.
5. Don’t Overwhelm Your User With Content
Your site should have sufficient content to keep your visitors interested. And you might have tons that you’d like to provide. However, you don’t want to overwhelm your visitors by flooding the site with too much content. If you have a lot of information, try to break it into different categories and spread it across multiple pages. Additionally, to aid the visitor in reading the content, do not let the lines of content stretch across the entire width of the page.
6. Write Quality Content
There are a few questions that you should ask yourself to determine whether you have quality content on your page:
- Is it unique?
- Is it well-written or is it riddled with grammatical errors or spelling mistakes?
- Will the target audience understand the content or will they need to employ the use of a dictionary?
- Is there sufficient content on a page or is the page mostly empty or full of ads?
7. Remove Dead Links
There is nothing more frustrating than clicking on a link and receiving an error page. So if you remove any content, be sure to remove all links that point to that page.