55% of Shoppers Abandon Poor Performing Sites

Conversion Rate Optimisation Tip #9 - Make Sure Your Site Works

That is, make sure everything works on your website, for everyone, all the time in all circumstances

You will lose more than 50% of your sales and leads if you don't.

This has been said many times before, and the research over the past 10 years always backs it up.

This latest study on Online Retail Usability from Econsultancy really puts some stark numbers on what poorly working sites can cost you.

Among the findings:

Some 24% said fast loading and properly working pages would make them trust a site they had never visited before.

Those of you familiar with marketing and sales will know that gaining a customer's trust is one of the key issues to overcome in any transaction.

Around 44% said they would abandon a sale in the checkout due to technical problems and slow loading pages.

The checkout is once you've got them in the buying process. They've already committed to buy your product or service and have entered the conversion funnel, but almost half of them will bail because of poor performance.

Finally, 55% said they would abandon the sale in the shopping cart if the site didn't work properly. This is customers who have put something in the shopping basket but haven't yet proceeded to purchase in the checkout.

That is, they are obviously highly qualified prospects; all you have to do is make it as easy as possible for them to give you their money. Unfortunately, more than half of them will never give you their money because your website doesn't work properly.

Harvest the Low Hanging Fruit

Hopefully you can see that just by fixing up performance issues on your site, you can gain incredible increases in revenue, leads, registrations, downloads and engagement etc.

What's more, any increase will be perpetual. That is, you'll continue to get the benefits month after month, year after year, and without the ongoing costs associated with some other forms of online marketing.

Quick Checklist

Here's a quick checklist of some of things you should pay attention to

Make sure your site works across all browsers, all PC configurations, all screen sizes and across all devices such as mobile phones, PDA's, iPads, tablets etc.

Be ruthless about any third party applications, plug-ins and widgets you use.

Consider if everyone will have that plug-in, will they have the latest version, even if they do can they be bothered to use it.

EG Flash 50% of people who have this plug-in still won't bother viewing a Flash presentation even if it's something they are interested in.

Be wary of the latest technologies.

If it's the latest, not everyone will have it. Stick to stuff that you know all of your customer have and use.

Make sure your site has valid coding that meets accepted standards.

Many developers will roll their eyes at this one and say it's not really necessary.

To some degree they are right, but where the problem comes is that one poor piece of coding in a plugin, application or script, can and often does cause problems for other scripts or plugins on your site.

Google Analytics is a classic example. There's nothing wrong with the Google code, however other incorrectly coded items, especially third party apps, are notorious for causing Google Analytics tracking problems.