A common problem we hear from prospective clients is that they’re getting the traffic (whether that be organic, social or another channel), but users aren’t engaging once they land on the website.
What does engagement mean?
Engagement is when a user lands on your website and they interact, there are many forms of interaction that can be tracked. Interaction can be that they read your content, they scroll down the pages, they fill in your forms and click on the call to actions you have specified as important.
Websites that lack engagement usually have high bounce rates across the board. A high bounce rate site-wide shows us there are changes to be made to the website as a whole that could be turning users off. If only specific pages have high bounce rates, then it is likely the content on the pages isn’t fit for purpose/the meta data for that page is misleading.
How To Increase Website Engagement
Improve Site Load Time
Users expect a website to load quickly and if yours doesn’t, they’ll leave and head to your competitors’ website who loads instantly. Your website is likely to be struggling to gain engagement if users must wait 10+ seconds for all your content and images to load fully. Your website load time should be below 3 seconds but below 2 seconds is best.
There are many free tools out there they can monitor your site load time and show you what elements are slowing you down.
Simplify Your Layout
The purpose of each page should be clear, if you have a busy layout it can be overwhelming for the user and confuse them. Your navigation menu should be clear at the top of the page and below should be your content, with plenty of white space separating paragraphs for easy reading.
Avoid having multiple call to actions on one page, minimise the options available to the users and make it clear you want them to: fill in a form, share on social media, call for a quote – pick one and stick to it.
Simplify Your Navigation
Your navigation menu should take centre stage at the top of the page and clearly lay out your main pages and subpages. Categorise your pages clearly so they are easily accessible; a user shouldn’t feel like they can’t find what they are looking for. If you have a very large website which makes it difficult to fit everything necessary in your menu, add a search function so that users can easily find the page required.
Mobile Friendliness
Whether a user is accessing your website via a mobile phone, desktop PC or tablet, they should be able to read and interact with your website with the same ease. Mobile is becoming more prevalent by the day, there is no excuse for your website to not be mobile friendly. If you deliver a poor mobile experience, users will move on and you will have lost a reader/customer.
Our experts at In Front Digital can create a full report on how to improve website engagement for your website, get in touch to find out more.