Websites come in all shapes, sizes, designs, and functionalities depending on the needs of the company, organization, or individuals behind them. Whether you run a blog, a news aggregate, or an online store, your website is the key, the gateway, and the path to a good - or lousy - visitor experience.

If you aren't getting the traffic you'd like to, or, if the traffic you are getting fails to convert with any regularity, it may have something to do with the fact that your website isn't built to ensure a positive visitor experience. From site load times that are too slow to obtrusive ads, here are six trouble spots that will ruin a visitor's experience of your website.

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1. The Slow Load

Human beings have never been naturally gifted at waiting - it's one of the reasons Patience has been considered a virtue for millennia. Unfortunately, the speed of life in the Internet Age has made our collective penchant for impatience even worse.

How bad is it? According to some research, if your website takes more than four seconds to load, 25 percent of your visitors will turn tail, and as that wait-time number goes up, so does your page-abandonment rate. Test your site across different browsers, platforms, and devices; if it takes more than four seconds to load, you're losing traffic and traction because of it.

2. Obtrusive Ads

One of the most common - and annoying - ways websites make money off of visitors is through advertisements. While some ads - those built by native ad networks, for example-aren't obtrusive, the vast majority of advertising offered up by the World Wide Web makes browsing, reading, shopping, and connecting more of a hassle than most visitors would like. If you're using any of the following types of ads, they may be to blame for your low numbers or poor conversion rates:

• Full-screen floaters
• Interstitials
• Auto-play anything
• Giant banner ads
• Over-pagination

3. Difficult to Navigate

Have you ever tried to get around a city you don't know well without a map? Depending on how well the city was planned, such an endeavor can be a surprisingly pleasant experience or a downright awful one. Websites are like cities, and if they're difficult to navigate, visitors just can't enjoy themselves. At their core, websites that are easy to navigate are intuitive and easy to use for a wide range of people. Make sure your website fits that bill.

4. Hard-to-Read Fonts

When it comes to a good visitor experience, good web design is essential, and your choice of font should be within the understanding of what good design is. Fonts are little more than vehicle for the words and ideas you're trying to convey to site visitors. When you use hard-to-read fonts, no matter how cool or interesting you think they are, those fonts stand in the way of a whole slew of goals, ranging from simple communication to closing a sale.

So, keep it simple. Avoid fonts that are over-embellished, draw attention to themselves, or are heavy on the serifs, because they distract. Also, be careful about the colors you use. The most straightforward font in the world will be difficult to read if it's yellow on white.

5. Incompatible With Mobile

Optimizing for mobile is becoming more and more essential for every kind of website out there, because, these days, people would rather surf, shop, and get social on the World Wide Web via a mobile device than via a laptop or desktop computer.

Over 6 billion people are projected to have a smartphone by 2020, which means your website needs to be mobile ready if you want anyone to hang around. While you can develop a special mobile site or app, just incorporating either adaptive or responsive design into the website you have should suffice.

6. Broken Links

Broken links can wreak havoc on your traffic for a couple of different reasons. In addition to the fact that your site's users will find it frustrating to click on link after link only to be ushered into a bland error page, dead links will also negatively affect your search engine rankings, leaving you buried at the bottom of search after search.

Don't suffer that fate. Go through your links and update any and all that need it, and once you've done that, be sure to run a monthly online link checker to stay on top of any future link breakage.

Don't just sit around wondering where all the converting traffic is. Tackle these trouble spots and others like them to grant your visitors the kind of positive web experience that will keep them coming back for more.

Author

Phong Thai is a Web Developer, Web Coder for 20 years with PHP, JavaScript, CSS. He is the creator of JavaScriptBank.com - provide thousands of free JavaScript code examples, web development tips and tricks, helpful blogging guides.

Follow him on twitter@js_bank or connect with him on facebook@jsbank if you want. His websites for your knowledge: javascriptON.com, inOneSec.com, www.gomymobi.com

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