What on your homepage is causing your visitors to get irritated, and are these irritations so bad that they give up and leave in frustration?

Conducting an allergen test

How can you tell if people are getting irritated? First port of call is your website analytics software.

What is the bounce rate of your home page? How many people are turning up, and then leaving without visiting another page? A secondary check is for the length of time people are staying on the homepage. In combination, these two metrics will provide a good snapshot of whether your homepage is causing a problem.

Now, it’s time to find out where the problem lies. Open up your homepage, take a few steps back from your computer, then take a look. Is your homepage too cluttered, too busy – presenting option overload?

Taking a closer look, is the text or graphics causing the issue? Are the navigation options too long, or too vague for people to understand quickly? Are graphics detracting from the text?

Finding the solution

As with hay fever, there are many solutions that you could try to implement, and it may take a while to find the right one(s). If you’re going to make minor changes, or overhaul the homepage completely, give each new iteration a chance to work. Take the time to experiment, take user surveys, and review your analytics regularly.

Once the right solution is found, you can breathe easy again, knowing that you’ve solved the allergy problems on your homepage.