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A poor experience on your website can leave a bad taste in a visitor’s mouth. In fact, an in-depth report from Baynard and eMarketer found that 88% of online users wouldn’t return to a website after having a bad user experience. That same report concluded that 35% of sales are left on the table due to poor UX—that’s roughly $1.4 trillion in lost revenue.
What are some of the most common UX problems that cause visitors to bail?
- Slow load time
- Slow response time (after clicking an element)
- Non-responsive site (not mobile-friendly)
- Poor navigation or content structure
- Obtrusive ad clutter, videos, or images
- Outdated design/poor aesthetics
- Difficult or lengthy checkout process
- Ineffective chatbots (or can’t get a real person)
- No call to action
- Lacking product/service information (especially unclear pricing/shipping/fees)
- No search function
UX Is Important To Site Visitors—and to Google
If turning off site visitors isn’t enough, keep in mind that Google is always judging you. Google uses Core Web Vitals as a way to measure your site’s performance. By rating certain quality signals, it gives Google a pretty good indication of how a user will interact with your site—whether they will be satisfied or annoyed! And guess what? Sites that are more likely to annoy visitors with poor performance are booted to the bottom of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
Google’s Core Web Vital report uses easy-to-understand metrics and ratings. It rates a website’s loading, interactivity, and visual stability as ‘good,’ ‘needs improvement,’ or ‘poor.’
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This metric measures loading time. According to Google, a good LCP is ≤ 2.5 seconds. If your site takes 2.6 to 4 seconds to load, it needs improvement. Anything over 4 seconds is considered poor performance.
First Input Delay (FID): This metric measures interactivity—meaning, how long does it take your site to respond when a user clicks a link, button, or other element? According to Google, a good FID is ≤ 100 milliseconds. If your FID is 101 to 300ms, it needs improvement. Anything over 300ms is considered poor performance.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This metric measures visual stability—meaning, unexpected movement/shift of content on a page (link, button, etc.) that causes a user to accidentally click somewhere else. This metric is extra important because how a site behaves in development is sometimes different from a user’s experience in real time. According to Google, a good CLS is ≤ .1. A CLS between .11 to .25 needs improvement. Anything over .25 is considered poor performance.
In general, you want your Core Web Vitals report to place your website at or above the 75th percentile for these metrics.
How A Custom WordPress Website Improves Core Web Vitals
‘Off-the-shelf’ WordPress themes contain every function and feature under the sun in order to work for the most number of people. This plug-and-play functionality may make it faster to get a site up initially, but most websites need only a fraction of the features that come with pre-built themes. The result is a lot of unneeded ‘code bloat’ that bogs down the site and affects performance—which can drag down your Core Web Vital ratings.
At PixelPeople, we’re huge proponents of custom-built WordPress sites. Custom design allows us to build your site around your brand and your product or service offerings. And custom development allows us to cut the bloat and only load the features, assets, and resources that a website needs. Plus, if it doesn’t make sense to custom-build a certain feature or function, we can still use standard WordPress plugins to extend your site’s functionality.
By custom building your website, you truly get all the features you need while optimizing performance—ultimately optimizing user experience. And just like in life, your website should work smarter, not harder! A custom-built website is also easier to maintain when it comes to updates and security because fewer things can go wrong.
In the end, clients that go the custom route agree it is worth the extra time and money to get a high-performing website that does exactly what they want.
Want To Improve Your Site’s Performance?
A happy visitor turns into a repeat visitor and eventually a customer! If it’s time to re-brand or build a new website, we’d love to show you how a custom-built WordPress site can improve user experience and help you pass Google’s Core Web Vital test with flying colors. Contact us to learn more.
