How is the traffic on your website? Getting lots of pageviews each month?
Want to reduce the amount of people who visit your website and interact with you?
Are people leaving positive reviews and feedback about your site and you want to put a stop to that?
We’ve put together a list of tips that should help you drive people away from your website, ensure decreasing levels of traffic and interaction, and possibly anger current and prospective clients.
Guarantee Slow Load Times. Make sure it takes your website a long time to load; especially on mobile. If possible, try and make it so that some of the text loads, but when a user starts scrolling, it disappears or becomes choppy. Bonus points if you can have the images load super slowly. Surveys indicate that almost half of web users expect web pages to load in under two seconds and will completely abandon a site that doesn’t load within 3 seconds. Even better, 79% of online shoppers will not return to a slow-loading site and almost half of them will relay their experience to their friends.
Don’t want delayed loading times to drive away your visitors? Gtmetrix and Google (PageSpeed Insights) both have good page speed testing tools or you could talk to a web developer about the different ways you can improve load times on both desktops and mobile devices.
Make Your Site Unresponsive. This is one of the best ways to really annoy your clientele as people really loathe unresponsiveness in both their service providers and websites. Today, over half of web traffic is from mobile users, so by making your mobile site non-existent or separate, you are guaranteed to alienate a good chunk of people. In fact, Google actually rewards sites that have a responsive design with higher SEO rankings, so you can effectively reduce your SEO ranking by making sure your website doesn’t convert to mobile devices. The fewer visitors the better, right?
Unconvinced and still want to pursue higher SEO rankings, increase traffic, and engage potential customers? Then spend some time making sure that your website is responsive and optimized to move from device to device seamlessly. Google actually provides a mobile-friendly test to see where you currently stand.
Impossible Navigation. The best feeling you can elicit from a user trying to navigate your page is one of utter hopelessness. If they land on your page and have any idea how to find their way around it, you haven’t done your job. Everything about your website is connected through the navigation including SEO rankings, traffic, conversion, content, and URLs. If you completely ignore UX best practices when it comes to navigation, you will successfully set your website on path to destruction.
Don’t want to leave your page visitors lost at sea? Then make sure you take your site navigation into account! Make sure your menu and navigation bar are located where your users would expect them to be. Try and be creative with your labels, and limit the items you have in your menu.
Annoying Pop-Ups and Ads. There is nothing more annoying than visiting a site and being bombarded by a pop-up that you can’t figure out how to close while a loud and unexpected ad plays in the background. Pages like that get closed faster than an windows in a typhoon.
Want your page visitors to not abandon your web page? Then don’t force them out with unexpected and unwanted ads and pop-ups. Google has even started penalizing mobiles sites with pop-ups, so it is even more imperative to make sure your pop-ups and CTAs (calls-to-action) are easy to interact with and intuitive. As for the annoying ads? Ditch them if possible. Users should be able to choose if they want to view and listen to media, not be forced into it.
These are just a few tips you can follow to make sure your website is unsuccessful, terrible, and rarely visited. If, for some reason, you want to encourage traffic, conversion, and leave visitors with an enjoyable experience make sure you consult with a web developer to avoid these pitfalls, and create a wonderful user experience.
haha great title, and post of course 🙂 I actually cannot believe that there are still active website out there with these ‘virtues’ Especially annoying pop-up are still going hard, I get pop-ups, nothing against that, but there’s a limit I can keep click ‘close window’ and the worst thing is, a lot of websites actually have all of these traits..