There’s some debate on this but it’s believed a visitor to your website will take less than 10 seconds to make a decision on whether to stay or go.
⏳ 10 seconds to tell us what you offer
⏳ 10 seconds to tell us what you sell
⏳ 10 seconds to engage with your visitor
💥TIMES UP!
So what can you do?
Let’s start with the obvious, if your site is slow to load it’s wasting valuable time, tests your visitors patience and puts your site on the back foot. The frustration will reduce the time a visitor is going to give you, once it does load.
✅ Review your page optimisation and website hosting to ensure it’s suitable for your website. If you have lots of traffic you’ll need server resources to match.
Now your site loads quickly it needs to say what you do or sell. Think about the language you use. Does it speak to your target audience? Does it make it clear what you’re offering? Do you make the most of your ‘above the fold’? By that we mean the part of your site that appears without any scrolling and remember this will likely vary depending on users screen sizes so ensure you compare mobile, tablet and desktop.
✅ If the visitor now knows they’ve come to the right place you have 1 more task to complete before the 10 seconds is up!
The final step is how enticing is your website? Are you engaging with your visitors to ensure they want to stay on your site. Is it easy to read? Is there a good balance of text and media? Videos are often a great way to maintain interest. They can tell a story and don’t require effort from the visitor.
✅ On long pages adding video half way down can provide some visual relief and reinvigorate the visitors energy to carry on scrolling.
So that’s it, that’s all you need your website to do, inside 10 seconds, just to get them to hang around. Now you need to convince them to make contact, but let’s save that for another day!
If you’d like us to audit your site get in touch and let’s see if we can improve your 10 second engagement rate.