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How To Keep Visitors Glued To Your Website
Design General Usability Web design

How To Keep Visitors Glued To Your Website

By Syed Zainul Haque December 07, 2018 - 52,817 views

Businesses often wonder what they can do in order to keep visitors for a longer time on their websites. This is very important in order to drive revenue and sales. Reducing bounce rates and enhancing website engagement help in increasing conversion rates.

However, the process of achieving these goals can be complex and requires a holistic approach towards the problem. Keeping visitors on a website for a long time necessitates a multi-pronged approach that involves web development, design, marketing, testing, and behavioral analysis.

In this article, we have listed 7 steps that help in keeping visitors glued to your website for a long time.

Make Navigation Simple

67% of mobile web users will abandon the page they are on if they feel frustrated by the navigation. Even on desktop browsers, if navigation is too complex or cluttered, users will abandon and move to a different website. It is crucial to keep navigation simple and focus on UX/UI. To make sure that the navigation of your website is simple, here are a few things you can do:

  • Do not use non-standard styles of navigation. Keep buttons in predictable locations.
  • Name your menu buttons attractively and refrain from using generic labels. Some recommend against using labels such as “Products” or “Services” and instead suggests using key phrases that people are searching. For example: “Our web solutions”, “app development products”.
  • Avoid drop-down menus and cluttering your navigation
  • Your navigation should reflect your sitemap and should provide easy access to all web pages within your website. This helps reduce bounce rates.

Reduce Page Load Time

Even a single second delay in page load time can reduce conversions by 7%. If a page takes more than 3 seconds to load, you can very well assume that most users will not return to your website again. To keep people lurking on your web pages, it is important to make sure they load quickly.

  • Compress your images and files to load pages quickly
  • Consider using Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to load pages quickly on a mobile browser
  • Many websites have complex codes that result in slow loading. Hire a custom development team to simplify the existing code. If you use a popular CMS such as WordPress or Drupal, upgrading it to the latest version helps too.
  • Fix website errors such as the 500 Internal Server Error, PHP warnings, and errors, and inability to load dynamic library. A website audit helps fix most of the errors you may encounter.

Understand your visitors’ needs

Between 70 and 96 percent of web visitors never return to a website again, and this is mostly because the web page does not serve their needs. To eliminate instances of visitors abandoning your website and to encourage them to stay longer, you should start understanding what your visitors really want.

    • Use predictive analysis to understand what your visitors want now and in the future, based on web traffic trends. Terracotta In-Genius predicts data processing requirements and helps fix slower data storage drives. Optimove offers bespoke predictive modeling that helps you implement persona-based segmentation. This insight is sourced from your business DNA and historical data.
  • Use web traffic data to understand your demographics, search terms, most engaging content, etc.
  • Conduct opinion polls and survey to directly ask your visitors what they want
  • Google Analytics, Kissmetrics, Mint, Clicky, Chartbeat, and Woopra are some of the tools used to understand various user statistics.

Engage your visitors

You might be surprised to learn that people form an opinion about your website in just 50 milliseconds (0.05 seconds). To make sure that this opinion is positive, you will need to make your web content and layout attractive, as 38% will stop engaging if they are not pleased with either.

  • Make your content shareable on social media and encourage visitors to do so
  • Always have a call-to-action at the end of a page so that visitors are not left wondering what they should do next
  • Add customer reviews, testimonials, polls, subscription options, and other features to keep your visitors engaged
  • Be real and engage your visitors by actually interacting with them using AI-based chatbots

Enhance content readability and usability

Users spend only 5.59 seconds looking at the content on your web page. This means, the content you publish needs to be skimmable and your focus should be on readability more than anything else. In addition, the content you publish should also be useful to the reader. According to Smashing Magazine, these are some of the industry standards you need to follow:

    • User-friendly headers
    • Scannable text with focus points
    • Lots of white space
    • Consistency in the hierarchy of layout, font, colors, etc.
    • Consistency in line height, length, and spacing
    • An emphasis on important elements and density of text
    • Accurate use of separators
  • Organization of content and media
  • Content that can be easily used, shared and consumed

Focus on excellent videos

Research shows that marketers who use video grow revenue 49% quicker than those who do not use videos. In other words, publishing engaging videos that act as infotainment will keep visitors glued to your website for a longer time and help you grow your revenue quickly too.

  • Use explainer videos to present your services and products
  • Convert presentations and blog posts into graphic videos
  • Use animation to elicit emotions in your visitors, which can help in keeping them on the website too
  • Consider voice over artists and professionally written scripts to take your videos to the next level

Test and maintain your website continuously

Bounce rate is defined as the percentage of people who visit a single page on your website and leave immediately. Reducing bounce rate should be an important goal if you wish to keep your visitors glued to your website. Conducting regular A/B tests and initiating ongoing website maintenance are crucial in reducing bounce rates. Bounce rates more than 25% are a cause for concern and need your attention.

    • Engage in usability, interface, compatibility, and functional testing of your website. Google PageSpeed Insights, io, Google ngx_pagespeed, Google mod_pagespeed, and WebPagetest.org are all tools you can use to test and optimize your website.
    • Upgrade to the latest versions of PHP and JavaScript, or related languages
    • Fix security issues that may be lurking without your knowledge by seeking the help of an expert. It is easy to miss errors and problems within your website even when you use professional tools yourself. An unbiased professional audit helps you target issues that are easily overlooked otherwise.
    • Protect your website from malicious threats and bugs.

Consider a holistic approach towards keeping visitors on your website for a longer time

As you can see, keeping visitors glued to your website is not an easy process. It requires a lot of effort right from web development and design to content and marketing. It requires a holistic approach that first diagnoses what the problem is, and comes up with a customized plan to keep your visitors for a longer time on the website. Making sure that visitors stay on your website for a longer time and ensuring reduced bounce rates require professional assistance.

If you are wondering how you can improve metrics related to visitors staying on your website for a longer time, contact us today.

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