What questions irritate site visitors?
A website may be liked by many people while another number of users will find it of poor quality.
The point is that the experience of a website is something completely subjective. A website may be liked by many people, while a different number of users will find it of poor quality.
However, there is some elements that equally annoy site visitors. There are quite a few of them.
Below is a list of eleven of them. They are undoubtedly among the ones that annoy us the most.
Which elements annoy site visitors? - 11 examples
1. Page takes too long to load
It has long been proven that our patience in the context of working with the Internet and modern technologies is at lower level than before.
We expect everything to be bigger, faster, more precise, smoother, and etc.
So don't make your site visitors wait indefinitely for your site to fully load.
Perform a speed test using the Pingdom Website Speed Test tool, for example, and make your site load as as soon as possible.
2. Lack of visibility or lack of confidence in contact details
To be persuasive, a company must inspire confidence.
This is definitely affected by:
- providing multiple ways to contact the company
- indicating an address businesses
- Display company VAT ID, company registration number, etc.
Remember the above points. Our previous text on how to present contact information on the site will help you with this.
3.Promise failure
This is undoubtedly one of the problems that most annoys website visitors. Many companies (especially online stores) publish all kinds of information that does not withstand the moment of contact with reality.
If If you promise, for example, to reply to an email within 24 hours, then do so. Otherwise (quite rightly) recipients may feel cheated, which, unfortunately, will not benefit the perception of your brand.
4. Unfriendly Navigation
Websites serve their users first. people whose satisfaction level determines the success of the site.
The more people love the site, the better. Of course, this is an elementary truth, but many site owners forget about it.
Unfortunately, we still encounter with situations where individual preferences prevail over common sense and dictate designers to implement something that only the owner likes, while other users consider this decision a shot in the arm.
5. The Artifice of Stock Photos
Publicly available stock images feel accessible to us as they often “match” activity.
Dental practice? No problem, there are thousands of pictures of doctors.
Smiling children? A group of businessmen in the middle of a meeting? Of course, they are there too.
The fact is that I used inverted commas in the first sentence for a reason . The fact that the picture seems appropriate to us in context may actually repel us.
Actor faces flawless smiles, flawless clothes, extremely elegant backgrounds - all this characterizes many stock photos. They are unnaturally perfect.
In his guide to what an ideal law firm website should look like, Bartholomew Kilian also touched on this topic. He offered to set aside a few days for his own professional photo shoot, which would give much better results than using photos that anyone can get for a small fee.
6. Broken links
Another truth: if a site has a link, it is there to direct you to another place. So it should work.
There are many ways to check your site for so-called 404 errors:
- Online broken link checker;
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider (a tool to check the basic SEO status of a site);
- Broken Link Checker (WordPress Plugin).
How you will track the possible occurrence of such errors, it depends only on you.
The main thing is to quickly respond to them and remove them outdated links or use appropriate redirects.
7. Non-intuitive forms
The task of the form is to collect a certain portion of data from the user.
The user plays a key role here. It is the user who fills out the form, so the owner of the respective site should do everything possible to make this process as convenient as possible.
- appropriate number of fields;
- distinguish between required and optional fields;
- efficient validation of entered information.
Besides In addition, you will find the tips above in the text, where this topic is discussed in much more detail: what does an effective website form look like?
8. Hidden Costs
Imagine this… You are in a store. You toss various items into a shopping cart and then head to the checkout. The seller tells you the amount you have to pay. Something seems wrong, so you ask questions. It turned out that for a number of goods (for various reasons) you need to pay extra, and this information was visible in small print somewhere in the store.
I don't know anyone who would be pleasantly surprised by this turn of events.
All expenses (both basic and additional) must be clearly and transparently stated. The earlier the better. The same applies to shipping costs - with this information, we can quickly estimate the total cost of the transaction.
9. Pop-ups
Pop-ups have been an effective annoyance to website visitors for years.
Despite the fact that in 2017 it was reported that Google should have negatively assessed the presence of annoying pop-ups on sites, they still occur today.
It is true that in many cases the way they are presented has changed (they are no longer as intrusive as they used to be), but they can still be annoying.
Therefore, using such windows should be a last resort. If you think you have more to gain than you lose, take action. Just don't forget to think about it beforehand.
10. Inconsistent Design
We are becoming increasingly sensitive to aesthetics. Websites are constantly evolving, fortunately in a good direction - they are getting prettier, more intuitive. We are grateful to you for this.
Therefore, the days of slovenliness are gradually fading into the past. We love to spend time where it's just beautiful.
So polish your site from this angle. Keep your company's web image consistent - it should be made up of specific colors and maybe even fonts and shapes.
11. Opening some links in the same window.
While shopping online for Christmas, I decided to create an account after as you checked the contents of your shopping cart. I began to fill out - rather long for such a case - a questionnaire. When accepting the terms and conditions, my cursor slipped and instead of accepting the checkbox, I clicked on the word "terms and conditions". The link took me to the above terms and conditions. It opened in the same tab.For me, returning meant that the form was reset and I had to start the process again.
My mistake? Yes. As do many other potential users.
Therefore, online stores need to be resilient to such situations as they only annoying site visitors.
Three things didn't "play" here:
- the word 'regulations' was not highlighted in any way, it was the same color as the rest of the words in the sentence (so you didn't guess
- terms and conditions don't open in new window;
- return to the previous page cleared of the previously completed form.
There are a number of these "flavors" in online stores.
Why improve elements that annoy site visitors?
After all, how I mentioned in the text above that business success depends on user satisfaction.
No one will regularly use the site , which is just annoying.
Do you have any interesting tips on this topic that you can share with us ?
If so, check out the comment section.