Websites are impersonal ways of communication and so they require strong confidence building measures to keep visitors and get them to return to the site. In this post, we have compiled 16 things that could turn people away from a website. Web builders/designers do forget to note and implement some of these recommendations even when they have themselves been irked by some of these things on other people's website. That happens to most of us but working with a simple guide like this one can help overcome some of these problems. This guide could therefore be simply referred to as a guide to what not to do when designing your website.

16 Reasons Visitors Hate Your Website

1) Slow Website Speed.

People have real trouble waiting for websites when the load time is very high. According to a KISSmetrics report 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in two seconds or less, and 40% abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load. Even a one-second delay decreases customer satisfaction by about 16%. This can have very strong and negative impact on website bounce rate. Faster loading website can help reduce bounce rate more than most other factors.

Slow loading time frustrates your site visitors and affects conversion rate and brand perception -- especially for mobile users, who are sometimes relying on slower cellular internet connections when browsing the web. How does slow load time impact brand perception, you might be wondering? According to an Ericsson study the longer it takes a website to load, the more website visitors blame the content provider instead of their mobile internet service providers.

So, optimizing your website load performance should be a priority and you need to spend time and research into getting it right below 2 seconds. If you are running a content management system, you need to pay attention to caching. Page load time can also be impacted by poorly optimized images, code, videos, and other factors This can be addressed by plugins if you built your website with content management systems like WordPress

2. Website is Not Mobile Friendly

If you are a mobile phone user and browse with your mobile phone, you should have come across some websites that you will have to scroll from side-to-side to read copy on a website or zoom to view the text content of the website. These are the painful UX people can have on websites that aren't optimized for mobile.

Google announced a major mobile algorithm update n summer 2015 that penalizes websites that aren't mobile-friendly, and announced it would strengthen the ranking signal from mobile-friendly websites starting on May 1, 2016. That simply means you have to take mobile friendliness very seriously.

The major reason why Google continues to make these changes is to improve the web browsing experience for mobile users. So if your site isn't optimized for mobile devices, you'll likely lose out significantly in the organic search rankings.

3) Poor navigation

When someone visits your site, do they get confused about what to do, Where to go, What their next steps should be. You have to make navigation easy and clear to things easy for your website users.

A research by Small Business Trends suggests that 80% of small B2B business websites lacked a call-to-action -- as recently as 2013. They were missing out because they simply didn't provide any direction on their website or ask people to click around.

To address this problem, you will have to include clear headline copy, jargonless page copy that explains the value of what you do, and a clear primary call-to-action that shows visitors how to take the next steps -- whether that's subscribing to your blog, getting a free trial, watching a video, or any other action you hope visitors will perform on the site.

4) Excessive pop-ups.

Pop-ups can sometimes be very annoying. It disrupts users flow while browsing.

If you're going to use pop-ups there is a right way:


Use them in moderation. That way, you aren't constantly bombarding your visitors with content they may not be interested in.
Make them smart. Making them smart means displaying a different pop-up (or no pop-up at all) to different types of visitors based on whether they've visited your site before, or whether they're at a certain stage in the buying cycle.
Track them for effectiveness. Assess the number of views and clicks on each pop-up along with how many submissions the pop-up actually leads to. If you find it isn't performing very well, consider editing or removing it to create a better user experience for your visitors.
Use delightful copy. Far too many sites use language meant to force visitors into taking the desired action. Use a polite language and give them the option to say no.
Use small banners that slide in from the side or bottom of the page with a call-to-action. They tend to be less obtrusive, providing users with more information while still allowing them to continue reading the piece of content.
5) Multimedia content that auto-plays.

People are mindful about how their internet resources are used and do not just want to be taken by surprise. If someone's enjoying what should have been a silent browsing session and suddenly gets bombarded with your theme song or a talking head on a video for which they didn't press play -- especially if they can't find the button for stop - this can be very annoying for people who are very mindful about noise and the use of their internet resources.

6) It boasts disorienting animations.

Animations, autoplay videos, blinking and flashing paid advertisements, and other interactive entertainment may seem a good way to sell an idea or product very quickly but if they're too obtrusive or disorienting, they can detract visitors' focus during those critical three seconds. Interestingly, visitors dislike this. Keep any animations on your website as simple as you can.

7) Too Much Generic Photography.

Working with images is great as they can represent a thousand words and ease understanding. But sometimes, we use generic images to create a wonderful impression about our company and people working there. We want to show images of happy people and we end up taking internet photos and use generic images showing the impressions. It ends up placing some questions in users mind about the reality about your company or business. You've got to be real and believable with your presentation.

