Does Your Website Turn Off Customers? Find Out Right Now

Posted by Penelope Herbert on December 15, 2017 · 1 Comment 

When you’re running your business, you might find that your website isn’t seeing that much interest from customers online.

Perhaps they don’t ever see your site, and this points to there being an issue with your SEO campaign. Or, perhaps they see your site and then click off.

This is actually worse because if they see your site and then click off they do find your business, but they don’t necessarily like what they discover.

This means that they will probably not buy and may never return to your site, losing you a potential sale that you could have boosted your profits.

But why did your customers choose to leave your site? What turned them off? That is the question that we will answer today.

Beware that from the slight to the massive, there are a number of clear and obscure reasons why someone will leave your site and choose not to buy from your business.

That’s why we need to start by thinking in terms of A-B testing. A-B testing is useful when there’s an issue that isn’t easy to guess or predict.

We all have subconscious likes and dislikes. There might be something on your site that is turning customers off and they might not even be aware of it.

To put this in perspective, this could be as small as the colour of a buy button. Honestly, that is enough to make a buyer pause before they commit to a purchase.

You might even find it’s the wording that you have used in a title page.

Through A-B testing you can change a little detail like this and run both versions of the site at the same time.

In one, you will change the colour of the buy button, and in another, you can leave it as it is. By doing this, you can perfect the little things about your site that are turning customers off.

Security Alert

You might not have noticed, but if you’re accessing your website on Google Chrome, you might see one of two things in the address bar.

You could see ‘Secure’ a little green lock and https highlighted in green. Or, you could see ‘not secure’ and a red triangle. Scrolling over this will provide a more detailed explanation of the label.

Unfortunately, the red triangle will say that your site is not secure and should not be trusted for personal information such as passwords and card numbers.

That’s an issue because to buy customers will always need to provide this type of information. Now, you might think that customers aren’t going to notice something like this.

But they will and only way it could have been more noticeable was for Google to highlight the whole darn address bar for an unsafe site.

A recent poll revealed that over eighty percent of customers would not buy on a site with this label, so it’s a serious problem.

Actually, though, it’s just one example of how important security is these days and how important it can be for customers. You might also have a problem with popups.

This is going to be more relevant for bloggers and news website owners. Popup ads can be part of promotional content, but they are also messy.

They can even push users and customers to less secure areas of the web which brings back that issue with security.

So, you do have to be careful what companies you work with and which ones you allow to piggyback off your site.

Poor Design

Or, it might simply be an issue with the design. Is your website design boring, dull or uninspired? Worse still, are you relying on a template that a large percentage of other sites use online. That’s quite common with WordPress sites and points to two things.

One, your site is amateur and professional (we’ll talk about that a little further down) and two it’s just not worth their time. If you see a site that looks like it’s run by one person in their mother’s basement are you going to stick around?

Exactly, so you should be looking into a pro website design for your site where it is devised from scratch by experts and a team of professionals. Remember, that’s going to make your business look professional as well.

It’s not just the initial design though. You have to handle adding content the right way as well. You need to make sure that it doesn’t clog up your site, once again making it look unprofessional. That’s not the only issue with adding content though.

You also need to make sure that the site is easy to navigate and make sure that customers can find what they’re looking for without any delays or issues.

Too much content and they’ll be scrolling forever, searching for a product they want to buy or a service that they need. One of the best ways to improve navigation is by using links.

With the right links, you can essentially guide customers right where they need to be for a purchase which is very useful indeed for finalising those sales.

Give A Damn About Your Bad Reputation

Of course, you might find that customers are being turned off not by the site itself but by what people are saying about it online.

This could be anything from a negative SEO campaign to a few disgruntled customers who are making waves by bad mouthing your business. It’s always worth Googling your company every now again and brand to see what buzz is like online.

You might not like what you find, and in fact, there could be a few fires for you to put out. Remember, once people find your site, they probably will do a quick search of your brand online.

This could be the real issue that’s turning them off from committing to a purchase. An analytics company can find out if there’s an issue like this and perhaps even put a plan in motion to course correct.

Using this info, you should have no trouble fixing the problems that might just be why customers aren’t sticking around on your website.