Amid claims human attention spans are worse than that of goldfish, it’s safe to say keeping your customers focused on their goal should be a top priority. You’ve spent all that marketing budget on getting that web visitor to your site in the first place, and then bam, they’ve moved on in an instant.

Capitalise on web visitors

Web visitors disappear in a cloud of smoke these days if you don’t grab their attention. And if there are too many distractions on your website, well, you’ll either lose them for good or they will be off Googling something else that’s popped into their mind.

Mobile phones and high-speed internet have made us hungry for information in an instant, and if we don’t get it, we move on. People’s minds are full of modern-day thoughts buzzing around their heads at a million miles an hour, so, the very last thing you want your website to do is to distract them. Yet, so many sites are a bit all over the places with irrelevant stuff and quite frankly annoying features popping up here, there and everywhere.

It’s time to declutter

So, if you want your digital marketing budget to be well spent and make the most of guests to your beloved website, then it’s time to wipe the slate clean. Have a good old clear out, just like you would if you were spring cleaning your home.

You might pick something up and be like, do I really need this? Is it taking up unnecessary space in my home? Well, the same goes applies to your website, if there’s something that’s cluttering the page and distracting the eyes of your visitors, it has to go.

A study by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, authors of The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us asked people to count how many times a basketball is passed. A gorilla walks onto the screen and beats its chest, and over half the people who watched video missed the gorilla. They were distracted and focused on the task at hand. People really struggle to focus on more than one task at a time.

To help you pinpoint some major distraction issues within your website, we’ve come up with some common culprits. Here’s how to minimise distractions on your website.

Consider popups very carefully

You don’t just need to be wary of popups because of users, but also because they could harm your Google rankings. On January 10th 2017, Google announced a new update to their algorithms. They claimed that popups are very intrusive and can slow pages down. They can also be very distracting for people, and either send them to an entirely different website, or interrupt their thought process. Or worse, be so annoying that people leave your site entirely.

Information overload

Don’t write uber long content just for the sake of it. Sure, you need to have a decent amount of copy for SEO purposes, but don’t pad out your pages purely for this reason. If you’re going to include 1000 words on the page, make sure they serve a purpose. Keep in mind that people tend to scan content, so ensure you’ve covered all the key points they may be interested in and make them easy to find within the content. You don’t want them to get bored and frustrated reading through a load of copy to try and find a bit of information, as they’ll most likely give up and leave.

Do a test run of your entire site

We normally don’t pay much attention when we get distracted online., We’ll go to do one thing, and then we click on a link and before we know it we’re shopping for something else, or reading a tantalising news story.

Sometimes it can be helpful to think like your website visitors. Start on your homepage and make a note of anything that distracts you, do the same for all the core pages of your website. If you’ve got an e-commerce site that means going right through to the checkout stage.

Consider using A/B testing

What better way to compare which versions of pages are more distracting? Take your current web page design, and A/B test it against a much cleaner, simpler, decluttered version. Then you can monitor how it performs in order to see where people are getting distracted and which distractions need to be removed most urgently.

Simplify and shorten forms

No one likes filling in a pointlessly long form. Especially if it’s asking for pointless information. Do you really need to know a website visitor’s place of birth or hair colour? Shorten forms, make them easier to complete, that’s if you even need them in the first place.

According to a study by Neil Patel over on Quicksprout, reducing the number of form fields on your sales page by even one or two can have a positive impact on your conversion.

Don’t overcomplicate your web pages

Review your website design and consider whether it’s overly fussy or messy. Really think about the purpose of each page, what you want to achieve from it and how you can get people to move to the next stage of their journey. Often, websites with more simple but striking designs tend to perform better. Why? Probably because there are less distractions, and less things to distract people’s eyes away from their goal.

Seek help from UX experts

Enlist the help of a professional to assess and improve your website so that it’s less distracting. UX teams know how to eliminate common distractions and push visitors to convert instead of bounce. Sure, you can make a lot of changes yourself, but if you want to skyrocket your conversion rate, talk to a UX agency, like ourselves for example. Click here to get in touch.