Website Tips Based On Your Website's First Impression [Infographic]

Need some fresh website tips based on data you don’t already have? I’ve got just the thing for you. If you have a website, whether it’s an e-commerce site, a blog or any other kind of webpage, you’ve probably put a lot of time into determining how it looks. When it comes to attracting visitors and keeping them, there are so many things that factor into the equation. Everything from how many ads are displayed to the colors you choose will play a role in how your website will be received by the readers who visit you. We’ve written about dozens of different aspects that will affect how powerful your website can be, but this is one we haven’t touched on before. Based on what you see here, you will hopefully get some website tips that will be helpful for you along the way.

The researchers at the Missouri University of Science and Technology (MST) recently did a study on eye tracking as it relates to websites. They studied things like where the visitor’s eyes go first and which aspects of a website are the most eye-catching. A few of the things they learned are that the colors and images on your homepage play a huge role in your website’s success (we all knew that, right?). Also, the reader will derive a first impression of your website in less than a third of one second. In other words, it’s faster than instant.

I wish I had more information about how exactly they went about this study and how many people participated. You can see the majority of their results in this infographic below called The Power of a First Impression created by Webs. There are a lot of website tips we can derive from this information. I found it interesting that we view the logo, main navigation and search box of a site longer than the written content. Of course, it’s all only a matter of seconds so it’s a little like splitting hairs when looking at these differences.

This all brings me to another point. If you’d like to know how long people stay on your site, it’s easy to find out. You can get this information by looking at your Google Analytics. You can also go to Alexa.com, enter your URL and enter, click on “Get Details,” and under the “Traffic Stats” tab, click on “Time on Site.” I could write a whole article about how to analyze that number based on what kind of site you have and where the majority of your traffic comes from, but I’ll save that for another day. In the meantime, I hope you get some website tips from this very interesting research data.