A Contact form With no Additional Contact Information.

Users want to be sure that they are dealing with a real company. On the contact us form, you should have more information about a physical address and telephone number. A Contact Us form should not be used just to generate a mailing list.

We have seen users using a contact us form to generate a mailing list and end up with lots of spam mails. The reason being that some persons just contact you with fake email entries just to test your contact us form and when you take such entries, you end up with lots of spam mails. You also need to realize that using the contact us form for opt-in email list is really the least valuable form of lead generation for you and your site visitors. Not only is it terribly generic, but it also doesn't indicate whether or not the contact actually wants to receive ongoing communications from you. It's more likely that they have a one-time problem or request that needs to be addressed and may not want further communication on other issues.

9) Poorly Crafted About Us page.

Does your About Us page truly explain what you do? Your about us page should be truly professional in the use of language and should tell the reader that you know your business, know what you do and understand the terrain.

10) Website Fails to Clearly Explain What Company Does.

Similar to a bad About Us page, it's will be a huge mistake and frustrating for users to find that your website does not clearly explain what company actually offers. You should be able to clearly present who you are, what you do, how you do it, the advantages you offer and why you are better than competition and so on. Your work and the products and services you provide along with the benefits should be clearly understood on your website.

11) Too Much Focus on Keywords - Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing had been an old practice way back around the year 2000. Website owners will over use a keyword in order to gain search engine advantages. Those copy were written for crawlers not humans. Today, it is recommended that you write for humans and not the crawlers. Avoid overuse of keywords because you want to force a high search engine rank. That's no longer beneficial and can really frustrate your efforts at a good presentation. Write for your target visitors and human users and not for bots.

12) Missing social sharing buttons on content.

Having the social sharing button on your site makes it easy for people to share your content on the social networks. Rather than copy and paste, it is good to have the social share button allowing your users to simply click and share.

13) Not Having a Blog

Some website owners think they do not need a blog simply because they may be a small company and not interested in regular posts or publications. Many think that blogs are for publications and news alone.

The fact is that although not having a log may not necessarily turn visitors away, it actually will have some effect on your capacity to attract new visits and even to get repeat visits. Blogs are an attraction for people who want to learn new things, get the latest advice, get product updates. Some companies feel too small to run a blog because their activity level does not support a weekly of bi-weekly update. No matter how small your size and activity could be, you have some events and news to report and so you need to have a blog.

A blog will help you provide fresh content to your website and attract web crawlers to revisit and index your content. Search engines like fresh content and so having a blog is a good way to gain their interest.

14) Titles and Headlines Not in Congruence with your Content.

Build content along the titles you have created. When titles and content are not in congruence, in increases bounce rate as users get irritated with content. Remember that visitors are attracted by titles, when the content does not meet their expectation based on the title you have provided, then there is a problem, a gap that creates user dissatisfaction.

15) Call-to-action Not in Alignment with the offer.

Ensure that your call-to-action delivers what visitors were offered. If you offer a free one-month website hosting plan, do not hide it under a conditional clause for them to subscribe to a 3 year plan before they can enjoy the one month free. Out rightly, offer them a one month free hosting for a 3 year subscription.

When you mislead your visitors by offering them a kind of bait-offer that is hidden in conditions, you are not only insulting to your visitors, but it will also hurt your reputation and conversion rates.

16) It contains internal linking that isn't user-friendly.

Internal links are useful both for visitors and search engines. It actually help search engines link your internal pages very fast. When done correctly, internal links are helpful for readers and website alike. They point readers to other relevant information, and help you improve the organic ranking for important pages on your own website. But some websites seem to have trouble executing internal linking correctly pointing users to irrelevant pages, linking strange phrases within the copy, and overdoing it to the point of making content unreadable.

Let's know what other website mistakes drives you crazy and could get you to abandon a page. Lets have your comments

Read full blog post at:: https://www.todhost.com/blog/digital-marketing-seo/199-16-mistakes-that-turn-people-away-from-your-website

The number one mistake is opening a website when there is no need for one.

nice 1 op

Noted

3rd to comment.. we are getting there.
Dedicated to everyone who wants to reach first to comment but have not made it yet especially because they are using glo.
Nairaland a da ooo.

None of these is as annoying as those pop up ads that takes the screen every time someone right click.

All those websites that would say "turn to next page for the rest of the article" are the best turn off

Information passed

Nice write-up

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Nice one

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Nice points there