Average time spent on your website
The number of visitors to your website is a good thing to measure. However, what you need to know is how long people are actually spending on your site, and whether or not they are interested enough to click on to other internal pages. We’ll then dive into discussing how a minimal website design can help significantly with retaining visitors, with some examples of beautiful and clean web designs.
On average the time that visitors spend on websites is about 3 minutes, this appears to be the industry standard. However, before we even get to this stage we need to attract our ideal clients in. There is no point leaving it up to fate, because when designing your website you can have big influences over this.
Average Session Duration in Percentage (%)
First Impressions Matter
Did you know that on average you have between a 10-20 second window, for your visitor to decide whether or not they are going to stay or leave your website? Actually it's typically about 8 seconds or less in which a person has already formed an opinion of your site.
Check out our post - How to introduce yourself on your website.
Did you also know .. that visitors are more likely to stay on the website after spending about 30 seconds on it?
Therefore .. the longer the time spent on the website, the less of a probability that the visitor will decide to leave the site and go elsewhere.
Bounce Rate
What you may need to know about your website is its bounce rate. By this we mean the percentage of visitors who have bounced away from your site after viewing the page they landed on, and did not click on to another link within your website.
In general, the lower the bounce rate, the better this is for your site. However, you don’t want visitors sitting idle on the site for too long either. We explain this a little later.
You can work out the bounce rate by using Google Analytics for your site, however, this is not what this blog post is specifically about.
What we want is to get you thinking about how long visitors are sticking around for, and to discuss how to optimise your website to ensure you’re providing a great user experience for your visitors.
Questions to Ask Yourself..
When designing your website, or even doing an audit of your existing website, you need to ask yourself the following questions:
Is the website optimised for mobile viewers?
Is the homepage of your website going to immediately attract your ideal clientele?
Are Call To Actions (CTAs) clearly displayed on the webpage, and catchy enough?
Are links to other internal pages clear and obvious?
Is the page loading speed fast enough? Overlapping with mobile optimization.
Is your business unique niche clear enough?
Is the layout minimal and clean enough?
Is the content readable? For example, are you using the right fonts, and displaying text such that it grabs the visitor’s attention?
These are primary and fundamental to making sure your website bounce rate improves.
In addition, in order to make sure that your bounce rate stays at an acceptable level, you also need to ensure the following:
Keep links to external websites to an absolute minimum, and make sure they open in a new tab.
Keep CTAs visible and obvious throughout the page; don’t let visitors rely on their memory.
Basic Mistake ..
94% of negative and bad user feedback has been design related, and 38% of users have said that they stopped engaging with a website that had a poor or unattractive layout.
This is so concerning because there are some proven and fundamental minimalistic strategies that can be implemented when designing a website layout, and it seems as if many businesses just aren’t following them.
If 88% of users are saying that they are unlikely to revisit a website because of a bad user experience, then this is something that needs to be addressed!
After all, you wouldn't design a shop front with a cluttered and unattractive layout, would you?
Minimalist Design Tips
When you walk into an Apple shop, it bears so much similarity in layout to the Apple.com website. Minimal, clean and simple.
After entering the shop you know where to walk to next, it feels spacious and you feel like you can breathe, which means that you’re able to focus entirely on the products. Similarly, after landing on the homepage of their website, you know what to click next, as they have made this clear and obvious with the call to actions.
There are also beautiful images of the latest products throughout the website, separated by plenty of blank (or negative/white) space, again enabling the visitor to have some visual breathing space.
Apple Store in Hong Kong
Apple.com
3 Minutes ..
Once on the website, visitors will typically spend no more than 3 minutes to look around, so it's within this period of time that you need prospective clients and customers to take the final action. For this reason, make sure that you have determined a good user journey which focuses on the user experience. This is a crucial part of designing a minimal web layout.
Final intended actions could include to purchase products, or complete your enquiry or contact form; this is up to you and is based on whatever your site goals are.
However, after 3 minutes you want your customer off the site. A lot of businesses find this difficult to understand. But your website should be seen as an online interactive tool, one which leads to a final sale in the case of ecommerce, or offline engagement with your business in the case of professional services.
Ultimate Site Goal
Answer the following: what is the purpose of your website? What is the ultimate goal?
Hopefully the answer is something along the lines of, “to sell a physical product(s)”, “complete an enquiry form” or “schedule/arrange a call”. You ideally want this to be completed within 3 minutes, otherwise we head into the ‘no action’ territory.
Minimalist Design Strategy
A minimal design strategy has been used by so many successful websites. From ecommerce businesses to professional services, with some examples below of beautifully laid out websites.
https://www.haagen-dazs.co.uk/
Tesla.com
One of the biggest reasons to implement this strategy is to improve the user experience which ultimately leads to better visitor retention. Which of course then means … more sales!
We have a written free workbook for you to download, which will walk entrepreneurs and businesses through the main steps to a minimally designed website layout.
Points to Remember
An excellent website design should take into account the following important points:
A website has less than 8 seconds to capture your ideal client and to give a great first impression.
Visitors decide whether or not to stick around in a 10-20 second window.
On average, visitors spend up to 3 minutes viewing a website.
It’s within these 3 minutes you want visitors looking to engage with the business in some way.