Websites – we make them, you need them, your elderly neighbour despises them.
Whether it serves as a digital storefront, informational hub, or just a graveyard for unsolicited musings like this, you’ll be hard strung to find a business that doesn’t have a website in 2024.
Unfortunately, of the many website’s that live on the internet (approximately 1.13 billion), not everybody has a ‘good’ one. While we might sound biased, we truly believe the value of a professionally made website cannot be understated. We’re not just saying this to secure your business… promise – we just really get a kick out of seeing businesses succeed on the web!
To prove we’re not just making this stuff up, we’ve gathered some data from far more credible voices in the industry than us. So, here’s a deep dive into some pretty eye-opening stats that reinstate the importance of investing in a good site!
First Impressions
Your website is often the first point of contact between your business and potential customers. It’s your 24/7 salesperson, customer support centre, and your best shot at making a killer first impression. If your website doesn’t have an immediate impact, all it takes is a single back click for a ‘could-be’ buyer to start eyeing-off their next best option. You need to make those first impressions count – and fast!
How fast? Well, it turns out that it takes a mere 50 milliseconds for users to form an opinion about your website. Even more anxiety inducing, 75% of consumers admit to making judgments on a company’s credibility based on their website design. That’s 3/4 of your potential customers sizing up your businesses’ trustworthiness based on your choice of font and colour scheme. And it’s not just about looking pretty – 39% of users will stop engaging with a website if images take too long to load.
The User Experience
Over time, we’ve been conditioned to think of User Experience (UX) as some sort of chemical sorcery, informed by a team of white-haired data scientists. Truthfully, it’s a lot simpler than that. UX is omnipresent in our day-to-day lives. From conveniently labelled ‘push’ doors, to the satisfaction of choosing from a shelf full of ripe avocados, it’s about ensuring a seamless interaction with a product or platform.
88% of consumers are less inclined to return to a site after a poor UX. That’s a lot of potential customers walking out your door because they couldn’t figure out how to add something to their cart or find your contact information.
UX isn’t just a safeguard to keep your audience from running away in tears. For every $1 invested in UX, the return is an astounding $100. That’s not a typo – we’re talking about a 9,900% ROI. If you’re starting to sweat thinking about those broken internal links on your website, we’d probably go fix that…
Note – Not everything needs presenting on a silver platter. If Apple’s idea of good UX is creating a photo slideshow of you and your ex that you just got over from four years ago, you’re probably better off doing that yourself… Anyway, UX should be like a cool party host – they make sure everyone’s having a good time, and tell you where the beers are.
Need For Speed
In the web world, speed = money. For us, that means less latte art competitions at work. For you, that means no one’s going to convert if their hair grows faster than your site loads.
53% of mobile users abandon sites that take over 3 seconds to load. This might not sound like very long, but, every three seconds:
- Twelve babies are born.
- An area of rainforest the size of a football field falls to human development.
- Bill Gates earns $750 USD.
A 0.1 second decrease in load time can boost a website’s performance by 8-10%. For e-commerce, this tiny speedup can increase conversion rates by the same margin. That’s a lot of potential sales hanging on a fraction of a second.
It’s a Small World
For many, mobile sites are the bane of any web project. Thoughtfully curated designs, interactive hover states, and scenic landscape videos, all reduced to fit in the palm of your hand – in a perfect world, we’d let the desktop do the talking. This isn’t a perfect world!
A whopping 63.38% of the world’s website traffic comes from mobile devices. To treat your mobile website as an afterthought is to blatantly ignore the largest group of users that will be seeing it. 57% of internet users say they won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed website on mobile. What’s more, 85% of adults think that a company’s mobile website should be as good as, or better than their desktop site.
The stakes are high: users are 5 times more likely to abandon a task if the site isn’t optimised for mobile. Your mobile site is a whole different beast to your desktop, and it calls for its own TLC.
Content is King, Placement is Queen
Your copy might be whittier than a Tarantino script, but if no one’s seeing it, what’s the point? Surprisingly, 69% of website content is never seen by visitors. It’s like writing Abbey Road and hiding the demo’s under your bed.
We’ll tell you this one for free – 70% of people read through content with clear bullet points, compared to 55% for lists without them. And then there’s your homepage… Give the people what they want!
- 86% of visitors want information about products or services.
- 64% of visitors expect contact information.
- 52% of visitors want to know about the business.
Yep, we tried the dot point thing – did that do anything?
Unless you’re up against some particularly stubborn keyword competition, you likely don’t need to churn out more content – just be a bit smarter with what you already have. Strategic content placement, clear navigation, and engaging, concise writing can ensure your key messages don’t get lost in the dark digital abyss.
S.E – YO!
An SEO specialist walks into a bar, club, pub, Irish, bartender, drinks, grill, beer, wine, liquor…
Sorry, we’ll take any opportunity to lighten up the traditionally gloomy connotations of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).
While a fair amount of SEO work does actually take place in a damp, dimly lit room behind an excessively bright monitor (or so the general public is led to believe), the bulk of it starts with your website build.
Believe it or not, there’s a boat load of SEO factors that can be overlooked in the website development process. Structured schema markups, optimised header tags, media compression, strong UX, and page load speeds don’t even begin to scrape the tip of this iceberg. Keyword optimisation is all well and good, but without a strongly built website to back it up, you’ll be left with content that looks like it was put together by a distracted copywriter.
The global SEO market is expected to reach a staggering $83.7 billion by 2025, increasing from $37.84 Billion in 2020. With the emergence of Google’s AI Overview’s, the evolution of traditional SEO towards OSO (Organic Search Optimisation), and the exponential rise in competing websites, ranking on Google’s first page is more difficult than ever before. If your website hasn’t been built with SEO as a primary consideration, then your campaign is on its backfoot before it’s even started.
P.S – We CAN help with your SEO!
Time For Something New?
Did you know that 81% of customers search online before making a purchase in a physical store?
The Yellow Pages is dead, and it has been for a while now. Getting your hands on a website isn’t the hardest, or most costly procedure. Though, the underlying data suggests that there’s a fair bit that goes into a good one – and it might be worth the investment.
We didn’t write this blog to scare you into throwing money at us. But, truthfully, we love building websites that tick all these boxes. It’s our jam, our bread and butter, our… you get the idea. You can check out some of our work here.
If you’re looking to revamp your digital presence, or just want to geek out about web stuff, we’re up for it – so drop us a line!