Is Your Website Customer Friendly?
Suppose you have a website that sells items online. How do you measure its success? Do you merely count the items that you manage to sell without considering how many hits you have per day? If you don’t, then you may not know it, but you might be letting a lot of opportunities slip away.
Try counting the number of hits your website gets per day and compare it to the number of items sold. If you begin to notice that there is a very low conversion rate of visitors to paying customers, then the issues might be because your website isn’t customer-friendly.
How long has your website been online and when was it last updated? And we don’t mean your list of available products or your latest news. We mean, when was your website launched, and does it have the latest features and meet the standards that people have come to expect from a website.
If your answer is anything longer than a year, then you should start by checking out your competitors’ websites and see how far behind you are. Do you have social media integration? Do you even have a Facebook Page for your online business? What other features does your competitor have that you feel you need to have. Take note of these differences. They could be costing you money.
Also, take note of your own website’s features, and of how long it takes for certain sections or elements to load. Try using different browsers to view your website and try loading each page and see which pages and images take too long to load. You may need to optimise certain images or have your web developer update certain pages to load faster.
Try out your sign-up process. If your website tracks clicks, try to find out if you have visitors who quit filling out a form. Perhaps your sign-up process is too long and inconvenient, and you might want to simplify things.
Lastly, ask two or three friends to try to navigate through your website. These should be people who have never seen your website before. Ask them for their thoughts on how easy or difficult it was to navigate through your website. Consider the navigation bars, the links, and if your website’s copy is easy to understand and follow.
Try doing all these processes at least every six months. Remember that technology moves at a breakneck pace and more than ever, people are becoming web-savvy. Everyone’s a critic, and if someone comes to your website and doesn’t like what he sees, then you just lost a customer.
