UX Fails: 4 Reasons Your Website Visitors Don’t Convert

Four common and preventable UX fails to watch out for.

You’re ready to launch your ad campaign. Everything is set up; landing pages, click-through, the whole nine yards.

What could go wrong?

We all know that high bounce rates are a standard occurrence in online advertising. However, many campaigns don’t fail due to this. Often it’s because audiences never even reach the content!

This is where having solid UX comes into play. It’s not only about what is on your website’s landing page – where to place key visuals and CTA’s. User experience begins the moment someone sees your advertisements and clicks through.

Here are four troublesome UX fails seen all too often.

Reason 1: ‘We don’t trust you’

Imagine spending all of your budget to send clients to broken web pages with error 404 written all over it.

Agencies claiming to help businesses ‘go digital’ sometimes take the easy way out which leads to this disaster. It’s surprising how often we see this happen where pages like this appear ahead of branded landing pages.

The why

Agencies often take the easy route when it comes to website hosting. They opt to host their clients staging server on a free tier DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) protection server rather than paying for it. 

All at the expense of the customer experience and the client’s media budget.

Website visitors decide to stay on a site within the first few seconds, therefore you can just guess the conversion rates of companies who’ve had clients land on this. 

The point

A basic understanding of technological choices is crucial for marketers today. Don’t let your lack of understanding of technology trump your customers’ user experience. 

Our promise

We host all our clients’ websites on a cloud based server using two environments. One environment is a staging environment which is used for look and feel purposes, navigation testing, general testing, upgrades, updates, security testing and user training. The other is a production environment which is live and accessible by the end users. Both environments will use a CI/CD (Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery) pipeline where the code is hosted on a git repository and delivered to the right environment.

Reason 2: ‘You can’t trust us’

Your website does not consider your customers’ needs for security and privacy.

Security warnings tend to scare off people from visiting your website as the website doesn’t secure privacy or encrypt data transfers for people visiting your website.

The why

When visiting unencrypted websites all major browsers alert people. The server in question doesn’t have a secure SSL certificate set up for the website domain. 

Setting up a secure SSL certificate takes no time and doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. Therefore, it’s surprising to still see this page pop up nowadays.

The point

Internet regulations and GDPR are forcing us to ensure all transactions and personal information is encrypted. This is a good thing. It is imperative to ensure that your server is set up with a legitimate SSL certificate for your marketing landing pages.

It’s the difference between http:// and https://

Our promise

We always set up an SSL certificate for all of our websites.

Reason 3: ‘Loading..’

When plugins and tracking tags get in the way of good customer experience.

The why

The average website developer uses plugins and tracking tags when building websites, this means that they increase the number of times the conversion page has to load stuff from other servers. CMS platforms like WordPress are notoriously slow particularly when adding plugins and add-ons. 

Google and other search engines actively downgrade slow and underperforming websites in search results. Therefore, it is important not to include multiple plugins and add-ons, as more requests to external services and servers means more time required to load your landing page.

The point

It’s important for a business to track visitors and conversions, however, don’t overdo it with plugins and add-ons. These will only slow down your loading time. These plugins aren’t created by you therefore you don’t know how they will perform. It’s imperative that you test the plugins you install. Also, it’s important to note whether your application server is updated to the latest version. 

From a UX experience it’s best to choose a solution that benefits your customers and not your business.

Our promise

We use custom plugins when creating websites for our clients that are tailored to their needs. This reduces the risk of their website getting hacked through the use of generic plugins that are used by a multitude of people all over the world. It also reduces the ability for these plugins to slow down the page’s loading time. 

Reason 4: Don’t use ReCaptcha

These security services are conversion barriers. Yet they are still widely used. Don’t do it. There are smarter, more human friendly solutions to minimise spam and scam registrations. 

In conclusion

Good user experience (UX) starts at the first instance your customer interacts with your company. It’s important to note that you may not be able to see these issues from your browser when you visit your website as it may be cached. Therefore it’s imperative that you test your landing pages on different browsers. Learn more about the role that UX plays in terms of design.

Want to ensure that your business doesn’t fall short and lend itself to these common UX fails? Come and chat with us and we’ll go over all of your website concerns. Review our process when it comes to website development by clicking on the link.