There are just three things a website needs to do to be a success.

Of course, you have to get people to your website. There’s a lot to that but some people think once they accomplish that, the job is done.

If only.

Maybe getting people to your site is the harder part of it, but I think what happens once they arrive on your site is just as important. Important enough that I’m going to devote a newsletter article to each of the three big steps that translate into a successful website.

The first is:

DON’T BOUNCE YOUR VISITORS.

The first big step is to get the visitor to NOT immediately leave.

Of course, there are two legitimate reasons for someone immediately leaving that are no criticism of your site.

Maybe they arrived on your site by mistake! They thought they were going to the website of Dr. Joe Dentist. What they got was the website of Dr. Bob Dentist. Oops, and “bye-bye.”

The second reason is they immediately found what they were looking for. Maybe they were just looking for your phone number which is prominently displayed.  They see the number, call or write it down. Bam, your website did its job and the visitor is gone.

But the third reason is the one we are here to talk about and it is a very big deal indeed. In some way the website immediately turned them off. They left and went looking elsewhere.

You just lost a potential customer. It’s right there that many websites lose the largest percentage of prospects.

There’s a number that expresses this that your analytics reports. It is called “bounce rate.” It is the percentage of site visitors who leave without visiting a second page. Sometimes if someone stays on the first page for a certain amount of time it isn’t considered a bounce.

Typical bounce rates vary by industry and how people find their site (paid advertising has higher bounce rates) but generally speaking, a bounce rate over 50% is pretty bad. You just lost over half your prospective customers before you really got started.

There are a number of reasons why this commonly occurs, and they can be remedied, often rather easily.

Here are the main reasons, most common listed first:

1. The site is too slow to load. Over the years people have come to expect a faster and faster response. If the page takes more than 3 second to appear on their screen, chances are they’re gone. Because of this, site speed is an important ranking factor in Google’s algorithm. A slow site will get lower search rankings and fewer visitors as a result.
2. Visitors can’t rapidly find what they are looking for. This is similar to #1. People lose patience if they have to hunt around to find out things like where you are located, what your phone number is, or what you do. This is a simple matter of putting yourself in the visitor’s shoes, but I’ve seen, and you’ve probably seen many times, a site where it was near impossible to find out what they even do. Marketing is not supposed to be a guessing game.
3. The site is, well, UGLY. Maybe it shouldn’t be that way but people tend to distrust a site that doesn’t look good. Frankly, I think it is perfectly logical.  If someone doesn’t care enough to make their site look good, how much care are they likely to take with their customers?

4. The site is confusing. Maybe the information the visitor needs is there but confusing navigation, bad links, and poorly organized pages make it hard to find. It’s just short of it not being there at all, because again, people are in a hurry and they’ll get frustrated and give up after a while.

5. Bad writing. This is akin to an ugly site. Typos, grammatical errors, wrong words don’t build trust but scare people off. People start wondering if the site will give them a virus.

Those are the most common things and they all have one of two things in common. Friction and Anxiety. It takes smooth, confidence building actions to make a sale. And make no mistake about it: getting someone to “stick” on your website is a sale. You’re selling the visitor on NOT leaving. Make no mistake about it, that’s what you are doing. 

Each of the three big steps of website success involves selling the visitor on something, as we’ll see.