One of the biggest ways your website’s design can directly impact visitors’ interactions with your company isn’t a flashy graphic, cool video, or sleek typeface. What actually puts visitors at ease and encourages them to continue exploring your site is how simple it is for them to get around— how navigable your site is.
Easy navigation can make all the difference in keeping people invested in your website. If things are too hard to locate, unclear or nonspecific, or poorly organized, it’s all to easy for a visitor to return to their search engine and start fresh with a new website and a different company. Keeping your website navigable is one of the easiest things you can do to help people continue to explore your website, and to continue to get to know your company.
Benefit #1: It Reduces Your Bounce Rate
Even if you don’t know what the term “bounce rate” means, chances are you are already working to prevent this from happening. Your page’s bounce rate is the percentage of people who visit your site and, instead of browsing further through your website, exit after only viewing the first page.
Google Analytics determines how many people view a single page without making additional requests to the Analytics server, with each one of these quick visits to your site counting as a bounce. This number is your bounce rate, and a lot of those bounces have to do with navigability.
You want viewers to your website to be pulled in, to investigate and learn more about your company, and hopefully develop a relationship with your brand. If visitors to your webpage can’t find what they’re looking, they’ll “bounce,” taking their search for the answer to another webpage— and another company.
With clear and intuitive navigation, viewers will find the answers they seek. When they arrive on your page, they’ll continue to browse, establishing trust in your website and your brand.
Benefit #2: It’s a Timesaver
Think about it: Nearly everyone you know has a full schedule and a jam-packed to-do list. Few people have the luxury of lots of time to poke around a poorly organized webpage. Today, answers to just about any question are available with just a few taps on our smartphones.
Visitors to your webpage are used to having a solution in seconds— it keeps their day moving at the fast pace to which we’ve quickly become accustomed.
It’s estimated that 55% of visitors spend less than 15 seconds actively looking at a page and taking in the content. That’s not a lot of time to get their attention, so your page has to be easy to navigate.
Having a site that is easy to navigate and locate solutions with well-displayed links not only saves your website visitors’ valuable time, but if your products or services are easy to locate, those visitors are much more likely to return to your page again in the future, too.
Benefit #3: It Converts Visits into Business
You’ve spent time on search engine optimization and beautiful graphics, but none of that truly matters without the ability to convert visits to your website into actual business. A well-organized site that is easy to find is more likely to get positive responses from visitors who will be happy to share their email address.
The easier it is for visitors to your site to interact with the information you are presenting, the more likely they are going to be to do business with you.
This fact may surprise you, but visitors to your page will form an opinion about your company within 50 milliseconds of viewing your website. That’s 0.05 seconds. A bold, well-designed site is vital to grabbing their attention, but after that, it’s up to your site’s navigation to keep that attention. 38% of people will stop engaging with a website if they do not like the layout or the navigation. Each of those lost visitors mean lost business for you.