10 Little Things That Cause Big Problems For Website Users

If your company website is going to generate a good flow of sales leads, it has to deliver visitors a great user experience (UX). Visitors interested in your products/services are looking for something — they are liable to be impatient and frustrated if they’ve been searching online for a while, and easily pushed away by anything on your website that gets between them and the information they want. While companies with lead generation websites generally do well with “big picture” UX issues such as typography, page templates and top-level navigation, it’s often the little things that trip them — and their visitors. Here are 10 “little” things that can become very big obstacles to lead generation:

1. Broken internal links.
2. External links that don’t open in a new browser window (it disorients the user).
3. Links that don’t change color after being clicked.
4. Hard-to-find phone number, or a number not clearly identified as the one for prospects to call.
5. No breadcrumbs or submenus for navigating deep into the website content hierarchy.
6. Contact form with several required fields.
7. Contact forms without a privacy statement.
8. Limited anchor text — mobile users in particular have a hard time clicking on links with only a word or two of anchor text.
9. No internal search function.
10. Slow page loading (also a major issue for SEO).