6 steps to making a great first impression with your website
You only have a few seconds to grab your website visitors’ attention, hold it, and get them to take action. Simply put, you have to make a great first impression with your website!
If your site has a bad user experience and poor content, it doesn’t matter if you sell something amazing as people won’t come back. There are other websites, other providers, and other ways to get what they want. Today’s consumers are not going to waste their time on a bad website, nor waste their money with a company that doesn’t invest in its own website.
Making a good first impression with your site is critical to improve engagement, return visits, and increase conversions.
Let’s review some ways to ensure your site aces its first impression and keeps people coming back for more!
1. Make the purpose of each page clear
Make the content of each landing page clear by keeping in mind these questions:
- Why are they on this page?
- How did they get here?
While most of your landing pages are conversion-focused, such as the visitor making a purchase, downloading a free ebook, getting a free trial, or signing up for emails, make sure someone easily understands what the page is about and what value they’re getting.
When it comes to writing copy for these pages, think of all the different ways a visitor could get to this page, whether it’s a social media post, email link, or Google ad and make sure your landing page copy delivers whatever they thought they were going to get when they clicked that link.
Use headers, subheaders, videos, and bullet points to help visitors scan the page’s content to make sure it’s relevant and delivers on the promise you made. You’ll also want to ensure your pages are optimized with relevant keyword terms.
Focus on quality CTAs that tell the user exactly what they’re getting or going to get with their click and try to make it impossible for them to not want to click!
2. Make them feel included
Reassure first-time visitors by using relevant keywords for their search, speaking in their language, and incorporating trust elements in your site, like reviews, testimonials, social media links, awards or accolades, and so on.
For e-commerce sites, you could also demonstrate trust by being helpful and showing related products or “customers also buy” boxes so they’re completely satisfied with their purchase.
Make sure the product description is thorough and tells them everything they need to know. Do not make them hunt down this information, especially shipping or return information, on their own.
3. Test the page across devices
With most sites utilizing a responsive design, this one is pretty easy as most websites adapt to whatever screen they’re being shown on. But, it never hurts to test your website, either using testing tools or the good old fashioned manual way. Your tests should also include different browsers, like Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer.
4. Get them what they want quickly
No one wants to pretend it’s 1999 anymore where you wait as a page loads and get served a website page bit by bit. Your content has to load within microseconds or they’ll have bounced before they even see your content!
5. Do not bombard them with ads
We all get it, some sites make money from advertisers but nothing is more annoying or less user-friendly than a site covered in ads. If I have to exit out of two ads or the page refreshes every few minutes to load new ads, I’m gone and I am never coming back to the site.
You can still run ads on sites but do not use intrusive-style ads or ones that aren’t easy to click out of! I’m not saying you can’t run ads on your site, but do not irritate your website visitors with them.
On a similar note, be careful with how you use pop-ups, like email subscriptions, providing a discount or calling attention to a special offer, or offering assistance with a chat bot. These can be valuable but they can quickly become annoying for first-time visitors.
6. Tell them where to go from here
In your site’s nav or on the page, tell them where they can go next or how to get back to your main website. Maybe you want to encourage them to find related products, visit a help page, or follow you on social media.
What tips do you have for making a great first impression with a website? Share your ideas in the comments below!
