Everyone in the business world knows that dissatisfied customers are extremely unlikely to actually voice their dissatisfaction. But did you know that actual number is around 4%? That means 96% of your customers aren’t even telling you they’re dissatisfied. What’s even more alarming is only around 9% will ever come back! With those kind of numbers, you would probably do your very best to make sure that your customers have the best experience possible and adapt your business to immediately address any and all issues. But what about your website?

mobile_app_1_xmlMost businesses under value their website for many different reasons. Some don’t even think they need one, which is even more dangerous. But both don’t know the true value of a great website. Google reports that 48% of users feel a company doesn’t care about its business if their website doesn’t work well on a smartphone. Even more, it’s reported that 67% of shoppers are more likely to buy from a website that is compatible with mobile devices than sites that are not. Did you know that you have about 10 seconds to leave an impression and tell your customers what they’ll get out of your website and/or company before they leave? How about the fact that if your website takes more than 3 seconds to load, 40% of people leave immediately.

What I have seen all too much is businesses not investing in a good website which then doesn’t perform in the way they’d hoped. This leaves them feeling frustrated because even if they see traffic to their website, why are so many not converting into sales. Some of the most common mistakes I see on businesses websites:

  • Poor load times – Load times exceeding 10 seconds because of improper resizing of images and not using proper compression.
  • Not Mobile Friendly – Websites that don’t respond to the user’s device and/or use a mobile version that contains 10% of the information about the company. Yes, your phone number and contact information are important, but most of those “mobile versions” lack the presentation to impress the visitor.
  • Bad Layout – Visitors have a hard time to finding the information they are looking for because a site is too hard to navigate.
  • Bad Design – Much like a bad layout, we’ve seen sites that made content visually hard to read, images that had no relation to the content being presented and much more. There should be good contrast on things you want people to read. How would you like trying to get information when the contrast of the text was like this?
  • Not understanding their target customer – Now it can be very difficult to know who might come to your website, but many businesses don’t have websites that speak to their customer demographic. For example, if you offer services for people who are retired, you would want to make sure you use bigger font sizes, have a cleaner and simple layout and design.  You would want to make sure the biggest reasons they’re coming to your website are above the fold.

So what are your customers not telling you? They’re not telling you that your website is the reason they decided not to do business with you. They are more likely to pick a different company to do business with than to tell you that you need to fix your website. Give them the right impression and a great experience with a great website. Also even though it is more expensive than doing it yourself, hiring the right company to handle your web design can make all the difference whether or not your website performs.